Over two hundred people joined in protest outside Sydney Town Hall on Sunday, decrying Labor’s abhorrent history of offshore detention policies.
July 19th marked ten years since then Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced that asylum seekers arriving by boat would be sent offshore to Manus and Nauru and banned from ever settling in Australia.
One third of those sent offshore are now in Australia but are being denied security and permanent visas, and are further limited by restricted access to employment, higher education and healthcare services.
Another 10,000 refugees who arrived by boat are also being denied permanent visas or any review of their cases.
The rally, organised by the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition, called on the Albanese government to grant permanent visas to refugees in Australia, as well as settlement to 77 other refugees indefinitely detained in Papua New Guinea.
Whilst protesters called to remove the ban on resettlement and for permanent visas for all refugees, there was particular emphasis placed on the plight of Sri Lankan refugees fleeing the ongoing genocide of the Tamil people.
Ramsey, a Sri Lankan refugee who spent eight years detained in Papua New Guinea and is now in Australia on a temporary bridging visa, highlighted the shortcomings of the Federal Government who personally promised him and thousands of other refugees a permanent solution during last year’s federal election.
“We need permanent solutions not a six month visa, a six month visa is bullshit,” he said.
“We can’t see our families, we can’t fly anywhere.”
Holding the Labor government to account was deemed essential by ALP National Conference delegate Shannen Potter, who will be addressing the party in August on the issue of refugee rights.
“The people who come here by boat, the people who have been locked up in camps, the people who are subject to the cruel and inhumane regime of offshore detention are overwhelmingly people of colour,” she said.
“I can tell you [that] if these were wealthy white people from somewhere else we wouldn’t be treating them this way, we wouldn’t have been able to have a decades-long policy of dehumanising and abusing these people and this racist policy needs to be called out for what it is.”
Tilly, a member of the Refugee Action Coalition, opened her address by recognising that refugee policies are the Labor government’s greatest shame, with people still in Papua New Guinea a decade later.
“I want to take a moment to reflect on the wins that we have had,” she said. “Last month, the last refugee was finally brought off Nauru, and that’s a testament to the strength and the relentlessness of this campaign.”
The rally was supported by the USyd Queer Action Collective who were in attendance.
The Refugee Action Coalition called on attendees to join them at a subsequent meeting supporting those refugees stranded in Papua New Guinea after over a decade in offshore detention hell.
The forum will take place on Monday 21 August outside the NSW Teachers Federation Building.