Anger over detention of refugees
Young people lead the way in organising opposition

The Federal Government's callous policy of mandatory detention 
of asylum seekers is clearly alienating young people throughout 
the country. In March, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone tried 
to downplay the significance of the phenomenon by suggesting that 
adults with political agendas were behind the flood of protest 
letters from school students arriving at her office.

Her attempts at diplomacy with a group of teenage ambassadors 
from the ChilOut organisation, which opposes the detention of 
children in the notorious facilities in Australia, Christmas 
Island and the Pacific, were disastrous. "She sat there, 
emotionless to our pleading and tears, we wept at the wounds of 
those who suffer from the effects of Australia's immigration 
policy", was how one of the participants remembers their meeting 
with the Minister.

Recently a group of high school students from the Adelaide hills 
organised a demonstration about the issue outside the electoral 
office of their local member, Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. 
Last week Bob Briton from The Guardian spoke to two of the 
students about the depth of feeling on the issue that is 
inspiring them to take action and how they have gone about 
organising it.

Bob Briton: Was it the students of Mt Barker Waldorf 
School that organised the recent demonstration outside Alexander 
Downer's Electorate Office? What was it that prompted you to do 
that?

Max McHenry: Well, I kind of organised it and had help 
from other people. I had the idea and did press releases but I 
had so much help from other people that it would be wrong to take 
credit. It was students from the school that put in all the work.

Patrick Wundke: It was really a response to the issues 
raised in the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity 
Commission(HREOC) report.

No justificationfor detention

MM: The report said all children should be released from 
detention by June 10 and listed all these horrible conditions 
that they are in. It said — surprise, surprise — that children 
should not be kept in detention facilities. [The reference is to 
the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's National 
Inquiry into Children in Immigration Detention Report — A Last 
Resort? released mid-May. See Guardian 26-05-04, No 1184 — Ed.]

I knew the whole thing was wrong because I'd been up to Baxter 
last year and I've been sort of caught up in it for the past year 
and a half. It just seemed really, really urgent that all 
children should be released from detention because there's just 
no justification at all for keeping them there — especially when 
you meet them. They're just people like you and me.

BB: Could you tell us about the group at your school? How 
long has it been involved in the refugees issue?

PW: It's been going for just over a year. We just get 
together at lunchtimes; we have trips up to Baxter every now and 
then. We talk about the issue and write to people in detention, 
ring the detainees, being in communication and just talking to 
the people.

MM: I guess going up and visiting just gives you a whole 
new outlook. I remember when I came back I thought to myself, now 
I know what's really going on.

PW: When you up go there you know that it's wrong, but 
when you visit them you feel this is just completely stupid, just 
completely outrageous that we're doing this to these people, that 
they should have to go through this when they've already gone 
through such hardship.

Overkill

MM: It's such overkill. It's more like a breaking down 
thing, really. It's not like these people are going to make any 
major escape attempts. On the way out, you go see the Port 
Augusta prison and there's grass and trees and one line of wire 
fence.

PW: You go to Baxter and it's a double fence: iron bars, 
barbed wire at the top. It's dry desert. You go through the 
security and it hits you:the people can't see out. They can see a 
square of sky. The roof overhangs. In the visitors' centre it's 
the same; you can look up but you can't look out. The windows all 
face inwards, the compounds all look inwards.

MM: And you know that there are children in there. They're 
not even allowed the dignity to walk out over to the visitors' 
centre. They're taken by guarded bus through gates and stuff. And 
when you send mail, you don't address it to them to "Joe Bloggs", 
you have to address it to "Blue 5, 56". They don't have the 
dignity of being known by their name.

The other thing you need to remember is that 93 per cent of all 
people in detention are eventually released on Temporary 
Protection Visas anyway. So they're recognised by the Government 
as refugees but they're still kept in there for long periods of 
time — like four years. And for a little eight-year-old kid 
that's half your life spent in a prison.

One of the families we met and talked to, there was an eight-
year-old kid and he'd been in there since he was four. Those are 
some of the most important growing years of your life and, until 
recently, he thought that all people in Australia lived like 
that. All Australian people were kept under guard and bussed from 
compound to compound.

PW: The family had just come from Afghanistan and they'd 
been caught in the fight between the Taliban and another power 
group. People in their village were just being slaughtered. They 
escaped, came over here and they've been there for four years, 
the whole family including five kids.

BB: Do most of the kids at school feel this way about the 
situation? Have you encountered any discouragement of your 
efforts?

MM: No real open negativity, not from within the school 
community. There have been a whole lot of people from outside 
sort of abusing me but never anyone from inside the school. 
There's a real feeling of support there.

PW: A friend of mine, she's at the local public high 
school, she was putting up posters for Max's rally around her 
school and she got called up to the principal's office and told 
she's being too political. There's everything to argue against 
that but that happened. There's no reason why she should have 
been pulled in there. She was told that there's not supposed to 
be anything at the school that is religious or political and yet 
there's a chaplain at the school.

[Max's mother interrupts to tell the Max and Patrick that the 
boyfriend of a member of the school circle has just been released 
from detention. He is from Sri Lanka. There is much excitement 
and happiness at the news.]

BB: This person that's been released, is he one of the 
people you've been in contact with?

PW: Yeah. We were visiting different families and this guy 
happened to be visiting someone else, so we met him. It's really 
kind of special because when you go there the people are so keen 
to hear from others, about the world and just to talk to someone. 
Anyone you see will come up and greet you. You've never met them 
before in your life and come from two places that are so 
opposite. That's where we met him.

Informing people

MM: But it is particularly hard to meet the people when 
they're out there in the most difficult places to get to. It's a 
five-hour drive to get to Port Augusta.

PW: That's why they're put there — because they're out of 
reach. It's difficult for people to get to see what's happening 
at the detention centres because everything's made as hard as 
possible. You have to put in an application weeks beforehand. 
Recently we put in one and it didn't get processed, which could 
have meant that no one had bothered to pick it up to process it. 
You feel bad walking in there. You get a feeling for what it 
might be like for the people in there and yet you haven't seen 
any of the things that they've seen.

They say that only 47 people are allowed in the visitors' centre 
but — depending on the guard — that may be 27 or it may be 50. 
They just make it up, really. You can't give anything to anyone.

MM: You can't take a photo of yourself in there because 
apparently they'd be able to make a fake ID and leave you in 
there! You have special ink that they put on you that can be 
viewed under UV light and armbands and everything like that. The 
idea of being able to do that is just ridiculous.

Support base in school

BB: Could I just backtrack a bit? Was the circle at your 
school an initiative from the students?

PW: Yes. However we've got a teacher, a really fantastic 
teacher, who had been visiting for a while, but there was already 
a lot of interest among the students. There was a big support 
base there and she just sort of put it in motion. She said, 
"let's meet this lunchtime and have a chat about what people know 
and what people want to pursue".

MM: Thirty people turned up and so now we meet regularly, 
share lunch and just chat about it, write letters and so on.

BB: How did you organise last Friday's demo?

MM: We didn't use the internet that much. It was mainly 
done through word of mouth and putting up posters everywhere. I 
put one thing up on Active Adelaide [www.active.org.au/adelaide] 
but that was pretty much the only place on the net I actually 
know of.

The rest was done through people getting big wads of posters and 
putting them up on stobie [electricity] poles, in libraries, in 
any shops that would take it and all over Rundle Mall. We put 
them in the uni and everything like that. Oh and Rip It Up [a 
free Adelaide gig guide] gave us a free full-page ad, which I 
thought was pretty cool.

BB: What sort of things are you planning to do now?

Future actions

MM: I was talking about a forum with Downer. I'm going to 
get on to Triple J, and some news people. Chris Warren from Seven 
News was really supportive and he would be prepared to put a 
thing on Seven News about that. Hopefully get something organised 
with them and get a whole lot of students from schools from all 
over Adelaide to just ask really good questions about it. He 
might refuse to come but if he does it would be a good 
opportunity.

PW: Maybe things like follow up vigils. Because if there's 
something regular every month people are going to know about it 
and that there's support out there in the community.

BB: Are you aware of things happening in other schools? 
Have you been able to link up?

MM: I'm trying to get in contact with St Ignatius. I know 
they've had a whole lot of things happening.

PW: There have been some good things happening. The same 
public school I was talking about before, a week before this 
friend of mine she organised a gig night to raise money for the 
circle of friends in Stirling. She raised about $800 towards 
helping a family get out of detention. It's just great. I was 
part of organising it and it was really good. We got over 100 
people there. We got people there from the Field of Hearts 
Project. [The Field of Hearts is a visual installation project 
launched in the ACT on UN World Refugee Day, June 20th 2003] We 
had information and Sally talked, just the educating of people 
that needs to be done. Everyone's got lots to learn.

If you would like further information about vigils, etc, then Max 
may be contacted by writing to amchenry@chariot.net.au.