I watched the brilliantly harrowing Netflix series Stateless. Pluck up the
courage and watch it too.
Stateless depicts the abject cruelty being inflicted on
refugees incarcerated indefinitely in Australia’s pernicious detention centres.
Refugees are not criminals. They are people who have the
legal right to seek “asylum” – safety and protection - fleeing war and
persecution in their homelands.
These law-abiding citizens – farmers, doctors, teachers and
shopkeepers – are parents desperate to protect their children and half of them
are unaccompanied kids running from life-threatening dangers.
These innocent people are driven from their homelands by
catastrophic wars perpetrated by corrupt governments with deep pockets for
bombs. In the last 20 years, the US, UK and Australian governments have
relentlessly killed millions and destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Yemen.
And they’ve supplied arms to countless other regimes to use against their own people.
Don’t feel too smug in your sense of security. It could be
you or me left homeless and stateless, on the run seeking refuge and kindness.
According to Google there are 26 million refugees worldwide.
But Stateless claims there are 70 million displaced people globally.
A Warm, Friendly
Welcome, Aussie-style
This compelling six-part series rips back the shroud of
secrecy to reveal the cruelty of rigid Australian Government policy started
under the heartless Howard regime, 1996 – 2007.
Liberal Prime Minister John Howard was a bland and boring
little man but he had a hidden power: bureaucratic policy-makers who invented xenophobic
slogans such as “border protection” and instilled paranoia and racism in
easy-going Aussies. Protection from what, you may well ask?
Australia takes around 12,000 refugees a year! This tiny
figure is no threat to anyone or anything. With Australia’s wide-open spaces
and crying need for reliable workers, the spectacular massive continent has
plenty to go around.
The government’s stubborn, iron-fisted approach to refugees
is ironic in contrast to post-war policy that enticed migrants to its
promising shores to provide willing labour for the fledgling manufacturing economy.
I grew up in Melbourne’s working class suburb of Footscray
surrounded by fascinating Italian families whose backyards flourished with
veggies gardens, fragrant basil and noisy hens, where grandmas sang as they bottled
homemade tomato sauce.
Enthusiastic migrants from Europe in the 50s and 60s enriched
narrow-minded Australian culture, isolated and cut-off from the rest of the
world.
Living on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast in the 90s and
noughties, I was a member of Buddies, a group offering friendship to refugees
living in appalling conditions in a detention centre on Nauru,
a tiny, sweltering Pacific Island, where refugees’ dreams of a better life
evaporated.
Many of Australia’s notorious detention centres have been
closed while new ones have opened, being operated by the British company Serco,
with fingers in many pies.
Who can blame refugees for dreaming of a better life in
sunny Australia with vivid blue skies, beautiful surf beaches and backyard
barbies of friendly, rowdy Aussies clutching ice cold beers and paper plates
loaded with salad and sausages.
Aren’t we all just
chasing a better life?
The True State of
Detention
Stateless exposes the wilful ineptitude of the Immigration
System as piles of Asylum applications gather dust on deserted desks while
hopeful refugees “wait”, trapped in endless purgatory for their cases to be
assessed.
The elusive Visa is dangled like a golden carrot, the
promise of freedom and redemption.
This institutionalised torture leads to unbearable suffering,
despair, self-harm and suicides. How did my country become so cruel? Was it
always this cruel? How can citizens turn a blind eye?
Stateless exposes the sadistic brutality of some guards,
devoid of empathy and compassion, who violently assault vulnerable men for
having the courage to fight back.
Stateless shows the moral compromise of good guys who become
guards to earn a high income to support their families in style, succumbing to
the lure of the spacious home with a swimming pool. For Cam, the motivation to
keep his job and be an impressive provider overrides his humanity.
Stateless portrays ambitious, smart-suited female managers who’ve
clawed their way to the top, divested of nurturing instincts, trying to uphold
the hollow rhetoric of “policy” in the face of human misery.
Stateless weaves a disturbing tale of a young Australian woman,
who winds up in this soul-destroying hell-hole of despair. She is psychotic
after traumatic abuse in a cult. Sofie shows us the fragility of the human psyche.
Abuse and misuse of power are everywhere.
These days I live in the UK with around 126,000 refugees and
around 45,000 asylum cases pending. That’s a small fraction of population of 65
million. And yet the Conservative Government has a nasty policy of deliberately
creating a “hostile environment” for innocent people fleeing persecution and wars
(they support).
I help young refugees make a new life here in a quiet corner
of their promised land. I believe in dreams. I believe we are all one race; the
human race, and we have one home, Planet Earth.
