Beyond the Wire: Refugee Advocacy in Australia – Margot O’Neill

Issue 1 | 3 February 2009

Australia’s recent policy of mandatory detention for unlawful arrivals on its shores is a chequered and distressing history. Journalist and author Margot O’Neill spent a couple of years researching how the policy drew hundreds of ordinary Australians together to advocate for detainees and protest at mandatory detention over more than a decade. Her book, Blind Conscience documents the story. On Tuesday 3 February 2009, Margot O’Neill addressed The Sydney Institute and recaptured some of the personalities and spirit that drove the movement.

BEYOND THE WIRE – REFUGEE ADVOCACY IN AUSTRALIA

Margot O’Neill

Let me start by painting a picture of an extraordinary political showdown. It’s 2005 and Victorian Liberal backbencher Petro Georgiou, along with three other government dissidents, is toe to toe with John Howard at the Lodge in Canberra. It’s late on a cold, rainy Monday night and the media are camped outside the front gates.

At stake is whether John Howard will face his first rebellion on the floor of the national parliament – the issue is Australia’s bipartisan system of mandatory detention of asylum seekers.

Petro has threatened to introduce a private member’s bill unless John Howard is willing to negotiate away many of the system’s most brutal components like imprisoning children behind razor wire in the desert and locking up others for years who have committed no crime and pose no security risk.

But after more than two and half hours, it’s obvious to the dissidents that the Prime Minister is not interested in giving in to the four backbench rebels – why should he? John Howard has just been re-elected with a tremendous majority covering both houses of parliament – a feat not seen in more than 20 years. He is at his political zenith. His hard-line policies on border control had been a key plank and the stream of boat people had all but stopped. John Howard is visibly irritable when the few concessions he offers are rejected as not going far enough.

So Petro Georgiou stood up. “That’s it,” Petro said sharply, rising to leave. “I’m introducing my bill tomorrow.”

“Let’s be clear about this Petro,” John Howard replied just as sharply. “If you do this, you will embarrass your government and you will embarrass your party.” The intensity and directness of what came next surprised even Petro’s three colleagues.

“I’ll tell you what’s embarrassing, John,” said Petro. “Three years ago you agreed to let out a three month old baby who’d been born in detention. She’s now three years old and she’s smashing her head against a wall inside Villawood. That’s an embarrassment to the party, John. We’ve got psychiatric patients I went to you about, who should have been released for treatment, but instead that was blocked by the department and now a court has found the government has breached its duty of care to these people. That’s what I call an embarrassment to the party. And we’ve got 140 people locked up for three years or more with no convictions and no evidence that they pose a threat to anyone. Let me tell you, John, that’s an embarrassment! I’m introducing the bill tomorrow.”

John Howard tried to defuse the confrontation. “Petro let’s all back up here a bit.” But the fuse waslit. John Howard failed to break the rebellion. But could Petro Georgiou break the system holding refugees and their children in indefinite detention?

By now, thousands of Australians had joined refugee advocacy groups to oppose John Howard’s hard line. For many, Petro’s push had put the nation’s conscience on trial. But it had been a long, lonely and often traumatic journey to this point for many activists. Australia had been locking up refugee families for well over a decade.

And so begins the book I’ve written – called Blind Conscience (published UNSW 2008) – in which I’ve attempted to tell the story of some of the thousands of Australians who became engaged in the asylum seeker movement. Why did I want to do that? Well partly for personal reasons. I had reported extensively on the problems inside detention for many asylum seekers and they were often grim, gut-wrenching stories about broken children, devastated parents, soaring mental illness and government denial. Sometimes I decided I needed to take a break from reporting those stories. Do something else. But the people who continued to bring me (and of course other journalists) the stories – the doctors, the psychiatrists, the nurses, the ordinary people who’d  became advocates – were quite remarkable for their steely determination in the face of such overwhelming misery in detention, and despite popular derision and government assaults. I watched as the issue consumed them, their families, their every waking moment, their dining rooms, their weekend rest. I was amazed.

I wondered – what is it like to make that switch from nice life to full time activist –  especially when most people opposed you and many people vociferously attacked you? For instance, when Rural Australians for Refugees set up their first stall on the main street in Bowral on a Saturday morning – people yelled abuse at them and would cross the street.

I wanted to know how it felt to act illegally and help refugees escape across the Australian outback or hide them in your home. This is a big step for usually law abiding middle class citizens. And yet they did it.  Like “Nicholas” who agreed to stow away an Algerian escapee  only to find his neighbour banging on his front door accusing him of hiding a refugee – but instead of mustering “French Resistance” cool – Nicholas panicked, yelled “Shut Up!” and slammed the door in the neighbour’s face.

What I learned through my interviews for the book is that much of the time it felt bloody awful. What a price they paid. These people gave their all. Some became obsessed. One advocate threw an old friend out of her house because the friend had dropped by to talk about curtains. What’s her problem, the advocate said to me? Who could even think about something like curtains? How dare she? The advocate was deeply offended to be then called a zealot.

But of course it took that kind of intensity and focus to create the asylum seeker movement. This wasn’t about saving a tree for the next generation; this was about saving a child tonight! And they all paid a price. They lost friends, colleagues, money – sometimes they even lost hope. Melbourne QC Julian Burnside moved chambers after being shunned by his colleagues. Psychologist Zachary Steel saw too many broken minds inside detention and in the end had to deal with his own depression.  The Liberal backbenchers were shouted down in the party room and snubbed in corridors. The hard left activist saw his hard line colleagues split over the issue – comrades stopped talking after decades of shared activism.

But there was something else that profoundly affected the activists – especially the rookies.

Because they also had to counter the biggest bully pulpit of all, the government, which whipped up a frenzy of rhetoric against these people – boat people were rich undeserving queue jumpers; they were culturally at odds with the rest of us and were willing to throw their children overboard; they were about to descend en masse with entire villages packing up for Australia; and of course, they might even be terrorists..

Their attempts to provide another view were aggressively dismissed as misguided naivety or hysteria. And not just by the government. They felt abandoned by both major parties. And for many this was the hardest of journeys. From optimistic middle class citizens who believed surely we just need to tell the Minister what is really happening in these camps, surely the government doesn’t know … there was a slow painful realisation that it did know and that it was willing to pay that price in the name of halting people smuggling, of border control, of winning back votes from One Nation.

Says child care worker and mother, Trish Highfield, a gentle shy woman who was transformed by her experiences campaigning to get children out of detention: “It has made me realize you have to be on the alert the whole time. You can never trust governments. We caged children and we live in a civilised country.”

For many there was a searing disenchantment with government and a deep, wounding grief over Australia which some felt had betrayed them. Says artist and activist Kate Durham: “I will never recover the love I had for my country.” Kate and others are also critical of the media. “Journalists, I have to say, were as big a problem as the Immigration Department,” she told me. “They didn’t believe us. No one was prepared even to visit the detention centres. One newspaper editor told me he tore up my letters when they came. I learnt how hard it is to have your tongue removed when you have so much to say.”

Interestingly, of the people I focused on in detail, it was the left wing, full time activist Ian Rintoul, and Liberal backbencher Petro Georgiou – two more opposites you couldn’t find – but it was they who were least traumatised – perhaps because they better understood politics or because they knew how to work the system. But however it cut painfully into their lives, they all say they’d do it all again.

It was a disparate movement. No central command or control. While it was driven by the burning advocacy of thousands of political rookies from rural and regional Australia as much as in the cities – it also relied on professional left-wing agitators to help spark the fire as well as conservative backbench Liberal MPs to achieve the breakthrough early reforms. Quite a roll call isn’t it – communists to Liberals to housewives to QCs – and many shades in between. Sometimes they agreed. Sometimes not.

I start the core narrative of my book with a handful of protestors outside Sydney’s Villawood detention centre in 1999 led by Ian Rintoul, a hard left ideologue and full-time activist – you know the kind of person – so many issues, so little time – but always there to prick our consciences – one anecdote capturing this is on the day before the Opening Ceremony at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 when Sydney is aquiver with anticipation and excitement, the Olympic torch is being cheered by thousands down suburban streets … except for Ian and about 25 stalwarts who instead chant anti-government slogans. “Free the refugees!”  The most common reaction: “Bugger off!”

But Ian Rintoul knows a pulsing political movement when he sees one – he’d helped build the one against Pauline Hanson – but this movement against locking up asylum seekers doesn’t take off and he worries it never will.

But already one of the key demographics which will make up the movement was stirring – Trish Highfield – a middle class middle aged woman with a grown up family – has been drawn out to Villawood to check on conditions for children. Initially she wants to know things like whether there is shade cloth in their playground? Then she meets Hemen Baban a young Iraqi father who’s been locked up in solitary confinement with his toddler for 13 straight days – so much for shade cloth. Trish embarks on a remarkable journey which would see her transformed from a trusting middle class citizen, shy and self-effacing who felt embarrassed to ring a minister’s office – to a tiger whose house is raided and who would shout down the phone at cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats.

Trish even confronts Philip Ruddock outside a public function. She holds out a bunch of yellow roses to him as he walks by media and protest placards. He moves towards her smiling, taking her hand and holding it to his chest as he accepts the flowers. She has him now! “I want to offer you these roses, Mr. Ruddock, as a sign of friendship and goodwill because you said the other day in the media that people like me who support asylum seekers have malicious intent. I am not of malicious intent, but I should let you know what is happening to children being held in detention,” and Trish is away.

Philip Ruddock probably really wants his hand back by now. But Trish is not letting go. She speaks to him for nearly five minutes. She says she can’t really remember how Ruddock responded. “I don’t think he said much at all,” she says. “But at one point he’d put his head down and that’s when I used a terrible voice that suddenly came out of me, and I said to him “Look at me when I speak to you!” And he did and I thought he looked shaken, and for a moment I felt like an absolute bully.” Trish says the feeling passed quickly.

The next vital element of the movement to stir was the medical profession – psychologist and researcher Zachary Steel is drawn in by stories from colleagues about apparently high levels of mental illness among detainees. He wants to find out what’s really going on but falls into the Kafkaesque-like world of the Immigration Department – which tells him you might be able to do the research if you don’t use the word torture or if you don’t actually interview anyone or if you don’t publish your findings – it goes on like this for years under two governments both Labor and Liberal – and then Zachary meets Aamer, Dr Aamer Sultan, that is, an Iraqi doctor detained in Villawood who has been independently documenting the tragically bizarre behaviour of his co-detainees. Aamer’s almost hyperactive drive to research, help and advocate for those also detained is amazing.

Whenever any outside official was being taken on a tour by the centre manager, he (Aamer) would run up and introduce himself and just talk for ten minutes about what is happening, about the psychological impact on people. That’s how he met the Ombudsman and various parliamentarians because the management used to try to steer them away from any detainees, but especially Aamer. But Aamer kept a constant eye out for these people. He wouldn’t even give them the chance to talk, he’d just launch into it. “One day he ran up and gave his spiel and then the detention manager turned to him said, ‘Aamer Sultan, I’d like you to meet the new gardener.'”

Together Zachary and Aamer , against the odds, despite government denial and rejection,  publish in two important peer reviewed medical journals the first indications that Australian detention centres were breeding catastrophic rates of mental illness engulfing almost every long term detainee – and then, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest it engulfs Aamer who was held for more than three years.

For years Aamer has watched other heavily-medicated detainees shuffle around the centre with vacant stares. Now he can feel himself slipping into the same agonising abyss. To the distress of his friends, after three years in detention, Aamer will join the statistics of chronically-depressed long-term detainees he has been documenting. He finds himself in the queue with other detainees waiting for medication.

Zachary tries to help, but some days Aamer can’t even come out to see him. “He really started to disintegrate,” says Zachary. Aamer knows he is simply the victim of the length of time he has spent locked up in no man’s land.

“That’s why I worked so fast with Zachary. I knew I had to finish the work before it happened to me. I had seen it happen to everyone else. Why not me?”

A few years later Aamer was released and went to Brisbane to retrain as a doctor (he is now training to be a surgeon at Sydney’s Westmead Hospital). By then Zachary Steel was engulfed by depression.

One day Zachary hears a knock at his front door. He opens it to find Aamer who has flown down from Brisbane. Aamer, he says, what are you doing here? I thought you didn’t sound right on the phone this morning, says Aamer, so I flew down. I thought you might need a friend.

One of Australia’s leading psychiatrists, Dr Louise Newman, becomes involved mobilising the medical profession to become a united voice about the deleterious effects of detention. Like many others before her, she believes once the medical profession, including every expert medical college in Australia, advises the government that it needs to change its policy, then it will – but again they are wrong.

Phillip Ruddock will not be moved – it’s not mental illness, he says, detainees are faking it – they are manipulating their children – they can always go home if they don’t like it here. Dr Newman and others are gob-smacked. “They would say there was no evidence that detention causes damage,” she says. “Every step of the way it was absolute denial. When we said we saw people with clinical disorders they said they must have had them before coming to Australia. If we said children were having developmental problem, they would say their parents were neglecting them.”

It all seems bizarre in hindsight because the Department now says the psychiatrists were right all along – detention does cause damage. Louise Newman currently advises the department.

Parts of the legal profession also tried to change government policy running test cases, and losing just about all of them.

The Tampa episode unleashes Julian Burnside QC – who, just like the medical profession, tries to approach the detention issue from a rational perspective – only to find it defied logic. I think one of my favourite anecdotes in the book is when Julian Burnside describes how a guard orders him out of Melbourne’s Maribyrnong detention centre because he hasn’t filled out the right form according to some randomly cited rule: So Julian asks if he can see the rule. “No.” says the guard. “Why not?” “It’s secret.” “Well can I fill in another form?” “No.” says the guard. “Why not?” “There’s a rule. You can only have one form.”

As Julian Burnside said. “It really struck me that if they’re prepared to jerk me around knowing I’m a poncy silk, what are they doing to the detainees?”

The crazy diversity of the movement means many forge unexpected relationships. Dr Louise Newman, an atheist and scientist, says she was surprised to find the one group she admired most was the nuns. “They seemed to be able withstand the pressure,” Dr Newman told me. “They would tell me, ‘There there dear, have a cup of tea’ but keep going.”

But, not surprisingly, there are many disagreements about how to operate. Should the movement work quietly behind the scenes to get some detainees out? Our hosts tonight, Anne and Gerard Henderson, were among the quiet unsung heroes helping to release 40 detainees through advocacy behind the scenes with government ministers. It is a record widely admired throughout the movement. And as Anne Henderson says in the book: “If you want something from someone you don’t spit in their face.” So they refrained from publicly criticising government policy and advised others to do the same. Some advocates now believe they may have saved the refugees they focused on helping sooner if they had followed the path of the Hendersons.

But not all agreed. What about the rest left in detention? You get 40 out – what about the other 1000? Shouldn’t you take the movement, try to shut the system down and free everyone?

Strategies wildly diverged. Should advocates reek mayhem like at the Easter protests at Woomera in 2002? Should the movement focus on releasing children or everyone? Should the Bakthiyari children have been allowed to escape without any parents? Should they have famously been taken to the British consulate in Melbourne resulting in their re-arrest?

If I can read about that poignant moment after the boys’ British asylum claims had been rejected:

The deputy high commissioner, Robert Court, is brusque. They are out of time. The two boys must now walk out the front door of the consulate and into the waiting posse of federal police. 11 year old Muntazer Bakhtiyari bursts into tears and pleads. “You can’t let us go back there. It’s not fair. Don’t send me back to gaol. I don’t want to go back to Woomera. Don’t send me back there.”

Thirteen year-old old Alamdar Bakhtiyari is slumped in his chair, resigned, exhausted.

The boys’ lawyer Eric Vadarlis refuses to accept the meeting is over. He remains seated. “We tried to keep talking. I wanted more time, more time. To this day I wonder if we should have staged a sit-in.”

Robert Court will not countenance more delays. There are only two choices now, he says. The boys must hand themselves over to the police, or he will invite the police into the consulate to arrest them.

The boys look to Vadarlis. “What should we do?” Eric Vadarlis has no choice. He rises from his chair and walks slowly to the front doors of the consulate. The boys follow, Muntazer still weeping.

As the glass doors open, the police reach out and grab the boys’ arms. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go,” Muntazer sobs. Vadarlis, who has children about the same age as the two boys, can’t bring himself to say goodbye.  He gets into the lift unable to look back. The boys are taken out separately through a back entrance and pushed into a car between Australian officials.

By the next morning they’re being driven through the South Australian desert back to Woomera where they’d both previously attempted suicide and slashed themselves and from which successive psychologists had recommended they be released for their mental well-being.

The deputy high commissioner, Robert Court, is brusque. They are out of time. The two boys must now walk out the front door of the consulate and into the waiting posse of federal police. 11 year old Muntazer Bakhtiyari bursts into tears and pleads. “You can’t let us go back there. It’s not fair. Don’t send me back to gaol. I don’t want to go back to Woomera. Don’t send me back there.”

Thirteen year-old old Alamdar Bakhtiyari is slumped in his chair, resigned, exhausted.

The boys’ lawyer Eric Vadarlis refuses to accept the meeting is over. He remains seated. “We tried to keep talking. I wanted more time, more time. To this day I wonder if we should have staged a sit-in.”

Robert Court will not countenance more delays. There are only two choices now, he says. The boys must hand themselves over to the police, or he will invite the police into the consulate to arrest them.

The boys look to Vadarlis. “What should we do?” Eric Vadarlis has no choice. He rises from his chair and walks slowly to the front doors of the consulate. The boys follow, Muntazer still weeping.

As the glass doors open, the police reach out and grab the boys’ arms. “I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go,” Muntazer sobs. Vadarlis, who has children about the same age as the two boys, can’t bring himself to say goodbye.  He gets into the lift unable to look back. The boys are taken out separately through a back entrance and pushed into a car between Australian officials.

By the next morning they’re being driven through the South Australian desert back to Woomera where they’d both previously attempted suicide and slashed themselves and from which successive psychologists had recommended they be released for their mental well-being.

How much in the end did the movement change government policy? Or was it the fact that a white Australian resident named Cornelia Rau was found buried in Baxter Immigration Detention Centre? And that an Australian citizen Vivian Solon was mistakenly deported in what had become a system seemingly out of control – remember the Sydney primary school kids snatched during class? The toddler denied access to playgroups despite her total isolation from children her own age for three years?

Certainly it was Petro Georgiou and the three liberal dissidents – Bruce Baird, Judi Moylan and Russell Broadbent – whose epic battle with John Howard included a brutal three-day stare down – who succeed in becoming the first to curb the worst excesses of the regime. They pay tribute to the movement for softening up the body politic for reform. But it still took a herculean effort on their part and all the skills of a masterful political technician that Petro is renowned for.

Russell Broadbent told me:”You know Petro was so strong and workmanlike throughout the whole process, he never got emotional, But the day they let out the last children from detention, when he saw the photo of a five-year-old in the newspaper, then he lost it.” Petro’s staff presented him with a framed copy of the photo. It sits on a bookshelf in his office.

So I wrote this book to try to honour these people who inspired me – they proved you can make a difference – they proved how toxic this policy was. Paris Aristotle, the head of Foundation House in Melbourne, who tried to advise the government on how to make its detention policy more humane, says one way to measure public policy is to examine its effects on those it touches. This policy ruined everyone – it damaged refugees, traumatised advocates, broke down many of the guards who are now also dealing with PTSD, and crushed some of the bureaucrats required to implement the policy. It was us as a nation who self-harmed with this policy, Aristotle says.

I learnt from the advocates that human rights really is about enlightened self-interest – we now live alongside many of the refugees who were mistreated, who saw friends deported, whose families were torn apart – I hope they all know one of the wonderful advocates like Anne and Gerard Henderson – because the rest of us need to live off that kind of human capital rather than anger and bitterness.

These advocates were not campaigning just for the refugees in detention camps but for all of us who didn’t have the time or the inclination to fight to ensure that Australia didn’t throw its humanity overboard.