Green Left Weekly recently spoke to Gleny Rae, who took part in the SBS documentary Go Back To Where You Came From, which retraced the journeys of some asylum seekers to their country of origin.
Rae said she had realistic expectations of what she would see, but still found the experience a “reality check” that was moving and confronting.
“There’s a gap between seeing these [refugee] camps on TV and the experience of them in real life,” she said. “You can connect with what [the asylum seekers] have been through. Their sadness, sorrow and pain is tangible.”
She learned more about the plight of refugees in different countries, such as Malaysia. There, refugees have no right to health care or education and cannot legally work.
Rae said: “When you see the way people live there, in the refugee camps, you realise crazy slogans like ‘stop the boats’ won’t do anything. People are desperate to escape.”
One of the most confronting experiences she had was seeing a raid by immigration officers in Kuala Lumpur.
“The whole operation seemed haphazard,” she told Green Left Weekly. “Workers and their families were grabbed and had their wrists cable-tied.
“Women and children were screaming and crying. They were bundled onto trucks and driven off. I had the feeling that the guards standing around with lumps of wood in their hands would have been a lot more brutal if we didn’t happen to be there filming.”
She said the positive effect of the experience on other participants, who were at first unsympathetic toward asylum seekers, showed “with human experience people develop a better understanding and can change their ideas”.
She added: “After the show a lot of people came up to me and said they’d changed their views about asylum seekers as a result.” Some told her “we appreciate you being a voice for us because we believe in them having a right to come here”.
Rae said she thinks that for many people who are against refugees “a lot of it comes from their own problems of the conditions where they live. They might think it’s already overcrowded — but that’s nothing compared with the crowding in a refugee camp.
“Or else it might be the difficulties they have finding work. A lot of it comes down to fear.”
[Gleny Rae will be speak at a Newcastle public meeting on August 4 with Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young and Refugee Action Collective Sydney spokesperson Mark Goudkamp on August 4. Visit http://refugeeactionnetworknewcastle.blogspot.com/ ]