Sarah Stephen
The recent Easter protests outside South Australia's Baxter immigration detention centre mark almost five years since the movement against mandatory detention began in earnest. It is a movement that has swelled far beyond the expectations of those who were involved in the earliest days of the campaign, involving tens of thousands of people and changing the attitudes of millions.
Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly spoke to some of the activists who helped organise the Baxter protest about how it went and what the prospects are for the refugee movement to push the federal Coalition government to retreat on its punitive refugee policy in the year ahead.
Emma Larking, an activist with the Refugee Action Collective (RAC) in Melbourne, described the Baxter protest as "a tremendous success". She told GLW that "People of all ages and from all sorts of backgrounds camped together in the heat and the dust. I spoke to young kids, teenagers on school trips, middle-aged people, and one bloke in his seventies. All very different, but united in opposition to the injustice being inflicted on the people locked up inside Baxter.
"Those who hadn't been active in the campaign prior to joining the protest said they'd simply reached a point where they felt compelled to take action, and also to engage at a personal level with the reality of mandatory detention. Everyone was affected by the physical presence of Baxter — the brutality of its razor wire and electric fences, its floodlights, and its sterile windowless buildings.
"One man I spoke to said he came to Baxter because he couldn't bear the idea of being judged by history for crimes against humanity being perpetrated in his name ... The protest also reminded [the Baxter detainees] that they are not forgotten, and are not struggling on their own."
Tim Petterson, also active in Melbourne RAC, felt that the protest was a success on two counts: Protesters were able to "make contact with detainees and express solidarity with them", and the protest "focussed public attention on the continuing obscenity of mandatory detention".
In Larking's opinion, the existence of mandatory detention "is an attack not only on the rights of the people who are locked up, but on all of our rights."
Petterson told GLW that "it was one of the most disciplined, creative and peaceful protests of this kind I've attended — not that you would get that impression from some of the media coverage". The police efforts to stop balloons and kites being flown "made them look silly and thuggish", he said. "The fact that the police felt the need to lie about the protesters having baseball bats and lacrosse sticks, and then trying to blame the Easter road toll on the protest is acknowledgement of our success and their failure."
Ian Rintoul from Sydney's Refugee Action Coalition argued that "the heavy handed police activity backfired on the government. When their refugee policy starts to look questionable, using massive police force to 'protect' detention centres looks even more ridiculous."
Petterson described the Baxter protest as "very timely" because "it became a very clear and definitive rejection of the Howard government's so-called softening of their policies". The return pending visa is "just a cosmetic change that offers no hope to most long-term detainees. Only by giving up all their rights to try to stay in Australia can anyone be released; the [new visa] offers nothing to Australia's longest-serving detainee Peter Qasim, nothing to the 54 still on Nauru and nothing to many thousands of refugees who live in fearful limbo on temporary visas."
Rintoul agreed. "The government is under growing pressure from shifting public opinion and its own back bench, and has tried to give the impression that it is responsive to the demands for change", he said. "But it is pure posturing on the part of the government. There is no substance and no hope in the recently announced 'return pending' bridging visas.
"The protests punctured the public relations efforts of the government and focused attention on the need for fundamental change — [the closure of] the detention centres, the need for permanent protection, and so on. Baxter is being discussed everywhere — on talk-back radio, at work. It has given the campaign a great opportunity to expose the lies of the government and shift public opinion even further.
"The government is desperate to appear to be making changes while leaving its policies of mandatory detention [and] offshore processing intact", Rintoul said. "But they are being pushed back inch by inch. Every shift they make encourages the demand for more change. People expected that Peter Qasim would be freed. When that doesn't happen, the response is to demand more radical reform."
In Rintoul's assessment, "the refugee movement is in an extremely strong position to push the government back even further. [The government's] own back benchers are saying that the recent visas do not go far enough.
"Liberal backbencher Petro Georgiou is saying that all asylum seekers should be released while their claims are being heard. The protests have served to galvanise the movement. We have never been in a better position to put forward the demands of the movement as the basis for a compassionate refugee policy. It is not just a question of long-term detainees — thousands are still living on temporary protection visas, and the government still threatens others with forced deportation. Others are stranded on Nauru and Christmas Island and [in] Indonesia. We are in a position to challenge [and] question the very logic of mandatory detention."
"There is a real opportunity now for the refugee movement to push the government and Labor really hard on this issue", said Petterson. "But to make the most of that we need everyone who is appalled by what this government is doing to refugees and asylum seekers in our name to come out and get involved in this campaign."
[Visit and to find out how you can get involved.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, April 6, 2005.
Visit the