| 'How long do we have to wait?' |
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| Liam Ward 02 February 2010 |
 In the last few days of January, hundreds of detainees in the Christmas Island Immigration Detention Centre staged a heroic three-day protest. From all the horrors of mandatory detention – the razor wire, the psychological damage, the isolation, the lack of legal support – they organised around just one simple demand, expressed most succinctly on one of their handmade placards: “HOW LONG DO WE HAVE TO WAIT?”
The protest started on Thursday 27 January with 60 people marching around the paths inside the centre, and built significantly over following hours, with estimates of up to 300 detainees taking part. Stakes were raised the following day, when 133 people began a hunger strike that lasted until Sunday.
Predictably, Immigration Minister Chris Evans responded by confirming that he would not be responding, but then responded anyway and claimed that protests by detainees will do little to help “their cause.” We know otherwise. The protests are vital and incredibly significant.
The whole history of mandatory detention in Australia has shown that resistance by refugees inside the centres has been instrumental in winning improvements and reforms, in gaining solidarity and in giving a human face to hidden and dehumanised people. And after all, it was a drawn-out act of defiant protest last year that saw refugees on the Oceanic Viking have their claims processed in six weeks.
By contrast, many detainees on Christmas Island have now been held for over six months, and some for almost 12 months. The average length of detention there is currently 107 days. This is despite repeated claims that processing under the Labor government is efficient and humane.
In media coverage of the refugee issue, much has been made of the 90-day limit on detention that the Rudd government announced in July 2008. The government likes to wave this figure around in those increasingly rare moments when they still try to proclaim their supposedly humane approach, and the media regularly refer to it in relation to Christmas Island. But the reason that the government can seem to be so flagrantly in breach of its own policy is because the 90-day limit explicitly does not apply to Christmas Island.
In fact, the 90-day limit is a phantom. It applies only to onshore asylum seekers. That’s people who actually manage to make it through the excised zones to the mainland before they lodge their claims. And there are precious few of them, certainly none who’ve come by boat. Every single person whose boat has been intercepted and who’s been transferred to Christmas Island is in fact in indefinite detention. This includes all those children who the government denies are in a detention centre at all, but who are nonetheless imprisoned in the so-called Construction Camp, a concrete facility with armed guards, fences and no grass or play area.
Mandatory detention is torture, whether it’s for a single second or a lifetime, and socialists are opposed to it entirely. But it was the feeling of never-ending imprisonment, often for years on end, that so crushed many of those who went through the detention regime under Howard. And that system has not ended. Indefinite mandatory detention is the practice of the Rudd Labor government.
At the time the recent protest began, there were 1,674 people being detained on Christmas Island, with 200 of them forced to live in tents, and dozens living in rooms originally designed to be classrooms. These numbers are climbing quickly, and as the centre becomes more cramped and conditions more unbearable, more resistance is inevitable. As those inside organise to stand together and demand to be treated as human beings, they have our full support.
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