Nick Riemer gave this speech to the March Australia rally in Sydney on August 31. He is an activist with the Refugee Action Coalition.
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The Gadigal and the other first peoples of this country were — and still are — the objects of a relentless war of attrition.
That merciless frontier war has been hidden and denied. Another war that the government tries to conceal and rationalise away is its war on asylum seekers.
That war takes the form of an unprovoked and vicious series of raids — raids on common decency, on reason, on hope and on the bodies and souls of refugees themselves.
Every day, the roll-call of the wounded and the dead lengthens.
In recent weeks, we have seen an epidemic of suicide attempts on Christmas Island; 157 people being made the objects of state piracy on the high seas; a 16-year-old severely slashing his arms when told he was being sent back to Nauru; and a Hazara asylum seeker deported to the sectarian hell of Afghanistan, where we can only imagine the grim fate awaiting him.
And we can only ask, what next? What previously unimaginable outrage will the political elite of the major parties now find it necessary to execute and justify?
We hear of these horrors so often we have come to expect them. But I would like to talk about another victim of the war on asylum that we do not hear mentioned so much.
That victim is our society, Australia. We — you and I — are the walking wounded of the government’s hostilities.
Of course, we are not subject to the same kinds of war-crimes that asylum seekers are.
We are not enduring the murderous and disease-ridden nightmares of Nauru or Manus Island, like [murdered asylum seeker] Reza Berati.
We are not stitching our own lips together. We are not being tortured by the corrosive despair of bridging visas.
We are not being driven to hunger-strike or to set ourselves on fire by the futility and hopelessness of our situation.
We are protected from all this, but still — our society is the collateral damage of the war on asylum. That war is intrinsically linked to the rest of the government’s agenda, and we bear the scars in so many ways.
We bear them in the racist attacks that are on the rise in Australia — no wonder, when all we hear from our federal politicians is that we have to stop dark-skinned refugees from getting here, whatever the price.
And we bear them in the budget cuts on services for ordinary people that the government has been emboldened to make.
Asylum seekers are the scapegoats in the major parties’ vicious, nationalist narrative of “Team Australia”, and refugees are used to distract from the attacks on us.
In brutalizing refugees, governments have established the principle that no matter how weak you are, no matter how desperately you need help, the state owes you precisely nothing, and it will doggedly and callously attack you — by cutting Medicare, by cutting unemployment benefits and by cutting public education.
At the same time as it persecutes you, it will use your money that should be being spent on schools and hospitals, to write cheque after cheque to its multinational friends who run our sickening detention camps.
Friends, in a war, we have to fight — not with violence, but with the conviction that justice is on our side and that we can make change happen.
It’s not enough to express outrage, go to a rally, make pretty speeches.
We have to build a social movement. What that means is continually seeking out new recruits and new reinforcements so that our side — the side of justice and decency — grows so large it becomes impossible to ignore.
If we do not do that, our complacency will slowly but surely poison our society, just like the blood of [Iranian asylum seeker] Hamed Khazaei is being poisoned. He is in hospital on life support in Brisbane with severe septicemia, all because he couldn’t get proper treatment for a trivial infection on Manus Island. [Khazaei died on September 5.]
If we do not build our movement, we will slowly but surely make our society more violent, unjust and unlivable, as it is for the refugee women on Nauru who have asked to terminate their pregnancies because they would rather lose an unborn child than condemn it to the life of affliction and loss that they themselves are living.
Friends, as the cracks in the government’s war-machine get wider, perhaps the heavy and lumbering wheels of progressive change are starting to inch forward.
Every so-called “solution” the government proposes falls apart. Manus and Nauru are not long-term resettlement countries, as we knew they could not be. Cambodia will not be either, if that ever happens.
Let us not underestimate the government’s cunning or determination. They have plenty of fight left in them.
But perhaps a change is starting. Whether it continues depends on what sort of movement we can build. Because the big secret, the great scandal of history, is that it is ordinary people like us who make change when we work together.
We will determine whether the wheels of change are sped up, or whether they come to a halt. But as our movement grows and broadens, we have to hold the line.
Many people want to fight to get children out of detention, or to limit detention to 30 days. That is not good enough. It might seem like these are easier, more attainable demands, but actually they are compromises, and they concede the single strongest argument we have on our side.
Seeking asylum is not a crime. No one should be punished for it. It is not just children who should not be locked up, deported, or tortured: no one should be.
More and more senior figures of the detention regime are defecting. Religious leaders are getting arrested for sit-ins in politicians’ offices.
Doctors, unionists, grandmothers, Christians, and ordinary people in places like Sutherland, Bennelong, Balmain, the Blue Mountains and in rural Australia, are all starting to lead the fight against [Prime Minister Tony] Abbott, against [immigration minister Scott] Morrison and all the corrupted slaves of expediency and “real politik” in federal parliament, whichever party they are in.
In the Refugee Action Coalition, we are helping to build this social movement. Please join us at our meetings on Monday nights to help us organise.
On October 11, at Hyde Park at 2pm, we are holding a major demonstration against the war on refugees. Join us then, and bring others who have never stood up for refugees before, to make our movement grow.
Together, we can bring an end to the war on refugees, and make the change that refugees, and our society, so badly need.
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