There’s a bitter paradox to the Djokovic/vax/Park Hotel/refugees circus. Had this sticky net snared a sportsperson with some sort of worldly political awareness and basic conscience, they would have said: “What? Two years in a room? Here? Nine years in a detention system? For arriving on a boat? Starting from when you were 15? That is raw evil!” And then used their celebrity to have done something about it.
But any sportie with the gumption to do such is unlikely to have ended up in this snarl. Whatever their feelings about vaccines, for the sake of a grand slam they’d take the jab and move on.
Djokovic may still say something, but anyone else appraised of the situation might have shouted it to the world immediately. If he doesn’t, thus ends the brief hope refugees and activists may have had that this could be a moment to tip this appalling situation into the world’s conscience.
Many have a vague knowledge that Australia has a harsh system for undocumented immigrants, but few understand the grotesque details of it: its cruelty and caprice, its use of time and idleness, and the contemplation of life going by, as a torture-terror tactic.
Indefinite detention of this sort, with its seeming reasonableness in physical terms (although rotten, maggot-infested food has made a comeback) is the torture of the penitentiary, the system designed to bring you to God in a godless world. Absent that, your life becomes the contemplation of the waste of your life.
The psychological damage inflicted on the refugees in the Park Hotel, and elsewhere in the system, is put in the medicalised terms of the moment. But it’s really just straight existential horror, weaponised to create permanent damage.
This is evil, nothing more or less, nothing else. Yes, it’s repressive, harsh, cruel, bumbling, slipshod, strategic — it’s all of those things — but at the root it is evil, the use of the means of life against someone trying to have a life. It is a knowing attack on the very conditions of possibility of what it is to be a human being. And it is happening in the middle of a capital city run by a state government that purports to be basically progressive, and yet will not say boo to the goose about it.
How long can this grotesque, atrocious situation continue? Every day, thousands of trams pass the Park Hotel, because the hub of Melbourne’s main tram spine is just north of it. Yet it’s basically a state hostage situation. No conviction, no sentence, no end — just the endless wastes of time. The siting of it normalises the process, and makes all of us just a little bit complicit. There is a sort of homeopathic guilt — and, as homeopathy insists, thus strongly bound.
The temptation, after one has been to the protests and written umpteen such articles, is to say that the best thing would be to drive a car into the side of the place, something, anything to interrupt this endless horror show. I’m not advocating that, but only because it’s clear that the refugees themselves aren’t conducting the struggle in that way. If they wanted to, they could gather on the ground floor and burn the building down. They’d have the right. But they’re not going that way, and one can’t substitute one’s own anger and shame at passive complicity for their imperatives.
The protests have to continue, the courageous and undoubtedly exhausted and distressed core supplemented by a few others. But it has now run into the paradox of protest Gandhi pointed to when he said: “What you do will make no difference, but you must do it anyway”.
What could supplement it, take things to the next level? One thing that could is out of the protesters’ hands: if Dan Andrews were to marshal the residual, partial autonomy of state government and challenge the morality of what is going on at Park Street very explicitly, repeatedly, that would surely bring it to some sort of crisis. There is no chance of it (is there?), not only because Labor is complicit in the system, nor the closeness of the election, but because the government is so full of SDA combover soft-Francoites that they love nothing more than illegal ad hoc detention in a city hotel.
The only other thing I can think of is for as many freelance writers as possible, with some sort of global hookup from The New York Times to “British Tram Fancier” (leave it, that’s mine) to make their next pitch for a piece over the next few weeks to be something about this situation. Not the whole iniquitous Australian system, but this particular, Kafkaesque grotesquerie carrying on at the heart of one of our cities.
Is it possible that half-a-dozen of these could land at once, in the space of a week or two, in the wake of the Djokofiasco, and hang sufficient shit on our sunburnt country for the stink to become intolerable? Whether the Morrison government responded directly or not, might it be the point at which it rapidly, quietly gave the Park Hotel inmates community visas in two or three releases? Would an incoming Albanese government have no choice but to effect immediate release? Or would it all become another flank for the government to exploit?
Our nation has become a leading-edge laboratory for new techniques of managed dehumanisation, compatible with liberal-democratic governance. The whole world is watching — to see how we do it and copy. Possibly, in the trailing clouds of a returned Serb, that offers a space to make a match point that I have no idea how tennis works.
Once it became clear that the avalanche of whingeing about how hard lockdown is was not going to translate into empathy for refugees and other prisoners I lost hope that much at all will change for refugees.
They are simply seen as non-humans and you’re right to point out the obscenity of this.
What to do?
Start by naming and shaming those who are complicit in the system, from the top down. Evil is evil, no matter how bureaucratised it is.
Oh yes. One wold have hoped that light bulbs would have gone off all over Australia. Actually, I thought that might happen years ago, during the floods in Queensland, when people had to flee with no paperwork, and then front Centrelink to try and claim benefits. Or when similar happened more recently in the bushfires. But somehow people just don’t seem to get it.
Martin Niemöller mentioned something about that.
These effing politicians of ours (past, present, left, right,) who have been in our Federal Parliament since Howard first said the word ‘Tampa’ should hang their collective heads in shame – they won’t of course but there is not one of them hoc can profess any sort of christian belief – they are not decent people
And what was Tampa primarily? Howard’s Big Diversion from Big Australia. Do you (or Guy Rundle) honestly think that Morrison is using a different playbook in this stunt?
Sure, I know that Crikey is all in favour of Big Australia, but that doesn’t excuse omitting the topic altogether.
Guy, the saddest aspect is Labor’s refusal to argue for a more humane system. I don’t think it would be any kind of political risk to spell out what’s happening and pledge to change it.
Anyone recall who, back in the dim, distant past first implemented off-shore detention?
And have since endorsed every Draconian legislative change put forward by the current shower?
Nah, nor can I.
It wasn’t Labor. They built the first on-shore detention centre in the early 90s. Off shore processing started in 2001, implemented by the Howard Government. Labor suspended it in 2008, but regrettably brought it back and extending it in 2012.
Quite right, I should have written ‘indefinite detention‘ which was, and remains, ‘Labor’ policy.
The most egregious abuses have happened under the Liberals.
No doubt of immense comfort to those only abused by ‘Labor’.
That’s simply not true. Read their 2021 Policy Framework, available on the Internet. If in government, they would limit detention to 90 days.
The discussion above was in past tense.
If you think “…their 2021 Policy Framework…” is worth two tenths of SFA then you have no long term memory.
Could be that Labor knows most people agree with it.
Most people don’t agree with it. They just don’t care.
That is the same thing, let the grubs at the top make all decisions.
Whether Ursula Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” or Dr Who’s ‘STAR WHALE‘, the old legal maxim “Qui tacet consentit” applies.
The status we accept, we endorse – and for which a sizable majority vote.
The only party that has opposed indefinite detention for the last half dozen elections is the Greens – ergo 80%+ voted for parties which are just ticketty-boo with it.
And it must be costing us an absolute fortune. of course with the LNP policy of secrecy who knows how much????
Do you think so ?
I do not know a single person who agrees with such an evil policy.
Actually I do but I’m not with them on this.
I think there is a political risk, and that’s been seen clearly in past elections. And there is certainly no political gain. All it needs is one manufactured ‘they are massing in Indonesia, and the people smugglers are waiting’ type beat up by the Murdoch media – and you know they’ll do it – for this to actually become an election issue, which it’s not now. Better to stay quiet, but have the policy of releasing all asylum seekers in the background.
Except a) Labor introduced mandatory and indefinite detention of refugees in 1992 and b) they have done nothing about it when in government
Mandatory, but not indefinite. That came much later. And, no, they haven’t done anything about it in government, except make it worse.
State the facts accurately – there are no detainees, they are free to leave Australia, see comments passim.
What they are not able to do, by supporting statute, is enter the community nor become Australians.
Neither now, the near future nor evermore, that last being the Rodent’s deft touch.
Actually, quite a few of them have found it very difficult to leave Australia. And a choice you don’t have a choice is not a choice. Stop nitpicking. It’s really boring.
Because of the prevalence of document destruction, in the case of Iran they have a terribly racist immigration policy – we will decide who enters and how.
This rarely includes malcontents who previously fled the regime’s tender mercies, with unknown quantities of gems, gold & illegal dollars or Euros – those airfares & boat/rotting hulk hires are not cheap.
Those unable or unwilling to return to their place of origin – or divers demonstrably safe transit countries betwixt & between – have made a seriesofcomplicated and expensive, not to say illegal activities before demanding entrance to this country.
Deary me. This could have been written in the 1940s about Jewish people fleeing Germany. In fact, I’m pretty sure it was.
Moral equivalency – the safe space of the weak argument.
After this, I will not reply to your series of unsupported lies. In Iran, for instance, there are minority groups, such as the Kurds, who have no rights and are persecuted by the government. They don’t have documents like birth certificates. They are stateless people. Homosexuals are similarly persecuted, including sometimes by the family. I have met a refugee who saw his father being shot and killed for belonging to the wrong ethic/religious group. Was he going to apply for his papers before fleeing? As for your claim that people pass through other countries before choosing Australia as a destination, this is because Australia is a signatory to the UN Convention on Refugees, and those other countries are not.
That is not true either. There are hundreds of detainees in Australia and in offshore detention. The vast majority have been granted refugee status, which means they fled persecution or worse in their home countries. If you think that means they are free to leave, I suggest you examine your ethics. In fact they are allowed into the community, and many have, over the past year or so. For reasons unknown, and arbitrarily, so that their friends still left in detention are tormented by the randomness of the choice.
It is totally and utterly gobsmacking that the global left has turned a blind eye to this situation for over two decades. We should have been an international pariah years ago. We should have had a BDS campaign against us. We should have had a no travel campaign against us. But…nothing. Crickets. And there are times when I feel like the refugee activists here are paid to actively work against refugees. They have not worked to engage the general population. Far from it. By allowing protests to be over run by groups like socialist alliance, and by ignoring the good work done in conservative seats by conservative constituents, they have undermined the campaign since it started. I stopped going to protests when it was clear that, not only did the organisers have no interest in getting rid of the blatantly anti-Semitic groups using the protests to spread their filth, they actually encouraged them. In 2001, yes, that long ago, I went to a protest at the then Woomera Detention Centre. I have never met such horrible, self absorbed, rude people as I did on that trip. It made me feel ill being in the same bus as them. It makes me sad to think that they are the people who took over the pro asylum seeker movement and subsequently alienated everyone else.
Other countries have had the chance to castigate us for this. New Zealand, the US, and Canada have all taken asylum seekers that we had banged up in concentration camps. Why have they not brought this up in international forums? Instead, countries like the US and the UK actually look to us to see how to run such a system. There is a bitter irony in a country which was colonised by a penal colony exporting the know how on how to run penal colonies.
It was always too much to hope that the Djokovic situation would bring wider attention to our torture of asylum seekers. My reading of Djokovic, his family, and his supporters is that they tend towards the far right and would therefore actually approve of how we treat asylum seekers. Indeed, after a few weeks Djokovic may well be claiming it’s not all that bad in the Park Hotel and what are they whining about anyway. But it would have been nice if the world media had picked up on the situation. There have been sporadic articles here and there in the world media over the decades, but for some reason it just isn’t a cause that interests people. Maybe it’s because we are so far away. Stateless got rave reviews when it was on Netflix, but still there is no widespread interest.
At this stage, I honestly don’t know what would change minds and hearts. It has to come from international pressure, because it’s clear we can’t do it from here. There is no political will to do so. The only way a political party could change this is if they didn’t mention the issue at all when campaigning, and then just quietly went about changing things when elected. Which is what both Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard didn’t have the guts to do. I don’t know. Maybe while George Clooney is in the country we could ask him to make a movie?
Oh, excellent idea. A boycott of the Australian cricket team.
Hahaha. Yes indeed. I’m sure that’s something that the rest of the Commonwealth would latch on to with alacrity.
All well said VJ! It’s a mixed up world. Bad people think they’re good and good people think they’re bad. But bad people are just bad people who do bad things to others or do nothing at all.
They sing of personal injustices out loud; then uphold the unjust status quo where others are concerned. Hierarchical systems and the ideology within can’t escape this simple truth.
We’re not in this all together: it’s a lie on most levels. Carona doesn’t discriminate but health care does. We are not in this together. It’s every one for themselves.
Scott Morrison is the prime example. Did the judge do the right thing? Perhaps the refugees at Park Hotel would have got more attention if the number one seed stayed a little longer… maybe someone didn’t want that focus on Park Hotel!
And our Federal Government has the absolute cheek to criticize China’s Human Rights Abuses, when they are, in the eyes of of lot of people both here and overseas, are continuing this Policy that is an abuse of Human Rights.