Sarah Stephen & Farida Iqbal, Sydney
Around 100 refugee-rights supporters from around the country converged on Villawood detention centre on the Easter weekend to highlight the human rights abuses taking place behind the barbed wire. There are 255 detainees in Villawood, including a significant number of refugees.
On April 11, all detainees in Villawood were relocated, ostensibly to protect them from exposure to asbestos. Some were taken to Baxter detention centre in South Australia and to Long Bay jail, but the majority were relocated to Holsworthy army barracks, just south of Villawood. One of the detainees taken to Holsworthy revealed that their new location was plastered with asbestos warning signs.
At least 250 police confronted the protesters over the weekend, massing at the park where the protesters had planned to camp. On Good Friday, police told family groups in the park that they should keep an eye on their children when the protesters arrived because they might be taken hostage. Police also urged local shopkeepers to close over Easter, supposedly to avoid "violence" and "looting" during the demonstration.
The police intimidation, and the confusion created by the removal of the detainees from Villawood, resulted in a smaller protest than organisers expected. However, the three-day action was upbeat and defiant, kicking off with a rally outside Holsworthy where powerful speeches were made about the need to release the detainees, not relocate them, and why, asbestos or no asbestos, Villawood is a toxic site that should be closed.
The protest moved from Holsworthy to Villawood on the second day, and on the third day went to the PM's Sydney residence, Kirribilli House. A local resident attempted to have a plaque listing the core articles of the United Nations' refugee convention presented to staff to pass on to John Howard.
Outside Kirribilli House, former ABC broadcaster John Highfield expressed his disgust at the misuse of taxpayers' money to over-police the protest, revealing that the police helicopter that hovered overhead for much of the weekend cost $9500 an hour. Other speeches were made linking the government's refugee policies to its broader agenda, and taking up issues of war, racism, homophobia, "voluntary student unionism", climate change and the anti-union Work Choices legislation.
The asbestos problem at Villawood was "resolved" by covering the contaminated soil with a few tonnes of gravel — hardly a permanent solution — and detainees were returned there on April 21.
The protesters held a conference during the weekend that issued a call for an ongoing campaign against the government's attempt to keep asylum seekers out of mainland Australia. "We are totally opposed to the government's move to establish off-shore processing for all asylum seekers, and to the proposal that any successful refugee will be settled in 'third countries'", a conference spokesperson, Ian Rintoul, said. "We will continue to campaign for permanent protection and for the closure of the detention centres, but we have adopted a new banner demand for our campaign activities — 'Open the borders to refugees, let them land, let them stay'."
The conference placed an immediate focus on West Papua and building major rallies to mark World Refugee Day in June. It also decided to liaise with ChilOut and Rural Australians for Refugees to call a conference later this year to cohere a national refugee-rights movement.
From Green Left Weekly, April 26, 2006.
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