Walking home from Caberet Nocturne last night, i passed the Department of Immigration and Citizenship - and ran into the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre’s Sleepout to End Poverty for Asylum Seekers. It was a fairly sizeable campout in front of the Department offices, with posters explaining their cause and a dedicated group of people still awake at 4am watching over their friends and explaining the event to passers-by.

For most of the current Howard Governments time in office, they have - on behalf of all Australians - failed to live up to Australia’s obligations to take in political asylm seekers. They have knowingly sent people back to dangerous situations by defining “asylum seekers” as narrowly as humanly possible, and created prisons to hold entire families of people who came to us for help. They have redefined Australia’s borders to create a legal loophole that means even if you are in what is historically known as Australian water, even if you are standing on Australian territory, you will not be treated as an asylum seeker. They do all this in the name of preventing dangerous “people-smuggling” - they throw lives into danger and then tell us it’s because they want to discourage other people from throwing those same lives into danger. And there has never been the slightest bit of evidence that this positively evil “disincentive system” even works.

They have done everything they can to send people back into places where their life will be in danger, and they have bent over backwards to ignore those asking for help. And those who manage to run the gauntlet and get through are denied resources nessecary to live.

So… it was nice to meet some of the activists protesting against the Liberal Party’s policies.

Related posts:

1. Carlton, the Stockade and the Asylum
2. Australian Student Visa Rules
3. Make Poverty History
4. Experiences in the emergency department
5. Hot tip from an expert