Notes from a public forum held at Footscray Community Arts Centre in conjunction with the launch of Shadowland photographic exhibition, 16 September 2004.

Facilitator was George Lekakis, chairperson of the Victorian Multicultural Commission, who began by acknowledging the Wurundjeri people as traditional owners of the land. Those with reasonably long memories may recall that Mr Lekakis, then chair of the Ethnic Communities' Council of Victoria, officially launched the Mission Statement of the Refugee Action Collective of Victoria at Trades Hall on 20 February 2001. That meeting was attended by about 270 people, perhaps a few more than the present forum, but even so no-one should quibble with his summing-up at the end of the forum's proceedings:

And may I say that when this horror started, gatherings like this did not occur. Demonstrations against these policies were very, very small. They have grown. They have impacted upon the conscience of the nation, and hopefully in a couple of weeks' time the Australian people will decide on way or another ...

The speakers' lectern was placed so that each speaker in turn was framed by two of the huge banner-portraits from the Shadowland exhibition. The first speaker was Ms Aowham Al Dujayli:

- formerly a primary school teacher in Baghdad, who arrived in Australia in October 200 “on an old fishing boat with [her] two children and elderly father and another 80 people.” Ms Al Dujayli said she was not going to talk about the war in Iraq or about the journey to Australia, but instead about the past few weeks. In August she had received a letter from DIMIA - an appointment for a review of her case. At first she had been very happy that her case was at last about to be reviewed after such a long wait, but then she began to remember and to relive the events of the past, and with a growing expectation of rejection. She is currently studying at university, and she began to feel a strong contrast between the warm world there and the cold world at home. She had a sense of belonging nowhere. "Why do I have to go through all this again?" After her interview she went back to her 'normal' life of waiting. But the preparation for the interview had re-awakened memories and emotions. She had tried to pretend that these things were in the past and not longer existed, but now she she can only promise herself that one day - in sh'Allah - things will be better...

Tony Birch, writer and historian, currently teching at the University of Melbourne, spoke next. He suggested there were possible lessons to be drawn from the history of William Cooper, the indigenous activist of the 30s whose unsuccessful attempt to petition the King led eventually to the walk-offs from missions from 1939 onwards. The petition was a demand for equality and justice, not just for Aboriginal people, but for all alike - "we are all human". In contrast to the current reception of asylum seekers he put forward the Wurundjeri custom whereby it was for the host to greet a visitor with a gift, to be returned by the visitor only on departure, whereas now these latest visitors are expected to give everything. Properly regarded it is we who are in their debt - a view which I think is shared by just about everyone who has had the privilege of welcoming refugees as friends....

Former Prime Minister and former Chairman of CARE Australia, to mention no more, Malcolm Fraser set himself to trace how things had changed so much over the last 50 years or so, especially since 2000, when people were looking forward to a fairer and more equitable world in the new century - a hope that was ended by 9/11. He recalled 'an Australian Prime Minister of the 30s' announcing when Australia had refused to allow a boatload of refugees from Europe to land: "There is no racism in Australia and we don't intend to import it!" But then WWII "led to a conviction on the part of many world leaders that the world just had to do better." There was the founding of the United Nations, the World Bank,IMF, GATT etc, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 'light on the hill'. Conventions relating to various rights, including the staus of refugees. America and Australia played a leading role - Australian lawyers were involved in the drafting. Australia's migration program from 1948 was gradually broadened in spite of the continuing White Australia policy, which was finally got rid of by Gough Whitlam in 1972. The US in this period still supported the UN Security Council; Canada, France, the US and Australia took many hundreds of thousands of refugees from Indo-China up to 1975. After the Galbally report an Italian who had been in Australia for 25 years could say to him "I no longer feel the need to look over my shoulder." why did this world that had been improving start to change, "and, as I believe, very much for the worse?"

In the late 80s the basis of multiculturalism began to be questioned - the Labor governemnt established detention centres for all boat people - not arrivals by air (this is still the case). The Liberals "tightened and toughened the system" and sent a message around the world. He told a story of how, even before the Tampa, he had been passed a question by an Australian representative in Yemen - where CARE Australia was active - a Bedouin had asked how it could be that they were doing so much to help people in Yemen when the Australian government and people were so hostile to refugees arriving in Australia... People began to be taught to fear the unknown, which of course included especially Islam. Afghani or Iraqi refugees were to be despised and repudiated as 'illegals', drug runners, prostitutes, or even terrorists - "all of which we know to be untrue." He quoted the head of Australia's security agency: "Not one person giving cause for security concerns has come to Australia by boat." They would of course have too much money and would get themselves first class tickets on Qantas... "The Refugee Convention, ratified by Menzies in 1954, no-one said anything about it, but effectively it was repudiated, effectively it was denied. It's one of the reasons I believe we need a Bill of Rights in Australia, so that when governments do things that are contrary to basic human rights, that they can be challenged, and challenged against an objective and clear standard." People were fearing Islam through ignorance and forgetting that people from all religions have at different times been terrorists - "even including the evangelical Christian Right in the United States." The chief interpreter of intelligence at the Pentagon is a lay preacher in a Baptist Church, preaching that Christianity is in a fight for survival against everything that is evil - represented by Islam. How can he give a balanced interpretation of intelligence ...? Some of the language being used might have been used by Richard II in the 12th century...

One of the mistakes that people make is to lump all terrorists together, but in fact the objectives of terrorists in Chechnya, say, or the IRA, Basque separatists, or Palestinians, are all different, even if the weapons and methods may be similar - it is not simply that 'they all hate us'."But dictators around the world can now suppress these minorities with impunity and without any criticism. They can do it all in the name of terrorism." Fundamentalism of any kind can be a cause of terrorism, "but why was it that Saudi Arabians alone I think of all people were allowed to be flown out of the United States after 9/11 and why is their fundamentalism, which so completely defiles many of the values of the West, so often so completely ignored?" If President Bush wanted to fight terrorism he should have done as his father did - preserved a coalition which included many Islamic countries. "He would have, in the name of terror, ignored Iraq, because Iraq was not involved in theSeptember 11, and Iraqi weapons of mass destruction did not exist," and many of the things said about Iraq were known to be untrue - by intelligence and foreign services if not by the politicians who said them. So Bush went on to make terrorist recruitment easier ... "We've had fear instead of generosity, discrimination as opposed to compassion, racism instead of a common humanity, and the story is not yet ended. How are we get out of this cycle that President Bush has unleashed? There may be a step early in November, but who knows...?"

Julian Burnside hardly needed any introduction either. He began by suggesting that it was actually "a cause for great optimism" that he and Tony Birch "could sit here ... and agree with every single thing that Malcolm Fraser says." His theme was loss of home, a theme in the forefront of our minds given the exhibition upstairs, but he felt "I am losing my home as well." This had begun in August 2001 with the Tampa, "and the idea that you would turn away a handful of women, children and men who had fled the Taliban and barely survived drowning, that you would turn them away rather that help them, struck me as completely at odds with the country I thought was my home." The message had been redoubled in May 2002, when he learned of an 11-year-old girl in Woomera, diagnosed as severely disturbed, who hanged herself in Maribyrnong detention centre, drinking shampoo when her first attempt failed. When her lawyer went to the hospital to visit her he was denied access by the ACM guards, although perfectly well known to them, on the grounds that visiting hours for lawyers were 9-5 ... And finally the case of the stateless Palestinian who had signed agreement to being deported, but cannot be removed because he is stateless: on 6 August 2004 the High Court finally decided by a 4-3 majority that people who cannot be deported can be kept in detention indefinitely -

Mark that day. 6th August 2004 is the day on which officially the Howard government had formally endorsed its right to hold an innocent human being in detention for the rest of that person's life. This is not the home that I grew up in. This is not the country from which I learned my values ..."

He then told the story of what is now one of his most treasured possessions, a pen given to him by a former detainee, whose story will be well known to many people reading this - he was released less than a month ago after four years in detention ... Last December, while in Port Hedland, his final appeal was unsuccessful and he was given a letter informing him that he would be deported within 28 days to Iran, at which point he wrote to Julian Burnside enclosing a video tape, with the message "This is what I fear, please help me". (The videotape shows the judicial blinding of a man; I have not seen it, but I have in my possession a CDROM containing just such a scene and several other ghastly sights from present-day Iran.) The core of the final court ruling in this case was the 'infamous decision' that the government was entitled to send a person back to torture and death, regardless ... But nothing happened for a long time, until out of the blue a visa was granted and [ ] was able to join his wife, whom he had met while in Maribyrnong; they are now living in Ballarat, where he had presented Julian with the pen at a recent meeting.

Julian ended by recalling that George Lekakis had begun proceedings with an acknowledgement of the traditional owners - he acknowledged that Australia has indeed a black history, but would like to add an acknowledgement of the latest arrivals too ...

That ended the first part of the forum, as the scheduled fifth speaker, Dr Nouria Salehi, was unable to attend - she is currently in Afghanistan. The discussion which followed ranged widely, some speakers from the floor taking the opportunity to relate their own experiences while others addressed questions to one or more of the panel. As well as the immediate topic of refugees and the experiences of asylum seekers, the subjects of the war in Iraq, erosion of civil liberties, including the matter of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, truth and accountability in government, even the case for a republic, were all raised. One questioner asked the panel specifically to comment on the general political climate:

Malcolm Fraser - "I believe that there has been a very significant erosion of normal human rights in countries like America, in Britain, in Australia ... that some of the so-called anti-terrorism laws go far beyond anything that will contribute to the fight against terrorism. And why those provisions are there I find it hard to understand...
Julian Burnside - "There is no doubt that ... our basic civil rights have been eroded dramatically in the last three years. It seems to me there are three conditions any one of which will enable an erosion of civil rights ...
Tony Birch drew a parallel with the government's reception of the stolen generation report - attempts to silence and ignore the stories of refugees in the same way as the stories and histories of the stolen generation were ignored by Ruddock and Howard, even though it was easy to locate supporting evidence from the historical record ...

Another questioner returned to the subject of accountability, what chance there might be that [Howard and Ruddock] could be made to answer:
Julian Burnside - "I have been speaking about this very point, and I've been universally ignored on it ..." - in 2002 Australia joined the International Criminal Court - no doubt that the Pacific Solution and use of mandatory detention could be seen to fall under one definition of a crime against humanity.The Government has not shown the contrary - that it is not breaching its own laws. The catch is that prosecutions can only be brought on the initiative of the Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock ... But a Labour government that abolished mandatory detention would be able to bring a prosecution...

This has probably been enough to give a reasonable impression of the forum, although there were other questions and quite lengthy replies. But perhaps the most important point was that made more than once by Tony Birch - that forums like this are all very well, but unless they lead to action, they go for very little:

Now my sense in relationship to this is unless we here - and I think the forum is a remarkable starting point, a discussion point - but unless you go away and do something on the basis of what you hear in relation to what's been said in this story, it might make us feel good when we go home tonight, but if we don't tell both federal liberal and labor that this is immoral and we will not support their parties on a wider level than just a narrow group, then there's not going to be a lot of change ...