Politics

As the government of Papua New Guinea has vowed to remove all refugees from Manus Island, most of us who have been detained there for almost seven years are being transported to Port Moresby. It is a big change for us: disturbing and disruptive in many ways. I am in the Granville Motel. It has been fully booked for the Manus refugees. We have to use our boat ID numbers here too for all our needs. Our identity continues to be stripped away from us in PNG.

There’s no doubt the populist backlash over attempts to deport a Tamil family from Queensland has caught the government by surprise. All of a sudden the perceived advantage for the Coalition in the areas of national and border security was slipping from its grasp. This was all the more of a shock to the minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, who has been assiduously attacking Labor on the issues since the election.

According to our prime minister, ‘If you have a go, you get a go.’ As it turns out, this maxim doesn’t apply to everyone. This truth became catastrophically apparent after Priya’s visa expired on March 4, 2018. Since that day, the members of her family have been denied their basic human rights.

At the very time the world’s most powerful democracy is locked in a trade war with the planet’s biggest authoritarian state, Australia’s reputation as a free nation is under severe strain. And nothing highlights this more than the independence celebrations in Timor-Leste, formerly East Timor.

Political drift doesn’t offer any substantive response to the ‘great disruptions’ now bearing down on us. It just capitulates to them. That’s why it’s now urgent to re-engineer our national imagination and paint the picture of a different future for our country, and then to choose the type of Australia we wish to become.

Every young protester is worried about being critically injured by police who use excessive violence. They fear being arrested and charged, of facing a possible 10-year jail sentence for rioting. But if they choose to remain silent, they may lose this last chance to help Hong Kong maintain its autonomy from Beijing.

In a frank admission – rare for prime ministers, who like to impress they are confidently in charge – Scott Morrison has revealed what keeps him awake at night. That is the feud between our biggest customer and our closest friend. The problem for him is he doesn’t seem to have a clear idea of what to do about it, and as such it is a nightmare for the nation.

Oceanic peoples, my peoples, are threaded through the backbone of the British colony’s economic success in Australia, and Scott Morrison’s recent actions at the Pacific Islands Forum in Funafuti, Tuvalu, only reinforce how they continually attempt to sever our tongues. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack’s comments after the forum, which reduced Pacific peoples to nothing more than labour for Australia’s economy, were similarly hurtful and unsurprising.

Whoever chose the venue for the first day of the federal parliamentary inquiry into press freedom had a sense of humour. At least, it tickled the funny bones of journalists assigned to the story when they learnt the inquiry was to be held at the New South Wales Masonic Club in Castlereagh Street, Sydney. Famous for centuries as a secret society, that organisation is not so furtive these days, and the hope of Australia’s major media organisations and human rights campaigners is that our government and its agencies will follow suit.

‘What would they know, what would they know, what would they bloody know, about being a blackfulla.’ It is a penetrating line in the documentary The Australian Dream. Gilbert McAdam – an Indigenous football hero – reminds us of an enduring truth in Australia. Too many white Australians just don’t know what it is to be Indigenous. Most Australians still admit they have never met an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person. What would they know about invasion, dispossession, stolen children, segregation? What would they know about the harsh realities of black lives in Australia?