On July 19, 2013, former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd stood beside Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill and said in a classical Rudd pretentious drone: “You won’t be settled in Australia. You’ll be sent to Nauru or Papua New Guinea for reprocessing and resettlement.”

Effective immediately, everyone who came by boat seeking asylum would never be given protection in Australia.

Four years to the day later, as nationwide vigils called for the evacuation of Manus Island and Nauru were held across the country, a man contacted me from inside the Nauru detention centre. We’ll call him Maziar as he doesn’t want his name known.
Familiar story
Maziar’s story is all too tragically familiar. He and his family fled Iran when they converted to Christianity, which is illegal in Iran and punished by execution. Maziar previously worked in IT and web development. He is in his forties.

He wrote: “I am going to say something untold since these four years.”

He went on to describe how after Rudd’s July 19 announcement the Department of Immigration and Border Protection (DIBP), divided people (including those who came on the same boat) into three groups when they reached Christmas Island. DIBP then sent one group to Nauru and another to Manus Island. The third remained on Christmas Island before being sent to the Australian mainland on bridging visas.

Maziar can “clearly remember that damn day the day which DIBP wanted to expelled us to Nauru. Still every time I think to that time my tears are came slowly and I feel a strong pain and burnt in my heart.”

Maziar wrote of how people felt during that time when “we were witnessed that our boatmates were going to Australia. But when we thought to our situation we were so frustrated we were living in tents for an indefinite time with uncertainty.”

I had seen no mention of DIBP sending people who had arrived after Rudd’s announcement to Australia. Subsequent searches through the media found nothing.

I found there had been a few attempts in 2013 by the media to follow up on similar stories. But they were stonewalled by DIBP with the “on water matters” mantra.

As with so many stories about the detention system, the truth only comes out when advocates in Australia communicate with people in detention.

Sally Thompson from the Refugee Rights Action Network WA (RRAN) said she first became aware of this happening in late 2014 from stories passed between people on Nauru and Manus Island to advocates in Australia.
Arbitrary detention
Thompson said: “When I began talking to more people on Nauru over the past year I became aware of more specific details of not only boatmates being randomly split but of members of extended families who came together on the same boat being split.”

One boat included an extended Rohingya family of 13 ranging from an 80-year-old great grandmother all the way to her great grandchildren. The great grandmother and one of her grandchildren were among seven family members sent to Nauru. Six remained on Christmas Island and are now living in Australia.

Another boat, LEL809, arrived at Christmas Island on July 25, 2013 with two Indonesian crew and 70 people seeking asylum. Of those 70 seeking asylum, 17 men, women and children were sent to Nauru, 21 men were sent to Manus Island and the remaining 32 were given bridging visas and have since been invited to apply for protection visas in Australia.

The selection, from all accounts, was arbitrary.

Thompson said: “When immigration officials chose who went, they often made a point of choosing vulnerable looking people for offshore to prove how tough they were being.”

RRAN held an action called “Border Farce” last December. “The process is a farce. It has little to do with determining who is genuinely in need of asylum. It is about enforcing and enacting a punitive and cruel system that seeks to deter people who are entitled to seek asylum, or to deny them asylum if they have not been deterred.” People were given lottery tickets to open that showed one of several possible outcomes for people seeking asylum in Australia.

RRAN has since collected numerous statements from people in Manus Island and Nauru describing what happened in the months following July 19, 2013.

Behan: “When we arrived on Christmas Island, we were grabbed by our shoulders by two giant officers and taken to an airplane. We were split by immigration from our boat mates … People who arrived after July 19 are living in Australia while we are here … just thinking and suffering and hopeless nights and days.”

Naeem: “19 July is a falsified claim. Although it had been decided to resettle all boat people in PNG and outside of Australia, in each and every case, there were people who remained on Christmas Island. It’s a clear sign of injustice and violation of their own policy. What was the difference between onshore and offshore boat people who arrived on the same day after 19th July.”

H: “A lot of our boatmates left in Christmas Island were released in mainland Australia. Australian government broke 19 July 2013 rule for them but we are still detained in Manus Island for four years. We have been here as a hostages, not for processing.”

Behnam Satah: “ I am a Kurdish man from Iran who came to Australia by boat in search of safety, after July 19, 2013. At Christmas Island we were divided into two groups, one group went to Australia and the other group of people were exiled by force to Manus Island. Since that time, I have been held captive as a political prisoner in Manus Camp. Still I do not know when we still see freedom.”

Yousof: “We arrived at Christmas Island on 25 July 2013 when I was just 7. At Christmas Island a man came and told us what would happen to us. He chose some families to go to Australia and he chose some men who had come by themselves to go to Australia. The other men who were alone he sent to Manus. My family and my aunt and her family and one more family he chose to go to Nauru. We weren’t told why he picked us for Nauru. We still haven’t been told why.”

In March, RRAN managed to get Greens Senator Nick Mckim to put this matter on notice to Senate Estimates. In April the government admitted that of the people who came seeking asylum via boat since July 19, 2013 “1414 were issued with bridging visas in Australia”.

The answer remains buried in Hansard and has not being picked up by the media.

Why did the Australian government arbitrarily send some people to Australia and left others to endure more than four years of torture on Manus Island and Nauru?

For Maziar “Another torture was started, which was pictures of our boat mates on Facebook and other social media which shows they have lived safely in Australia. They have taken many pictures in most famous places like Sydney Opera House. For years their children are going to best school with high quality of education and my son has not gone to school since 2014.”
Scapegoating
Why did the Australian government violate its own policy just days after announcing it?

Thomson thinks “there were several reasons this was done. One was Manus and Nauru wouldn’t have capacity for everyone arriving via boat and the government didn’t want them to become full before pushbacks and refoulment stopped the arrival of further boats. If there were boat arrivals after the camps were full the media could easily become aware that people were being brought to Australia, whereas selectively splitting where people on each boat went wasn’t picked up on.”

If nothing else this clearly shows the policy did not “stop the boats”. It was all about politicking and scapegoating to win elections.

For Maziar this policy was introduced to “push people to breaking point and consequently drive them back [accept deportation to the country they fled] and make a horrible picture for those who want to make journey to Australia by boat.”

Thomson says it is “another example of the Australian government’s callous disregard for those who sought our protection.”

A statement released by people on Nauru on July 31, speaks of their horrors of detention and cries for freedom. They especially mention the trauma the separation of families has created. It reads: “Some of us have children, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives and family in Australia. Our families are heartbroken and devastated from the separation.” [Read the full statement here.]

The government is trying to force people to leave the Manus Island detention centre and move to East Lorengau by cutting off the water and electricity. People who have moved to East Lorengau have suffered a spate of vicious attacks, including machete attacks.

The fact that the Australian government separated people from the same boats that arrived post July 19, 2013 and sent some to Australia shows that the offshore detention centres did not stop the boats. They were only stopped by turning them back to danger in a politically driven cruel policy.

Thomson said: “1414 of the 4533 men, women and children who arrived by boat between 19 July 2013 and 27 July 2014, have been living, working and studying in Australia. The general population has no idea of their presence because they are human beings going about their daily lives, just as their boatmates and family members stuck on Manus and Nauru would be if we #BringThemHere.”

David Bradbury is an iconic left-wing filmmaker who has been at the forefront of telling the stories of people fighting against injustice and oppression for the past four decades.

I first encountered Bradbury when we were both filming the Lizards Revenge anti-uranium dump festival and protest outside Roxby Downs in the South Australian desert in 2012.

We reminisced fondly on that protest when we had a chat after a screening of his latest documentary, America & Me, in Parramatta.

He told me he still has all the footage from the Lizards Revenge but cannot get the funds to edit it into a documentary.

Every year, he said, it is getting harder to finance films.

It was this struggle that set Bradbury off on a journey that led to America & Me. The two-time Academy Award-nominated filmmaker went to the US in August 2015 hoping to raise money after struggling to get a cent from the ABC and SBS.

But every door he knocked on was shut.

What he did see while travelling across the US shocked him — thousands of homeless people across a country that spends billions each year on its war machine.

This led Bradbury to make America & Me. It is one of his most personal films, with Bradbury travelling across the US meeting war veterans, people struggling with homelessness, victims of the for-profit prison system and activists on the frontline against the tar sands pipeline.

Watching the film, I wondered how he managed to find and talk to such a diverse range of people on the street.

He recounted one story of meeting Vietnam veteran David Charles: “I basically wandered the streets with my camera ready to go — I’d been staking out the social security office with my camera getting a few shots, I saw this well-dressed guy with dreadlocks being hassled by police.”

Bradbury started filming the altercation. “Then I filmed an interview with him afterwards.”

Charles recounted his time in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) when Communists were taking over, and it was his job to say who could be taken offshore and who couldn’t — this created lots of stress for him, aged only 17, telling families they had to stay.

“I approach my filmmaking as a one-man band always having a camera on,” Bradbury said. “I let the characters speak and give the audience an emotional journey. A film works best showing raw emotion, hurt, being let down.

“All my sequences have a raw energy. I’m always hunting for a quintessential moment that tells it all.”

America & Me is full of stories of people suffering from the US war machine — from activists facing down military vehicles at Standing Rock to a woman who was tortured by US agents in Chile. It is a tapestry of the oppressed — and of those fighting back during US President Donald Trump’s election campaign.

The driving force, and glue that really holds this film together, is Bradbury himself.

It is almost a biopic of his journey of filmmaking from the Vietnam War to revolutionary struggles in Latin America and protests outside military bases, including Pine Gap in Australia.

Bradbury has had a fascinating filmmaking journey, coming out of the ABC journalist scene in the 1970s. In those days there were internships available, financing for documentaries and people to act as mentors. He laments: “It’s a shame it does not exist anymore.”

This led to his first documentaries — Frontline in 1979 about war cameraperson Neil Davis and Public Enemy Number One in 1981 about left-wing journalist Wilfred Burchett.

“I stumbled into Neil Davis and then met Wilfred Burchett and that was an eye opener for me after all the arrogant inner-city journalists I’d met.

“I learnt from Neil Davis that you always have to think like a news camera[person]. [Frontline] was a mentoring project, especially preparing for going into war.”

This included talking with Davis about how he escaped death by an inch in Saigon when a bullet went through his cheek and missed his brain.

Davis would die from shrapnel in 1985 when filming a coup in Thailand.

These lessons came to a head a few years later in Indonesian-occupied West Papua where Bradbury smuggled himself in, got malaria and “had to chew on a piece of sugar cane to keep energy alive before being deported”.

Frontline and Public Enemy Number One went on to have successful releases, with Frontline nominated for an Academy Award. Bradbury feels this was because it was different from a lot of other films on Vietnam War at the time. “It was about what made the journalists covering it tick, what goes into getting a clip for TV. It is more fascinating than watching a propaganda film.”

He would then “fall in love with the Third World of Latin American politics”. He made several documentaries about revolutionary movements in Latin America in the 1980s, including Nicaragua: No Pasaran (1984) and Academy Award-nominated Chile: Hasta Cuando? (1985).

Bradbury said he went to Nicaragua “as I always found the revolution wasn’t going to happen in Australia and that’s why I wanted to go places that revolution was going to happen — but I also found how revolution hurts poor people”.

He went to Chile in 1985 as Augusto Pinochet brutally repressed anyone who stood up against the neoliberal policies of Milton Friedman and Henry Kissinger being implemented.

Bradbury felt he had to tell the stories of those who resisted, saying: “It’s very scary and I do it because of my political activism and commitment to telling people’s stories who might not be able to get their voices heard — not because I’m an adrenaline junkie.”

He recounts seeing secret police reading newspapers upside down outside his apartment. One story I found fascinating was how they smuggled canisters of 16 millimetre film out of the country. “We got our film stock out in the suitcases of a couple of nuns leaving the country,” he recalls.

In recent years, he has made documentaries about the anti-war movement in Australia and abroad, including War on Trial (2016).

It is these stories, especially the footage from Chile, that make America & Me a fascinating story of US imperialism and political activism over the last four decades.

It is a story that is more pertinent than ever to Australia’s current political climate, with the Malcolm Turnbull government recently announcing Australia will be in the top 10 countries for arms exports.

It is a future Bradbury says he is “very concerned about. It was a link I made when running around [Melbourne] with anti-war activists and we went to a hundred locations that were [owned by] defence contractors. It was an eye-opener for me to see Lockheed Martin and other defence contractors everywhere.”

America & Me reflects another struggle, that of ensuring the survival of the activist documentary. Bradbury self-financed it and is struggling to find distributors or raise money for another film.

The style of the film, a collection of fleeting interviews, is a product of these financial limits.

“I’d love nothing more than to put a radio mic on a subject and follow them to the enth degree till I know I’ve got a film. I don’t have the money to do that anymore, so America & Me is a collection of fragments.”

He muses: “It would have been interesting if I’d had the budget to have someone following me and making a film of me in the US — I’d like to pass on what I’ve learnt”.

Bradbury is unsure if he can financially keep on making documentary films. “I do it still because I’m a political activist — but I find it a lot harder.”

He picked up the phone I was recording our conversation with and said: “Everyone’s got one of these and calls themselves a filmmaker and its up on YouTube for nothing — so why would people pay 20 bucks to see a film at the cinema?”

Bradbury has already begun to re-invent himself to continue making films. He is learning video editing “so I can start putting up some free video clips people have come to expect”.

He is even exploring drama, noting: “Not everyone can go from doco to feature and use a set of skills, I tried it a bit on [2015 docudrama] The Crater and had a chance to work with actors or non-actors.

“I really enjoyed that process after making documentaries for 30, 40 years. It was nice to work with actors and create drama and take what I know from making documentaries to make it look and feel real.

“That’s an area I want to get into — whether I will be able to get the money is another issue.”

As Bradbury enthusiastically talks about distributing America & Me, I get the strong feeling there are still a few more documentaries left in him.

“I consciously have put myself in the somewhat exhausting task of taking a film around, Tasmania, Canberra, Hobart, Sydney — to me it’s part of what goes with being an activist filmmaker.

“If you don’t do that, the film gets lost and you’re trying to extend your work as a political activist to encourage discussions. I’d love it if younger activists came.

“I like to connect to people and discuss neoliberalism, [the US] military industrial complex, whether we should be marching on parliament. We need to know about these things — like the Yemen bombings, Gaza.

“We need to have a commitment of where we stand and who we vote for in our pathetic elections.

“That’s why I make films, I thinks it’s more important to light one candle than to curse the darkness. One candle in a darkened room can create a lot of light on a situation, even if it’s for a brief moment.”

[Find out more about David Bradbury’s films at Frontlinefilms.com.au.]

A man waves over a roughly boarded fence, as a guard walks intimidatingly in front of it. A group of refugee protesters, sweltering in the hot sun in Leonora — a two day drive from Perth into the desert — wave back and yell “azadi”, the Farsi word for freedom.

I am one of the protesters and I am filming the protest.

One week earlier, just before the start of my second year at university, I opened an email from an activist group advertising a “Caravan of Compassion” to Leonora detention centre.

A few days later I was on the bus, barely knowing one other person.

We spent the first night in Kalgoorlie, where we watched a documentary about the 2002 Woomera convergence. We all got excited watching the hundreds of refugee activists tear down the fences, allowing some refugees to escape.

The next day we arrived at the gates of Leonora detention centre. For some of us, it was the first time we had ever seen a detention centre.

One of the activists later reflected: “It looked like there was a secret inside that they were trying to make look as banal, as normal as they could. But then I saw parents holding their children over the fences with signs saying ‘please help me’. It was clear there was something inside those centres that desperately needed to come outside.”

We spent the weekend protesting, flying kites above the fences and visiting people inside. Someone had arranged for toy donations to give to the kids. People inside would often wave over one of the many fences and we would chant back, much to the annoyance of the guards.

On our last day there, we were secretly given a letter from one of the people inside. Many people cried when they heard the story it told — of fleeing the Taliban with her children only to be locked up indefinitely in detention in Australia, with no hope of release and daily abuse from guards.
Students for Refugees
Those of us who were university students took these experiences back to our campuses and began forming Students for Refugees groups. My journey as a refugee activist had begun.

We discovered Murdoch University had a contract with Serco. Serco was one of the private companies employed to run the detention centres. We began a campaign to kick them off campus.

We ran stalls, held speak-outs where refugees who had been in detention shared their stories, organised photo petitions and built contingents for refugee rallies.

One person who joined on an O-week stall soon began visiting refugees and leading chants at rallies. Friendships were formed that have lasted years. We became part of the colourful tapestry of refugee activism in Australia.

Campus refugee activism has a strong history in Australia. Under the John Howard regime, student organisations held campus rallies hundreds strong and university-wide referenda to make their campuses refugee safe havens. This meant making campuses places of sanctuary, solidarity and aid.

Our actions helped build the pressure that led to offshore detention being closed in 2008 when Labor came to power — only to be re-opened by Labor a few years later. However at the time it was a significant victory and showed the movement could win.
Campus sanctuary
On the other side of the world, US students are organising against President Donald Trump’s attacks on immigrants and undocumented citizens. Student activist groups at more than 100 university campuses are campaigning to make their universities sanctuaries.

There are ongoing discussions about what a campus sanctuary would mean. The most common meaning is not allowing immigration agents on campuses without a warrant and refusing to disclose and collect immigration status details, while also providing legal, economic, tuition and other welfare support for people are risk of deportation.

They have also been campaigning for legislation changes and defiantly staring down moves to cut funding to universities that support the sanctuary movement.
Student victories
Over the past few years students in Australia have won victories.

One of the more inspiring victories was Mojgan Shamsalipoor and her school, Yeronga State High in Brisbane. Mojgan fled sexual assault and an arranged marriage in Iran and was released into community detention on a bridging visa. She began attending school, met the love of her life and planned to become a midwife. Then, one day the department of immigration decided Mojgan was not a refugee and gave her two options: return to Iran or be sentenced to indefinite detention in Darwin’s Wickham Point detention centre. Fearing persecution in Iran, she chose the latter.

Her high school community then began campaigning for her release. They took their struggle all the way to Canberra and her story was told on ABC’s Australian story. She was eventually given a bridging visa and has remained in limbo ever since.

In Newcastle last year another victory was won by student activists. They forced their university to cut its contract with Broadspectrum, a company with contracts to run offshore detention centres.

One of the key organisers of the campaign, Tim Buchanan, said the campaign really took off when Students Against Detention pushed the idea that students could do something on campus for those locked up in detention. “Our call out was: ‘Hey, we’re at uni and there are people on Manus. We can’t physically get there; we can’t even get media on there. [However] we could actively shut down the business here on campus.’”

Late last year students occupied immigration offices in Canberra, Newcastle and Sydney as the Australian government forcibly closed the Manus Island detention centre, leaving the refugees stranded on Manus Island without access to adequate healthcare, safety, food and housing. This made national press at a time when people were becoming outraged at what was happening and looking for ways to get active.
Why campaign?
I often get asked whether it is worth campaigning for refugee rights when nothing seems to be changing. The history of Australia’s refugee campaign shows it is possible to win victories when enough people mobilise.

Beyond this, the answer can be found on the hill overlooking Northam detention centre, where one stormy night in the pouring rain a few hundred of us, including student groups, made our protest with massive letters spelling out “freedom” in several languages to refugees in that detention centre who were also protesting. One of the men inside sent a message to us saying: “Thank you for these protests. We love you and our hearts are with you in this moment.”

This would later be the foundation for a short documentary, “For my Friends in Detention”, which I made in my film class at university. It looks at why protesting is important to people in detention. It has since been selected for film festivals around the world and the message has resonated with a lot of other people in the campaign.

For this reason alone it is worth being involved in the campaign: it means a lot to the people on Manus Island and Nauru who have spent more than four years in detention.

You don’t need to jump on a bus with a bunch of strangers heading out to a remote detention centre to get involved. You can come to the Palm Sunday rallies for refugee rights on March 25.

There are student refugee rights groups on many campuses organising contingents to the marches, so get involved and become a part of this important campaign.

A solitary voice echoed around the banal foyer of Sydney’s Department of Immigration office on November 3: “We are here today”.

Two dozen voices chanted back: “We are here today”.

Signs were pulled from pockets reading “Bring them here: close the camps”.

Again, the voice echoed: “Because we cannot fathom.”

Security officers flooded the foyer.

A banner is procured and unfurled, “Manus in crisis. Turnbull, Dutton = Responsible,” with red blood dripping from the word Responsible.

With more vigour, the voices continued: “The repercussions still to come.”

Security guards locked the doors, stopping more people from marching into the foyer, including Greens Senator Lee Rhiannon.

“Because every day.”

Three women locked themselves together and refused to leave until immigration minister Peter Dutton ends this crisis.

“On Manus and Nauru.”

Photos of the action began circulating on social media with the hashtag #WeAreWatching.

“Is another day in Hell.”

The voices continued to describe the hell that the Australian government has created by sending 600 people seeking asylum to rot on Manus Island.

A simultaneous occupation of the immigration department offices was held in Canberra, inspired by the occupation earlier in the week by Students against Detention in Newcastle.

The previous night I was up late talking to Behrouz Boochani, one of the men detained in Manus Island. He describes one of the worst human rights violations imaginable – and that is getting worse.

Boochani speaks of men digging wells to find water, the fear of locals coming into the camp with machetes and attacking refugees, a rise in cases of malaria, the suffocating tropical heat and the denial of medical services.

The next day Boochani posts to Twitter that authorities had blocked people from delivering food to the centre. People inside have been starving since October 31.

In previous conversations, Boochani had spoken of the resistance of the men inside Manus Island.

They are now entering the ninety-fifth consecutive day of protest, which began when the Australian government announced it would close the centre and leave the men stranded on Manus Island.

Protesters crossed their arms above their head, a symbolic gesture that has being used in refugee protests every day in offshore detention centres.

I took a photo and sent it to a refugee I know on Manus Island. He replied: “Thankyou”.

If there is one thing I have learnt from being involved in this campaign over the past decade, it is that seeing people protesting, known that someone cares about you and is watching, has always made a difference to people suffering in detention.

I read some of Boochani’s words out at the occupation. They echoed around the immigration department, which has long since adopted a torturers’ detachment from human suffering.

Moments later, the police arrested the three women that had locked on. Five police officers drag one of the women out, stomping on her hair as she yells “free the refugees.”

This defiance of the detention system – both inside and outside the barbed wire fences – has won victories.

In 2002, at the Woomera detention centre, activists tore down a fence and refugees managed to pry open another. Several refugees managed to escape and were hidden in an underground refugee sanctuary network.

The stories that came from Woomera reverberated around the country.

In 2008, Nauru detention centre was closed and the “Pacific Solution” announced dead. It came after the refugee movement swelled into the thousands during the John Howard years.

In 2016, the government sought to deport 167 people back to Nauru after they had been brought to Australia for medical reasons. The Let Them Stay movement began with thousands of people holding up #LetThemStay banners at concerts, workplaces, football matches, schools, churches and hospitals.

It culminated with people holding a vigil outside Brisbane’s Lady Cilento Hospital in support of medical professionals refusing to discharge Baby Asha who was been threatened with being sent back to Nauru.

Baby Asha is still in Australia.

Now we have the growing #WeAreWatching campaign. People across the world are watching what is happening on Manus Island, documenting the human rights abuses and taking action – in workplaces, universities and editorials in national newspapers.

Even celebrities are speaking out. Russell Crowe took to Twitter to write: “Manus. A Nations shame. Lives held in limbo. Lives lived in fear & despair. It's fucking disgraceful.”

This is one the greatest abuses of human rights in Australia’s history. It is one that is happening before everyone’s eyes.

Neither Coalition nor Labor politicians can say they were not knowingly complicit in the tragedy unfolding on Manus Island.

Later that night, hundreds of people sat down in the streets of Brisbane crossing their arms above their heads.

This action is being repeated across Australia, from big cities to rural towns. Growing numbers of people feel they cannot remain silent.

If urgent action is not taken, people will die in the coming weeks.

[Zebedee Parkes is an activist with the Refugee Action Coalition in Sydney and a member of the Socialist Alliance.]

Punks For West Papua
Directed by Anthony Brennan
46 minutes
www.punks4westpapua.com

A friend's request to film a punk rock concert and a rushed drive across Sydney to do a last-minute interview with West Papuan independence leader Benny Wenda — without even knowing who the twice Nobel Peace Prize-nominated activist was — was the catalyst for filmmaker Anthony “Ash” Brennan to make his award-winning film Punks For West Papua.

The deeper origins of Brennan's motivation to be a social justice filmmaker can be traced back to his childhood. Growing up in a Western Sydney multicultural neighbourhood, he had ideas of social justice at an early age: “It's in my blood to be working class and my parents were always very welcoming to anyone who came in the front door.”

This included Greek and Italian migrants, and later Vietnamese refugees. “Initially there was a bit of a stand-off — 'who are these people blah blah' — eventually they became our mates and to this day I'm still friends with them,” Brennan told Green Left Weekly.

“I remember one of them telling me his story of coming on a boat and how his father hid him and his sister under the floorboards because pirates wanted to come and take him.

“I remember going, 'I'm just a 15-year-old playing footy and my biggest worry is getting my homework done and cracking onto girls'. I didn't think that [sort of thing] happened.”

Then Brennan got involved in the mass anti-war movement and environmental campaigns. This started his interest in advocacy films. “A couple of years ago I got a bit more handy with a camera,” he said. This led to him shooting videos on community campaigns against destructive mining, such as the struggle of farmers in Gloucester against coal seam gas mining.

Brennan has spent a lot of his life working for commercial TV, which has led to a healthy scepticism of the mainstream media's selection of messages. “It is not the news of the day, it's just the news they want to feed you,” he said. “There are too many stories we just never see.”

The oppression of West Papua by Indonesia, with the support of the Australian government, is one of those stories. For more than five decades Indonesia has occupied West Papua with the complicity of multinational corporations and global powers.

The origins of the film came about when, in June last year, Brennan was contacted by friends Jodi Bartolo and Neil Carrington from Sydney band Diggers with Attitude to film a benefit concert for West Papua.

“It was just meant to be five bands to raise a little bit of awareness and a bit of money for what's happening in West Papua and they asked me if I could come and film the night.

“I said OK, let's interview a couple of people, maybe do something cool, it could be a good promo for your next album or something.”

It was never meant to be the start of a feature-length documentary. It did, however, get Brennan thinking. “I got off the phone and went 'West Papua, everyone knows there's something there, but no one really knows [much about it]'. So I started reading up on it. There's a genocide happening there.”

Other bands began to follow Diggers with Attitude's example and started planning their own benefit gigs around the country. Brennan was already travelling around the country with work, so it seemed obvious to “do my other job and I can just do interviews with the other bands”.

However, it was not until two weeks after that initial phone call that the real catalyst for the documentary came. The Free West Papua campaign in Australia got in contact with Diggers With Attitude and said United Liberation Movement for West Papua spokesperson Benny Wenda was in town and available to be interviewed.

Brennan's first thought was, “Cool, a West Papuan, that would be good. I had no idea who he was. Basically we got the phone call and had to get to the other side of Sydney in 45 minutes.

“I didn't know that he'd been nominated for two Noble Peace Prizes. But I can only say in my own experience, in that hour that he just turned me around in a heartbeat.

“He told me what's been happening there. Half-a-million people have been murdered in the past 50 years. You're not allowed to fly [West Papua's] flag, or it's 15 years' jail.

“They're killing kids there — just opening fire on people. One thing that stuck with me is that they are just north of Australia, we are practically neighbours, but nobody knows about this.”

“Once I interviewed Wenda, I knew we needed to make a documentary. That's when the word 'documentary' first came into it and so for the next two months I travelled the country interviewing people.”

Brennan began by interviewing the headline act of each of the Punks4WestPapua concerts. The documentary starts off like a punk rock music clip, it is fast with strong music and heavily stylised shots. It is not something you see often in a documentary.

Brennan explained: “I felt the need to just throw punk rock in people's faces, startle people straight away. For the most part, punk rock is about caring for your fellow people, standing up for the rights of the downtrodden.”

Using punk rock as the opening for the documentary is more than just a hook. It is also very connected to the West Papuan independence struggle. Brennan said: “There's actually a massive relationship between that part of the world and punk rock.

“In fact some of the punk rockers who have played in this benefit gig are starting to send over gear to them, old guitars and stuff. But they systemically get rounded up by the government and get thrown into jail.

“But I couldn't really have a documentary with [just] punk bands talking about the injustice of West Papua — I needed a voice of credibility.”

That came in the form of Hugh Lunn, a multi-Walkley Award-winning journalist who has written extensively about West Papua. “That [interview with Lunn] really made the documentary. He was there, he saw what was happening. Those photos in the documentary are his personal photos that he took. Hugh Lunn just gave credibility to the whole thing.”

Lunn had previously tried to get documentaries made about West Papua, but was unable to generate enough interest. Brennan said he was only able to make his documentary by self-funding, with most of its $10,000 budget going towards rights to use footage and music.

“I work in film and TV and I do alright out of it, so I started to use my powers for good rather than evil for a change,” he said.

Getting footage from West Papua was one of the film's biggest challenge, as the Indonesian government does not allow people to film freely.

Luckily, Brennan made contact with one person in West Papua who shoots video for Papua Storyteller, which can be found on Youtube and Facebook.

“He just does a lot of day in the life sort of films and his stuff is actually quite good. He was quite happy for me to use his footage if the proceeds went to the campaign.”

Brennan's main regret is that he was unable to film in West Papua. “I feel like I did cheat in this documentary a bit because I didn't go over there. That's the one thing I wish that had been different.”

Brennan feels the campaign for West Papua is finally starting to gain momentum in the past couple of years. “Just the other day, [Greens Senator] Scott Ludlum was talking about it in the national parliament. Every day there is a new social media group starting about what's happening in West Papua.”

Ultimately, Brennan is proud of the film, which allowed him to pull two of his biggest passions together.

“I had a musical upbringing. I played in punk bands through the 80s and 90s. Obviously politics was an interest of mine, so to be able to combine music and politics in one doco was pretty special.”

Punks For West Papua has just won the Award of Merit — Documentary Feature at the Indiefest Film festival in San Diego, the first festival it was entered into.

It is currently being screened around the country. You can find out more details about the screenings or buy the film at punks4westpapua.com

I moved to Sydney at the start of this year. For months I have spent every Sunday I'm not working rushing around the Inner West being interviewed as a flatmate, only to suffer rejection after silent rejection.

I started by scouring all the share house platforms, from Gumtree to Facebook groups. But, seeing dozens of comments appear on a listing within an hour of it going up, makes me wonder: “How the hell do you compete with this level of demand?” Most people I've messaged on Facebook never respond.

Then I signed up to online housing platforms such as flatmatefinder.com.au and flatmates.com, where you create a profile that is eerily similar to an online dating site — including all your lifestyle habits, interests, political views and work situation. My mixture of work, engagement with social justice issues and rental history netted me about one reply to every 10 messages, usually from people looking for “left leaning creative peeps”. Considering the demand for housing, that was not too bad.

In Ultimo, where I work, the demand is at least 8 to 1, with an average price for a room of more than $300 a week. I've seen rooms listed at $400 and above, and they still get a flood of responses. This is comparable in most suburbs close to the city, such as Newtown and Glebe.

There are two major universities in the area. If you study full time, Centrelink pays less than $300 a week. Where do people who cannot pay upwards of $300 a week live? In those rooms I originally thought seemed like a good deal at about $200 a week, but which on closer inspection turned out to be shared rooms. Sometimes there were more than three people in them. They boasted features such as “you have your own key to the house” or “no one sleeping in the lounge room”. I had better conditions at the hostels I stayed at while travelling last year.

Then there is the flatmate interview. I probably got about one interview for every 20 places I messaged. I never knew whether to treat them like a job interview or a tinder date. Some are all about your lifestyle and others are very brisk.

One time I went to a couple's house, where they were like the king and queen of the mansion. They charged about $300 a week for a room and wanted me out of the house on week days as they like their privacy.

Others said: “Here's the house, goodbye.” That's it. You could have saved me the effort of coming to the inspection if you have already found someone else.

But most interviews seemed to go really well. I ticked all the boxes with my work, rental experience and having a life outside the house. It's surprising how many people have heard of Green Left Weekly: “Is that the paper people are always flogging at Central Station every Friday afternoon?”

Most never get back to you — apart from one woman, whose rejection sounded more like someone cancelling a date at the last minute.

Flatmates.com.au's billboard on the bridge near Redfern Station says “Someone finds a room every 5 ½ minutes”. Really? Mine is a common story for young people looking for a room near the city.

Instead of governments increasing public housing and supporting initiatives that would lower rental prices, they are in the pockets of big developers waging war on affordable inner city housing.

Unless you happen to come from a very wealthy family that is prepared to support you, it's going to be a struggle to survive inner city gentrification and find a room to rent in a shared house.

Where were you in May when the New South Wales state government announced it will scrap the free rides the Opal card currently gives you after having paid for eight trips in one week?

I was not gazing out the window of a train daydreaming that I was on a catbus — the magical type of public transport in Hayao Miyazaki's 1988 anime classic, My Neighbour Totoro.

Instead, I was playing Twister — not by choice — on the staircase of the train running from Central to Parramatta, having given up all hope of getting a seat. For this privilege I paid $10. Some days I have to eat for less than that.

Coalition transport minister Andrew Constance tried to justify the move by saying: “We at the moment are foregoing in the order of $300 million of free travel across the network. Last year we actually lost money, which of course means it's unsustainable in the long term.”

Luckily, this time I was not on a train when I heard this, or I may have been kicked off for swearing.

How can the state government spend more than $15 billion on building the WestConnex toll road, or the federal government spend $12 billion on military planes that cannot even fly, yet $300 million is way too much to spend on a (usually) perfectly functioning “public” transport system?

Why does public transport have to make money to be sustainable? Surely “public” transport paid for by our taxes can be run for its positive benefits, such as lower pollution, less congested roads, affordable travel and safety.

Instead Constance, like most of Australia's politicians, sees it as a business, where transport officers exist to harass people who cannot afford a ticket, passengers are commodities and the principle of how many sardines can you squash into a can for maximum profit is to be applied at all times.

Perhaps the donation of more than $1 million by Leighton Holdings to both the Labor and Coalition election campaigns offers a clue. Leighton has been awarded numerous WestConnex contracts, totalling more than $7 billion of public money. But $300 million is way too much for the public transport purse. Leighton is also at the centre of a Senate corruption inquiry where it has been accused of bribing politicians.

Having recently moved from Perth, Sydney public transport does have its advantages. Unlike in the west, I stand a fighting chance of getting home after 10pm on a weeknight.

For example, one Wednesday night in Perth I was not allowed to wait at the station until the trains started running again. I tried having a discussion with security about giving people a safe place to wait at night till the trains ran again in the morning. I got nowhere.

Instead I was forced to wander the streets of Northbridge for several hours at night, sober, cold and all alone; with no Totoro catbus to rescue me.

Luckily when I was stumbling home on Friday and Saturday nights, there was a late night train service. But the Western Australian Coalition state government announced in February last year it was cancelling the late night trains because not enough people were using them. Of course part of the justification was it would save $6 million over four years.

The announcement came as quite a shock as I had caught a night train the previous week that was standing room only. Perhaps transport minister Dean Nalder, driving around in his taxpayer-funded government car, was a bit out of touch with the demand for Perth's late night trains.

I was not the only one. Social media exploded with the hash tag #transperthlatenight enticing thousands of people to upload photos of full trains late at night. A pyjama protest planned for later that month and advertised on Facebook got thousands of people saying they would attend.

Even the Taxi Council was worried it would not be able to cope with the increased demand.

Then the government, groaning under the weight of growing public protest, decided to keep the trains running.

I actually wished they had waited until after the pyjama protest. I have never had a chance to photograph people protesting in pyjamas. There might even have been someone in a Totoro onesie there.

People have been crying out for more public transport infrastructure in Perth for years. They want fast and regular trains to towns down south and a light rail system in the CBD that connects to the airport. Variations of these are regularly put forward at state elections but they never seem to eventuate.

I guess private contractors see other projects as more financially viable, such as the Perth Freight Link, which has numerous health, safety and environmental issues, will probably be a toll road, and will rip $1.6 billion from the public purse to give to private contractors.

At least the Smart Rider card system actually works in Perth — unlike in Melbourne where the government spent more than $1.5 billion trying and regularly failing to implement its Myki card system.

Perhaps instead of spending public money to make people pay for public transport, they could just use that money to make public transport free?

There is a striking similarity between Sydney, Perth and Melbourne — the drive to build massive road projects like WestConnex, the Perth Freight Link and the recently defeated East West Link. While crying poor when it comes to funding public transport, road projects — that all the studies show will lead to more congestion on the roads, not less, are facing massive community opposition and are ripping billions of dollars from the public purse — get the go ahead.

Imagine the kind of public transport system we could have if we had control over our public money and assets instead of corporations and their political lackeys — one that is free, where you do not have to play Twister, that operates through the night, with bullet trains between cities and reaching into the outer suburbs. With that kind of money we could start to imagine having Totoro Catbuses.

After months of protests, mass meetings and failed talks with the University of Sydney administration, about a dozen Sydney College of the Arts (SCA) students started an occupation of the Dean's office at its Callan Park campus in Rozelle on August 22.

SCA students dropped a banner reading “Under new management” from an office window and barricaded the doors as staff left the building. Since then, supporters have been protesting twice daily outside the occupied building, sending food and supplies to the occupation via a basket pulled up by a rope.

The Let SCA Stay campaign is demanding that: the arts college stay at Callan Park; there be no staff cuts; the reinstatement of the Bachelor of Visual Arts (BVA) degree; and an independent review of the SCA's financial situation.

“We're in a crisis and we've had to take extreme action to get what we want,” Suzy Faiz, a fine arts masters student told Green Left Weekly on August 22.

To date, there has being minimal security presence and no police. The administration has turned off the student accessible WiFi, but no other moves have been made to remove or dissuade occupying students.

While earlier protests had pressured management to back down from its initial proposal to merge SCA with the University of NSW's Arts and Design School, it is refusing to reinstate the BVA or budge on its decision to move SCA to the main Camperdown campus.

Faiz said the occupation will continue, “until we get a proper response [from the university] and they meet some of our demands.”

She said it is very important to keep SCA at Callan Park as “The grounds are magical, but the facilities, the space, offers us a chance to grow and expand and create work, large work … A space to do research in and studio-based practice, which is what Sydney College of the Arts is all about.”

While every student at SCA has their own studio space, no similar studio, teaching and exhibition facilities exist on the Camperdown campus. Courses such as jewellery, ceramics and glass creation will be cut if the planned move goes ahead.

The University of Sydney — one of the wealthiest universities in the country with a vice chancellor that is paid at least $1.3 million a year — claims SCA is financial unviable.

Yet, the university pays no rent for SCA, as the state government gave it the land for its Callan Park campus in 1996 and paid for the refurbishment of the buildings.

Moreover, SCA students are paying $9 million worth of fees for 2016, while expenditure at SCA is estimated to be only $6.8 million a year.

Faiz said “we've all payed money to this university to get a certain degree and they have completely changed what we invested in.”

SCA students believe the university has manufactured a financial crisis to sell the Callan Park campus and sack staff. The campaign is calling for an independent review of SCA's financial situation.

The unanimous decision by SCA students to start the occupation at a general assembly on August 22 comes after months of campaigning and protests.

Faiz said SCA students decided “they would escalate if the demands of the students weren't met.”

A vibrant rally on August 17 drew hundreds of students and staff to a march through the Camperdown campus. The student-led protest had the support of the National Tertiary Education Union.

In July, SCA students and staff wore red capes and clapped "SOS, SCA" in time with a snare drum outside the Archibald prize ceremony at the Art Gallery of NSW. They were joined by numerous figures from the arts community such as former Archibald Prize winner Ben Quilty.

Community support for the occupation has being growing. The members of the Sydney branch of the Maritime Union of Australia visited the occupation on August 24, donated $1000 and commissioned a number of artworks from the occupying students.

Aboriginal activist Uncle Ken Canning spoke at one of the daily protests and lent his support to the occupation.

Student organisations around the country have circulated photos of themselves holding signs up in solidarity with the occupation.

Friends of Callan Park's Hall Greenland spoke in support of the occupation at the first solidarity protest. Many see the occupation as part of the struggle against Premier Mike Baird's agenda of corporatisation and attacks on public space in New South Wales.

Faiz said: “It's been really nice how this campaign has brought a lot of people together, while the university's plan is to divide and conquer — it has really strengthened us as a community … it's definitely shaken the art world up.”

[The campaign to save SCA is holding daily protests. Find out how to support the campaign at facebook.com/letscastay.]

United States politicians have, for the moment, succumbed to pressure of a growing campaign against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SIPA) and the PROTECT IP act (PIPA).

The campaign has involved forces ranging from independent bloggers and content producers to internet giants Wikipedia, Reddit, Facebook, Twitter and Google

In response to protests, the proposed acts have, for now, been shelved.

SOPA (in the US House of Representatives bill) and PIPA (in the US Senate) are proposed US laws. However, they have global implications, as actions can be taken against any site whose server is in the US or which violates a US law.

The acts are presented as a means to stop online piracy (dissemination of copyrighted material without the copyright owner's permission). However, they are highly flawed acts that will not effectively combat piracy but will hurt independent producers and strangle freedom of speech.

Many opponents of these acts believe that is what they are really being introduced to do.

The proposed SOPA act is meant to work in a couple of ways. First, it grants judges the ability to force internet service providers to block access to websites on grounds that they support piracy.

Second, it allows for charges to be laid against offending websites. Actions against websites can include accounts frozen, sites sued, sites taken down and even five years in jail for those involved.

The bills are mainly being supported by the likes of the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America and the US chamber of commerce.

These groups have raised concerns about online piracy causing them to lose revenue — most never reaches the artists who produce the works in the first place.

There are already many laws that these large corporations can access. These include being able to get content subject to copyright removed from a website and the ability to sue people for piracy.

Under such laws, families can be sued over the music playing in the background of a home movie.

SOPA will not stop piracy. There are myriad ways to circumvent it. Some common strategies include using alternative servers, proxy services and other domain names. More are likely to be invented.

Even Pirate Bay, one of the largest piracy websites in the world, has said it isn’t concerned about the legislation affecting it from a business standpoint. However, it raised concerns over the potential of the acts to restrict free speech.

Many independent content producers, such as musicians, filmmakers and bloggers, have heavily criticised the bill. Fight for the Future, a non-profit group, has a specific letter for artists to sign alongside their broad one, highlighting the significance threat this bill poses.

The broad interpretation of the bill means it can be used to target any site that links to another site with pirated content or tutorials on piracy. This could be as simple as instructions on how to burn a CD.

It means that any site, big or small, that posts links to copyrighted material, or has users which do, can be shut down and have accounts frozen. The implication for social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter — which revolve around users posting such links — could be dire.

But it also has the potential to destroy any individual blog or small site.

Many independent artists could be shut down under the law, further centralising even more control into the hands of the major studios and record companies pushing the bill.

By granting the US government wide-ranging powers to shut down sites, the acts threaten to give it powerful tools to politically censor the net.

On January 18, Wikipedia led what has been dubbed an internet strike against the acts. Wikipedia, and other sites such as Reddit, “blacked out” their sites, shutting down in protest.

With an easy to use code and plugins created and promoted by opponents of the acts, many small sites and individual bloggers took part in the online protest. This raised a huge amount of awareness and many people upon knowing the consequences of SOPA rallied against it.

Reddit and other groups have also been encouraging boycotts of companies that support it. There is a plugin developed to tell people when they are on a website that supports SOPA, giving the use a chance to boycott it.

The most important element in the campaign against online censorship is the many bloggers, internet users and activists on the ground.

The campaign against SOPA has shown off a variety of methods of internet activism — various ways of spreading information, going on strike and boycotting companies.

These strategies, while being effective in the short term, will not by themselves stop censorship in the long run.

To seriously stop internet censorship, must be a continuation of the growing campaign by the masses on the streets against attacks on civil liberties.

The recent victory against SOPA and PIPA are reason to celebrate. However, it is not time to become complacent.

Soon after their defeat, police raided Megaupload — a popular file sharing site. This forced many filesharing sites to go down. Already other bills aimed at controlling the internet are being proposed in the name of stopping porn among other things.

For all the bills’ rhetoric of stopping things like porn and piracy, it wouldn’t be long before they are used against political activism.

As attacks ramp up against the internet, it is essential for activists to fight against an attack on an increasingly valuable tool for mobilising people on the streets.

Many people suffering in Manus Island and Nauru detention centres are struggling to find hope that their situation will change. One such person is Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist who fled Iran and has become well known for his writings about life in the Manus Island detention centre.

In a conversation on Facebook he said: “After four years we got disappointed with Australian political parties and the rallies to change the policy. I can say that people in Manus feel that they are out of sight and out of mind and I think they are right because nothing change after four years.”

Manus Island detention centre was opened by Labor in 2013 and many of the people inside are now into their fourth year of detention. They are facing increasing uncertainty that they will ever be released.

This has been compounded by the PNG Supreme Court ruling almost a year ago that the detention centre must close. Yet it still functions.

Then there was the announcement of the US refugee deal — which may see no one resettled in the US.

Behrouz describes this situation as mental torture. “They are playing with our minds with fake news and rumours every day. They have made us tired by [the] uncertainty [of the] situation and news.

“They are threatening and humiliating people in different kind of ways. We have to stay in a long line for each meal. The officers search our bodies, the system calls us by number. It is a big humiliation.”

Recently, immigration officials set up a food serving area that forces people to queue up in long lines for food, which they receive through a small window that is too high for some people to reach. It gives immigration officials more power to deny people access to food.

Manus Island detention centre has been condemned for its human rights abuses by international organisations ranging from Amnesty to the New York Times.

Two crimes against humanity stand out: the deaths of Reza Berati and Hamid Kehazaei.

Berati was murdered when detention centre guards attacked asylum seekers and refugees inside the centre. They kicked Berati in the head while he was on the ground, before someone smashed his head with a large rock.

Kehazaei was murdered by the system. He suffered a small cut to his foot and was consistently denied medical attention as it became more and more infected. Eventually he died from septicaemia. Subsequent medical reports said if he had been given adequate and timely medical aid he would have survived.

Now the Australian government is ramping up the pressure on people in Manus to accept being deported to the countries from which they fled.

After four years of torture and no hope of ever being free, Australian Border Force officers are reportedly telling people: “You don't have any choice. Sign and we will give you $US25000, or we will deport you just like we deported your friend.”

Behrouz said in one of his regular Facebook posts on March 30: “Six Lebanese guys went back to Lebanon 'voluntarily', but actually it was not voluntarily because they were under such pressure for a long time and only signed to go back under this pressure.”

Asked how people are managing to resist and survive in Manus Island detention centre, Behrouz said: “It’s hard to explain how people are resisting in this prison. People try to survive in this prison in any way they can.

“Some people are doing artistic works, some are in touch with their families, some are seriously damaged and are wasting time in the medical clinic. This prison is the same as other prisons and people just do some simple thing to survive, although a lot of people are broken in this cruel prison.”

This is the result of Australia’s policy of mandatory detention, which is now in its 25th year. It has never been about saving lives at sea or finding solutions to the global refugee crisis. There are now more than 20 million refugees globally. Australia takes about 10,000 a year.

In 2015, the UNHCR global trends reports showed Lebanon, Jordan and Ethiopia received more than two million refugees between them. Even when they could still come via boat to seek asylum in Australia, about 20,000 asylum seekers was the highest you would see in a year.

At its inception in 1992, then Labor immigration minister Gerry Hand told parliament: “The government is determined that a clear signal be sent that migration to Australia may not be achieved by simply arriving in this country and expecting to be allowed in.”

Barely 200 people a year were coming to Australia on boats. The changes to the Migration Act to make detention mandatory came amid the rhetoric that migrants were coming to Australia to take away people’s jobs. The government wanted to keep migrants subordinated, create a scapegoat and sow divisions between workers.

Since then, successive Coalition and Labor governments have destroyed the lives of refugees as they erode welfare rights, free education and workers rights, among other attacks on society.

It is now more important than ever that we unite and build social struggles to make mandatory detention too politically costly for the government to sustain if we are too have any hope of building a more just, humane world.

A sharing of culture, food and art that supports refugees and asylum seekers, including those in detention, is at the heart of the Food for Thought project.

Ravi, author of From Hell to Hell, a collection of poems and drawings from his time in Nauru detention centre, or “human dumping ground” as he calls it, first started thinking about Food for Thought the day he got out of detention.

Ravi told Green Left Weekly: “The first day I got out of the detention centre, I went to Perth where they were celebrating the First Home Project, where people bring different food and share it. I thought we can start something different.”

With the help of Centre for Stories and members of the Refugee Rights Action Network WA, Food for Thought was launched in Perth in April last year. It is growing in popularity.

Food for Thought includes a range of artwork, poetry readings, short films and Afghan, Pakistani, Iranian and Tamil feasts. All the money raised goes towards buying gifts and phone credit for people in detention.

Ravi said it is popular with refugees in the community as “a good platform for them to perform their skills in reading and writing (often poetry), photography and cooking”.

He said the events “bring people together and they can gain understanding about asylum seekers.

“In these three hours people can learn lots of things — it’s a different culture, different people and different traditional food, religion, language and experience.

“It’s touched a few people’s hearts and minds. They’ve got a chance to open their eyes and see what’s going on around asylum seekers. It’s a real turning point.”

The Sydney events have included screenings of the Dark Way films, created by asylum seekers and refugees on Nauru. The films show the harrowing conditions in Nauru Detention Centre, share the stories of asylum seekers trapped there and the heroic 240 day protest. Ravi also screens a couple of other short films where he shares his story.

Ravi is working on another project called Hidden Voices from Human Dumping Ground, where he collects and shares poetry from people in detention centres, especially Nauru and Manus Island.

At the end of every Food for Thought event, after hearing stories from asylum seekers, a photo is taken of attendees holding letters forming “WE HEAR YOU”. Ravi said it’s a way of showing “people can hear the people in detention centre, their voices”, especially as “the people in the detention centre can’t speak out”.

Ravi then shares these photos with his friends in detention. “It’s a good thing when I share those photos. It’s giving people hope.”

More information about food for thought is here.

Refugee activists have maintained watch at Villawood Detention Centre to stop the deportation of Saeed (not his real name), a 60-year-old Iraqi man, since March 22.

Through the hot days and cooler nights activists have been at each of Villawood’s three entrances, checked every leaving vehicle to see if Saeed is being deported and issued regular calls to action and updates on Facebook livestream in support of Saeed.

At a vigil on March 29, a statement from Saeed was read out: “Thank you to everyone who is protesting to help me stay in Australia. Immigration has treated me very badly and makes me worried and depressed. I cannot go back to my country, it is dangerous for me. I am very happy to know that people are supporting me. Thank you.”

Saeed is from a persecuted religious minority in Iraq. He came to Australia in 2012 on a boat and has spent the last four years in detention. His brother, who came on the same boat and had an almost identical application has been granted asylum.

Saeed lost his initial application for asylum in Australia due to a technicality and was not told he could appeal. He does not speak English and when he attempted to submit an appeal years later, he was told it was too late.

Saeed’s lawyer Alison Battisson said: “Saeed’s case is another example of an asylum seeker getting lost in an unfamiliar legal system. Australia’s system for hearing and reviewing protection claims is so complex that many find it impossible to navigate. All we ask is that the minister hear Saeed’s full story.”

Saeed has said through his lawyer: “My family would be in great danger as well as myself if I am returned. Please don’t deport me; I am a human being too.”
National campaign
The campaign to stop Saeed being deported, which is turning into a national focal point, began in the rain in Melbourne outside Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation (MITA) at Broadmeadows on March 21, when he was first slated to be deported.

Refugee activists made a large sign out of lights that said “Don’t deport to danger” and hung it from the walls of the detention centre as they maintained their vigil at MITA’s entrances.

Called on social media by Close the Camps Action Collective and Refugee Action Collective Victoria, the action lasted for 22 hours, until Saeed was rushed to hospital.

Saeed has been on hunger strike for more than three weeks now and his health is precarious. Doctors have declared him too unwell to fly.

In hospital, Saeed was force fed with a tube and deemed fit to travel. He was returned to MITA and plans were put in place to deport him. Activists returned to MITA.

Saeed was blocked from seeing his lawyer, bundled into a van and driven through the night to Villawood Detention Centre in NSW.

Only then he regained access to his lawyer, after more than 12 hours.
Villawood
Upon learning that he was in Villawood, the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition called an action outside the detention centre for March 24. About 70 people gathered outside the main entrance and checked cars as they were leaving.

The police presence grew and they eventually attacked the activists, pushing them off the road so vehicles could drive out. Four arrests were made.

Saeed was meant to be deported that night, but the protests prevented it. Refugee activists have maintained a consistent presence every night since.

On March 26, activists at Villawood held a candlelight vigil in support of Saeed. About 40 people came within a few hour’s notice. They spelled “Saeed” in candles and committed to stay at Villawood to stop his deportation. One women held up a “7” candle to reflect the number of days activists have stopped his deportation.
Appeal to Qantas
An online petition was set up calling on Qantas not to deport Saeed. More than 20,000 people have signed it and many more have been calling Qantas and writing on their Facebook pages that they will never fly with Qantas if they are complicit in deporting Saeed.

On March 27, Mums for Refugees and students occupied Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s office in Brisbane, demanding he not deport Saeed.

Father Rod Bower wrote on his famous Gosford church sign, “Mr Dutton you have the power to save Saeed’s life” and used Twitter to get people down to Villawood.

There was a national day of action on March 29, with solidarity protests in Brisbane, Adelaide and Melbourne, where 30 people occupied the Department of Immigration and Border Protection. One banner read “Deport the government”. Young children held a picnic inside.

Numerous campus and community groups are taking part in photo shoots with signs saying #saveSaeed and #freeSaeed.

In Sydney, 100 people came to a concert and vigil outside Villawood, co-hosted by Love Makes a Way and Mums for Refugees. Live music, the lighting of candles and speeches were made about how important people’s presence at Villawood is to the morale of Saeed and others inside, as well as refugee campaigners.

Currently activists are monitoring Saeed’s situation inside Villawood, watching the detention centre and being prepared to rush to the airport and call on passengers to stand up in the plane to stop it from flying.
Making a difference
The feeling at Villawood is that constant vigilance is making a difference in stopping Saeed’s deportation. It has already delayed it for more than a week.

Deportations are a part of the detention system and to stop deportations you have to end the detention system.

Anti-deportation actions are a crucial part of the strategy to defeat mandatory detention as the actions bring hope to people inside and make a difference in the here and now. This is a powerful way of building a campaign.

We saw the power of this unleashed last year in the campaign to save Baby Asha, when activists maintained a constant presence outside the hospital in support of the doctors and nurses refusing to discharge the refugee baby. To this day, Baby Asha has still not been deported to Nauru.

This provided a focal point for the campaign which involved communities across Australia organising #LetThemStay actions.

The campaign to free Saeed is involving activists in a new way, including coordinating organising people to watch the gates, build networks with other groups, organise vigils and create social media content.

People are connecting with refugees and their stories in a practical way by taking part in the anti-deportation actions at the detention centre.

[Zebedee Parkes is an activist with the Sydney Refugee Action Coalition.]

Activists from Western Australia’s Refugee Rights Action Network traveled more than 800 kilometres from Perth to the remote Leonora detention centre over January 27-29. The journey sought to draw attention to the 160 unaccompanied minors locked up in the detention centre.

Immigration minister Chris Bowen had previously promised that all children would be moved out of detention centres by June last year.

When the activists arrived and started a protest outside the gates, they were greeted with excited waves from the children inside. It was obvious the young refugees were overjoyed to see the protesters and wanted visits, even though the guards employed by prison operator Serco said the refugees had told them they did not want any visitors at all.

Serco guards soon parked a bus between the activists and the waving refugees inside.

But Serco eventually relented to the protests inside and outside the centre and agreed to let the activists visit the refugees the next day.

The visits were very stage-managed. Guards were present in the interview room at all times and took notes of the conversations. The refugees were clearly intimidated, feeling uncomfortable to speak out against their captors.

Despite this, some information did come out. There are about 160 refugees inside, most from Afghanistan, with some from Iraq and Sri Lanka as well. Most were aged 14 to 16. Many said they had been in the detention system for a year, some said two. Most had spent time in detention at Christmas Island and Darwin.

The refugees have 10 computers to share. They receive no newspapers.

Almost all said they were tormented by the waiting and uncertainty in detention. One refugee described it as “walking into a tunnel without light”.

Visiting refugee activists also observed that the Serco guards called the refugees by number, not by name.

On the night of January 28, the activists took Serco by surprise and clambered up the fence at the back of the detention centre. They threw tennis balls to the children inside that had messages of support written on them. With large smiles, the children ran past the watching Serco guards to the fence and gave the activists high-fives.

Later, the protesters marched to the front gate and started shaking it. As the detention centre management looked on, the crowd chanted “every child that cuts themselves is blood on your hands” and “how can you sleep at night violating human rights?”

The event successfully shone a light on the inhumanity of detention centres, and provided some relief and hope for those trapped inside.

Campaigners against the planned Woodside gas hub at James Price Point in the Kimberley believe the Greens’ opposition to the proposal was the reason for their success in the Kimberley seat.

They say it has proven the Broome community does not want the Western Australian Liberals and Woodside's gas hub at James Price Point.

Greens candidate Chris Maher won 23.5% of the primary vote, a swing of 10.1% and the highest vote for the Greens in the Kimberley seat. He polled first in three out of four voting booths in Broome and second in the other.

A strong community campaign against the gas hub has been built up over recent years through big and non-violent direct actions against the plan.

Many commentators in the mainstream media have painted a picture that the combined vote of the Labor, National and Liberal parties being larger than the Greens shows that most people want the gas hub.

Broome Community No Gas group member Jan Lewis said this was wrong. “The Liberals are the only ones really pushing the project ... they were the people we needed to beat and I think we should rejoice because we did beat them.”

The Greens received 1557 votes, compared with the Liberals’ 1205.

The National and Labor parties did not take a strong stand in the election on the gas hub. An Environs Kimberley report into the policies of both parties shows they support the gas hub.

National party candidate Michele Pucci campaigned almost exclusively around the “royalties for regions” policy and showed slight reservations to the gas hub.

She said more needs to be done to address the social impacts of the gas hub.

Labor party candidate Josie Farrer tried to avoid the issue completely. She went so far as to pull out of a “meet the candidates” forum hosted by the ABC in the final week of the election.

In an apparent effort to distract voters from Labor’s support for the gas hub, the party put up signs at polling booths advertising its policy for a Kimberley marine park. The map for the proposed marine park misses all mining area proposals, leases and exploration sites in the Kimberley, including unconventional gas fracking and coalmining in the Fitzroy region as well as the gas hub.

Some people might see the No Gas campaign as an extension of the Greens. But Lewis says the campaign was “not a political party”.

“Really we’re a single issue lobby group.”

Lewis said that during the election campaign, the No Gas group decided “to try and attract some people who wouldn't be traditional Greens voters, to think this was the most important issue in their life and they ought to review who they normally voted for”.

The big swing to the Greens, compared with a statewide swing against them, suggests many people voted for the Greens to protest against the gas hub.

Lewis said a poor vote across the state may be because: “The fracking issue has come so late in the piece.”

Fracking has only recently gained attention in the Kimberley. Fewer people outside Broome know of the effects of fracking, and the challenge for the campaign now is to spread this awareness further to raise the number of opponents of the gas hub.

Campaigning across the entire Kimberley electorate is difficult with an area of 419,078 square kilometres — larger than Germany. Many small communities are remote and hard to access, particularly during the wet season. Getting the message out to more people in the region would take serious resources.

The Liberals invested a huge amount of money in its campaign. It bought wrap-around covers for regional WA newspapers to plaster with advertisements designed to look like news articles. TV ads and billboards were also big campaigning measures.

The No Gas group is run entirely by volunteers. It meets outside to avoid paying money for a room, raises all its finances from donations and relies on members to put promotional banners outside their houses.

The fact that the Greens got a higher vote than the Liberals in the Broome booths and come close across the Kimberley region is a testament to the power of the community campaign against the resources of the mining corporations and the Liberal party.

With the election over, the campaign is now pressuring federal environment minister Tony Burke to not give approval for the project and is preparing to defend sacred Aboriginal burial grounds.

“We want our country to be alive. We don't want it to be dead because that’s our country, that’s our spirit country, we come from that country,” said Aboriginal traditional owner Teresa Roe to a crowd outside Woodside's office on April 12.

The gathering was a celebration after the announcement that Woodside Petroleum has shelved plan to build a liquid natural gas hub at James Price Point in Western Australia’s Kimberley.

Woodside CEO Peter Coleman said it was an economic decision and not influenced by environmental or public policy concerns.

This is partially true. Former joint venture partners such as BHP and Chevron have sold their stakes in the project.
Since 2010, the cost of building the gas hub has risen by $20 billion, while increased shale gas production in the US has flooded the market.

When Woodside announced its withdrawal from the project, its share market price jumped 3.4%.

But that is only one side of the story.

Mass community activism played a huge part in the gas project’s failure. A continuous campaign, blockade, legal challenges and environmental studies have perpetually delayed Woodside’s plans.

This was also in the face of a biased approvals process. When the Environmental Protection Authority in WA was assessing the Browse project, four of the five board members were disqualified because of self-declared conflict of interest with Woodside.

So the decision over approval of the project was made by one person, who approved the project despite serious and unresolved environmental concerns.

Numerous environmental groups submitted reports about environmental problems such as the potential damage caused by dredging 50 square kilometres of seabed and carbon emissions of at least 39 million tonnes a year.
Other research discovered endangered species like the bilby, the largest humpback whale nursery on earth and the monsoon vine thicket, as well as unique dinosaur footprints.

The community campaign has mobilised large numbers of people around the world that has consistently made the project controversial. It has engaged many people in environmental campaigning for the first time in their lives.

Five thousand people protested against the gas hub in Broome in 2011. Twenty thousand people attended a Save the Kimberley concert in Fremantle in February. An action at James Price Point a week before Woodside made the announcement showed the international scale of the movement with cutout hands displayed on the dunes from people all over the world, including the US and Europe.

This is a campaign that has won an important battle using a range of tactics and involved many people that have become empowered. As an emotional Philip Roe said outside Woodside's office: “I feel very privileged that this campaign not only belongs to the Goolarabooloo people but belongs to each and every one of you that fought this campaign.”

The mainstream media painted a negative picture of event. The West Australian devoted two pages to lament the loss of jobs and how it will adversely affect Aboriginal people because they won't receive the promised $1.5 billion in royalties.

It's not just the media and conservative politicians who have being critical of the decision. Australian Manufacturing Workers Union secretary Paul Howes told the ABC that Woodside “sacrificed” thousands of jobs when it dropped the project.

There has been no serious study into the net effect of jobs lost and gained as a result of the gas hub. Once construction on the project was complete, the advertised 6000-8000 jobs would have dropped and there would have been a direct loss in long-term sustainable jobs like tourism and conservation. Many small businesses in Broome wouldn't be able to operate with the increased cost of living that the gas hub would have brought.

Pursuing jobs in renewable energy would be a far better solution, both in terms of the environment and developing sustainable industries.

Woodside’s promise to invest $1.5 billion in basic services for Aboriginal people has been dumped along with the gas hub. A “benefits package” to fund education, housing and health in exchange for being able to mine on Aboriginal land is one of the most common ways mining companies quell dissent to destructive land practices.

It is an outrageous form of bribery. These basic services should be funded by the government as basic human rights and not dependant on a mining company being allowed to destroy sacred Aboriginal burial grounds and song lines.

It is another example of how mining corporations have too much power in Australia and need to be brought under public ownership, so the resources can be used for the public good like providing services and funds to Aboriginal people.

Woodside and its joint partners are now considering other options, including a floating LNG plant offshore. This will still have high environmental impacts such as carbon emissions and damage to marine ecosystems.

The defeat of the James Price Point gas hub is a temporary reprieve. But the campaign against industrialisation in the Kimberley is far from over.

At a community meeting in Broome after Woodside's announcement, there was a strong sentiment to fight against attempts to drill for unconventional gas in the Kimberley. Any other companies that try to build a gas hub at James Price Point will be met with a determined, organised and now empowered mass community campaign.

That the Australian government can find $6 million to fund a film aimed at convincing asylum seekers to not come to Australia and yet cut more than $50 million from Screen Australia speaks volumes about its priorities.

The Journey is a 90-minute telemovie filmed across three countries. It tells the story of asylum seekers who flee from Afghanistan and in attempting to come to Australia meet terrible fates — either dying at sea or languishing in offshore detention centres. In the production company Put It Out There Pictures' words the film aims to “educate and inform audiences in source countries about the futility of investing in people smugglers, the perils of the trip, and the hard-line policies that await them if they do reach Australian waters”.

It has already been screened on multiple channels in Afghanistan and has been adapted for audiences in Pakistan, Iraq and Iran.

This is not the first time the Australian government has published advertisements in countries from which asylum seekers flee. One poignant example is a billboard in Quetta, Pakistan that depicts a leaky boat and warns asylum seekers not to come the “illegal way”. It can be seen in photographs that captured the aftermath of an attack targeting Hazaras in October 2011.

Making a dramatic film is taking this a step further.

Put It Out There Pictures has a record of creating films that promote the interests of Western governments in Afghanistan. These include Innocent Heart, which “centred on Kabir, a 12-year-old boy who was naively manipulated by insurgents”; Salam, a film designed to illustrate “the threat to the community posed by insurgent activity”; and the US government-funded Eagle 4, which is about “promoting faith and trust in the Afghan Security Forces”.

In her memoir Making Soapies in Kabul producer of The Journey Trudi-Ann Tierney talks about making propaganda in relation to Eagle 4: “The official term for what I was facilitating was 'psychological operations', better known as PSYOPS which basically equated to identifying target audiences and influencing their values and behaviour to suit the objectives of, in the case of Afghanistan, NATO and its allies.”

The government doesn't just stop at film in its cultural war on refugees. On top of the $51.5 million cuts to Screen Australia in the 2014-15 budget, last year former arts minister George Brandis proposed cuts of $100 million to the Australia Council for the Arts (Australia Council) over four years. At the same time Brandis announced plans to set up his own arts fund with that money, calling it the National Programme for Excellence in the Arts. This, in effect, gave him power over which projects were funded.

In 2014 nine visual artists staged a boycott of the 19th Biennale of Sydney contemporary visual art festival because it accepted sponsorship from Transfield (now Broadspectrum) — one of the companies that profits from operating offshore detention centres.

Brandis wrote to the Australia Council in response, saying they were endangering their government funding by allowing “the effective blackballing of a benefactor”.

The government's attacks continued in the corporate media. In 2014 then-communications minister Malcolm Turnbull proposed more than $250 million in cuts to the ABC and SBS, which have often given more favourable coverage to the refugee rights' campaign than the Murdoch press.

In effect these cuts are creating more space for Murdoch's message. The Daily Telegraph has featured headlines including: “Victory at sea: 12 boats turned around”; “Julia's boats baby bonus”; “Hellhole solution”; “G'day Nauru: Tamil boat people say hello to their new home”; and “Open the floodgates: Thousands of boat people to invade NSW”.

With headlines like these it is little wonder people believe the government's lie that it is illegal to seek asylum by boat — when in fact it is legal.

But the government goes further to silence the voices of asylum seekers, especially those in offshore detention.

Asylum seekers who have been caught filming and photographing the ongoing protests at the Nauru detention centre, which started on March 20 to coincide with the Palm Sunday rallies, have been subjected to intimidation and threats of arrest by local authorities.

One video shows asylum seekers including children standing behind a fence holding a banner that says “We have been in detention since 1000 days ago” and chanting “Human rights, where are you? Where are you?”

In a letter entitled “Message from Nauru detention centre to the world”, the asylum seekers write: “This is not a letter — this is our tears we are crying. No one can see and wipe our tears. We are falling into a deep ditch, no one can see and offer a hand to us. No, we have spent 1000 days here that we cannot get back; 1000 days passing with emptiness and uselessness…”

While the government tries to silence the truth in Nauru, poet and artist Ravi shows what it is like to be a refugee inside the detention centre. Ravi spent three years in Nauru detention before coming to Australia and has released a book, From Hell to Hell featuring poems and drawings he did while in detention.

Going through them, he stops at one drawing titled “Why you punish me”. It is of a man hunched over in a dark prison cell locked up with a padlock that has a map of Australia printed onto it. He describes it as “talking about my feelings really. It's talking about why you punish me like this. They locked up my aims and my dreams, hopes and feelings...”

There is another drawing of birds trapped in cages titled “Freedom is oxygen”. Ravi said: “When we have a free life we can breathe freely, but when we are in the cage and we don't have any future we cannot see anything. It is very hard to breathe. Freedom is human oxygen…”

We can see the powerful effect of stories from detention centres in the “#LetThemStay” campaign. Once people knew the story of baby Asha, and the conditions children and babies face on Nauru, it sparked a new wave of action in the refugee campaign. With health professionals refusing to discharge Asha while she could be sent back to Nauru and a diverse range of community groups and unions supporting them, the government was forced into a political backdown.

The recent Palm Sunday marches, where thousands of people and dozens of community groups ranging from religious organisations to unions marched in more than 30 locations across Australia, showed people are rejecting Dutton's propaganda and instead support a narrative of welcoming refugees.

Films such as Mary Meets Mohammad, which encourages acceptance of refugees; Between the devil and the deep blue sea, which powerfully illustrates what pushes asylum seekers in Indonesia to take the boat trip to Australia; Nowhere line: voices from Manus Island, an animated film that evokes the horror of living inside a detention centre while focusing on the murder of Reza Berati; For my Friends in Detention a short documentary that captures the positive impact of refugee activism; and Chasing Asylum, which features footage from inside Nauru and Manus detention centres are all powerful tools for the refugee movement.

These films evoke compassion, shine a light on what refugees live through and encourage people to support human rights.

Instead, the government would rather attack arts organisations that support refugees, silence the voices of asylum seekers in detention and pour millions into a film that aims to convince people that whatever horror they are facing at home — the Taliban's bombs or the systematic rape and torture conducted by the Sri Lankan army — coming to Australia is a worse fate.

Newcastle Students Against Detention (SAD) culture jammed the University of Newcastle’s rebranding launch on May 15, putting pressure on the administration to cut ties with Broadspectrum which runs Australia’s detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island.

The students were leaked the designs which they parodied to better reflect the University of Newcastle’s (UON) odious business ties, and stuck them over the official ones.

The rebranding focused on the word “New”, so SAD made posters stating: “New Abuses. New Human Rights Violations. Lose Your Ethics at UON.”

Social work student and member of SAD Keira Dott told Green Left Weekly how it was done. “We rocked up at the internal launch and put up all our posters on billboards. We welcomed people in saying this was the new design and asked them if they wanted to get their picture taken with our billboards.”

Dott had also advertised her student profile: “As a social work student, social justice and wellbeing of other people is very important to me. I really disagree with my student money going towards a company that contributes to the abuses of vulnerable humans fleeing their countries from war, persecution and violence. As someone who cares about other people I can’t sit back and be silent, knowing it is my student money going to this company.”

The next day, UON announced it would cut ties with Broadspectrum. Students and staff have been campaigning for a few years for the university to cut ties with this private company which is complicit in the abuse of asylum seekers and refugees.

The campaign began in 2014–15 when students learned that UON had contracted out some management and maintenance tasks to Broadspecturm, in an $88 million deal.

Tim Buchanan, another student activist, told Green Left Weekly: “When we came saw [the university’s] links to offshore detention people began to organise.”

Students and staff held a protest in early 2015, although the campaign really started after the release of the Guardian’s Nauru Files in 2016 which exposed thousands of cases of child abuse, sexual assault, beatings by guards, people denied medical treatment and other crimes on Nauru.

Around Australia, within one week of the files’ release people began protesting outside MP’s offices and thousands turned out to “Bring Them Here” rallies.

This is when Dott first got involved: “Tim [Buchanan] pulled a few of us together. We held our first action on campus and as we were pretty well received we decided to keep campaigning. We then formed Students Against Detention.”
Campus actions
Buchanan said that after the Nauru Files “any event where the university was in the public eye, we would rock up and let the public knew.”

The first major public event SAD interrupted was a UN flag-raising ceremony in Civic Park, in central Newcastle, where UON’s Vice Chancellor Caroline McMillen was speaking. “She was postulating how great and ethical the university was and we were there with a banner seven metre’s long and 2.5 metres high the entire time.” The banner read “UON: Stop Abusive Businesses”.

Next came UON’s open day at the Great Hall. “We decided to stand outside it with a big banner saying ‘University of Newcastle: No Business in Abuse’. A few of us sat in cages holding signs saying, ‘Stop the abuse of asylum seekers’ and a few of us were handing out flyers,” Dott said.

Security tried to move them on but the students stood their ground, saying they had a right to there.

Dott took the message to a “Bring Them Here” rally organised by the Refugee Action Network Newcastle, saying it was “a really good opportunity to speak about the university’s contract because not many people were aware of it.”

More banner drops, film screenings and snap actions generated new activists and bigger organising meetings. It was a campaign that just kept growing.

“As someone involved in many issues, this campaign got traction really quickly”, Buchanan said. Asked why, he replied that it hit a nerve: people were already supporting refugee rights and so “there was no need to explain the ethics, people already knew what was happening on the Nauru and Manus”.

Buchanan said the campaign really took off when SAD pushed the idea that students could do something on campus for those locked up in detention. Our call out was: “‘Hey, we’re at uni and there are people on Manus. We can’t physically get there; we can’t even get media on there. [However] we could actively shut down the business here on campus.’

“We talked about Broadspectrum having no ‘social license’, how you can take out certain parts of an industry without having to tackle the whole industry.”
1000 cuts campaign
Buchanan said the “1000 cuts idea” was empowering for many. Instead of targeting the actual detention centres, the campaign was directed against companies that profit from the detention system. He said grassroots autonomous protests, which shut down businesses to effect change, like the Westpac campaign against Adani, has had a real impact.

The 1000 cuts campaign was aimed at brand-bashing the university. “As students we are responsible for our university and our university represents us. If it’s involved in unethical practices, especially if it has links to a company that has overseen child molestation, murder, rape — the most heinous crimes we know of as a society — it’s clear that students must stand up,” Buchanan said.

Dott said the campaign has empowered students with a sense of self-belief. “When people stand up together we have a lot of power. As students we have a lot of power at our universities and, whether we realise it or not, we can invoke real change. We used every opportunity we had to hold the university accountable for this contract.”

SAD is organising a celebration party while organising for when the UN visits campus. Buchanan believes the win has been “really empowering but there is always more to be done”.

SAD is still active and Dott said they have still got a lot to do. “We are going to continue so our university never again employs, or does business with, a company that detains refugees.

“We are going to continue to demand that the [administration] reworks the university’s policy and ethical framework so that they will never ever employ or do business with companies involved in refugee and asylum detention.”

Immigration minister Peter Dutton has become so despised by sections of society that some are questioning if he has a soul or heart.

This could also apply to any Coalition or Labor immigration minister over the past couple of decades.

Watch videos of refugees protests over the past decade and it will not be long before you hear chants such as “Lock up [insert current immigration minister] throw away the keys, we won’t stop till we free the refugees” or “Blood on your hands [insert name]”.

However Dutton has taken “evil” immigration minister to another level. The reactions on social media last year to the photo of his face covered in shadows that he tried to ban, illustrate this. Memes circulated that parodied him as evil power-craving pop culture figures such as Darth Vader and Voldemort.

Putting aside social media commentary, there are genuine reasons to be very concerned about the extra-judicial and often secretive powers Dutton is gathering. These powers, frankly, give him control over life and death for many asylum seekers.

Liberty Victoria’s Rights Advocacy Project released a report on May 4 entitled Playing God that examines the powers the immigration minister has over asylum seekers’ lives and the lack of any accountability or transparency. The report examines how many decisions — such as visa applications, boat turnbacks or people being moved in the dead of night to an offshore detention centre — cannot be appealed or reviewed.

The case of Iranian asylum seeker Mojgan, that has received national attention due to her appearance on the ABC’s Australian Story and a novel recently published about her story, shows this. Dutton has refused to give her the chance to apply for a partner visa and — under public pressure — has only given her three-month temporary visas that are constantly being reviewed.

Or the case of 60-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker Saeed who, despite not speaking English and whose brother’s similar application has been accepted, has been denied the chance to appeal his decision by Dutton.

Dutton is now threatening thousands of people who have been working, studying and living in the community for years with deportation if they do not get their applications for protection in by October 1. This involves filling out a complex 60-page legal document. According to the Guardian the waiting list at asylum seeker support organisations for legal assistance can be up to a year.

While the rest of the world reacted in anger when US President Donald Trump introduced his immigration ban, Dutton supported it. But he did not stop there. He went on to make comparisons between Australia’s immigration policy and Trump’s, as if he had helped inspire it and was proud of the fact.

It would not be hard to imagine Dutton working towards an immigration ban in Australia. He has commented that it was a “mistake to let Lebanese Muslims into the country (in the 1970s)”, claiming it has led to terrorism.

In May last year he said of refugees: "They won't be numerate or literate in their own language let alone English. These people would be taking Australian jobs, there's no question about that. And for many of them that would be unemployed, they would languish in unemployment queues and on Medicare, and the rest of it.”

He has also falsely painted refugees as paedophiles. After the Good Friday shootings, when PNG locals and Navy personnel fired live ammunition into Manus Island detention centre, Dutton said it was because people had seen refugees leading a five-year-old boy into the centre. No evidence has been produced to support this.

There is evidence that several days earlier refugees had given a 10-year-old boy some fruit when he came asking for food. The refugees involved have asked for video footage to be released to show what actually happened but Dutton has refused to release the footage. Many people have labelled Dutton an outright liar and there has been no evidence produced to the contrary.

It is not just his attacks on refugees that have irked people. He has also attacked businesses for supporting marriage equality, boycotted the apology to Aboriginal people in 2008, was voted worst health minister in the last 35 years by Australian Doctor magazine in 2015 and texted a journalist telling her she was a “mad fucking witch”.

The anger towards Dutton is being channelled into campaigns to defeat him. Sydney Refugee Action Coalition has launched a petition calling on Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull to sack Dutton for his lies about the Manus Island shootings. GetUp! recently raised more than $200,000 in one week to campaign against Dutton in his seat on local issues. There have been numerous occupations of his office by Mums for Refugees, Love Makes a Way and student groups.

Changing one immigration minister for another will not change the policy. But getting rid of Dutton as a result of public pressure would be positive and puts the next immigration minister on watch.

More importantly, anti-Dutton campaigns can shine a light on the immigration minister’s the growing, unchecked and often secretive powers; powers that desperately need to be rolled back. The immigration minister should not have the ability to “play God” with people’s lives.

Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time
Written & directed by Arash Kamali Sarvestani & Behrouz Boochani
Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time is a ground-breaking film that gives audiences a new window to look into Manus Island detention centre.

In many ways, the method of the film’s creation and the connection it began having with society before one frame had been screened, is its greatest achievement. The Sydney Refugee Action Coalition held a rally and march to the film’s premiere, which included a message from the film’s co-creator Behrouz Boochani.

At the Sydney International Film Festival premiere, there was an empty seat next to co-director Arash Kamali Sarvestani. The seat was for Boochani, the Iranian journalist who has spent the past four years in Manus Island detention centre. His writings on social media and the media have laid bare the human rights abuses in the detention system.

Boochani was officially invited to the festival, but the Australian government denied his visa application. He spoke to the Q&A from Manus Island, saying he hoped his letter asking for a visa and the official denial would one day end up in a museum.

Chauka, through the use of footage secretly recorded on phones, explores daily life inside Manus Island detention centre, the native Chauka bird and its connection to Manus Island’s culture.

The film originated when director Sarvestani read Boochani’s writings in The Guardian and contacted him to ask if he wanted to make a film. Boochani spoke to several directors previously, but none shared his vision for the film in the way Sarvestani did. They both wanted to make a poetic film, rather than a more journalistic or character-driven narrative.

Theirs was a relationship developed over more than 10,000 minutes of phone calls during the film’s production.

Its style was inspired by internationally respected and socially conscious Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, who believed film was powerful when it gave the audience the opportunity to look at a context from the outside without the filmmaker trying to force their views on the viewer. Rather, the audience is encouraged to think for themselves about what they are watching.

Sarvestani explained that they were “creating a frame for the viewer to look through” into Manus Island detention centre.

It is a style that Sarvestani admitted may cause some to get bored through the film. He urged audiences to sit until the end, saying it was when you dwelt on the film long after its screening that it came together.

It is a style that results in a very loose film, from framing, editing and music to narrative and characterisation. This can make the film difficult to follow.

You get a frame into the day-to-day life inside the Manus Island camp from difficult phone calls to relatives back home, and the endless sitting, pacing and sitting. There are endless hours staring at the sea through fences while detention centre staff go about their duties in a drone-like manner.

The footage is often dull, numbing, devoid of life. It is in contrast to footage that focuses on intense moments, such as guards assaulting people, rather than daily, often torturously dull life inside detention.

The narrative shows these vignettes of life in the centre, such as the food being delivered pre-made in plastic containers, though it rarely seems to be going anywhere. While you get to see these moments of people’s lives, you never hear their stories or why they are seeking asylum.

This narrative style is effective at capturing life in detention and the effect it is having. But it makes it a hard film to watch, with things going nowhere — in many ways like life in detention.

Boochani said that for people “to understand the film you need to understand chauka as a concept”.

The chauka is a bird native to Manus Island and is explored at length in the film through its place in Manus Island culture, how it sings different songs to signal the time of day and how the Australian government has called the most horrific compound in Manus Island detention centre, where people are sent to be punished, the Chauka compound.

Sarvestani says the chauka’s connection to time was integral to the film’s message. He said: “The most important part of this prison torture is the erasure of time — it drives people to suicide, self-harm.”

Historically, time has always been a part of torture. Australia’s detention system is set up in such a way that time can seem to have no meaning for detainees.

The chauka is also a symbol of Australia’s colonial approach to Manus Island, taking the island’s most sacred bird and using it as the name of the centre’s most inhuman compound.

Chauka, Please Tell Us the Time invites its audience to observe and meditate on what life in detention is like. Its style is the antithesis of many contemporary social impact films. While it may struggle to shock or inspire into action, it gives a poignant view into the detention system.

As an almost anthropological-style film observing life inside Manus Island detention centre, it will certainly take its place in history. Its effect and importance may only become known years down the track.

Chasing Asylum
Directed by Eva Orner
Selected cinemas

Chasing Asylum is a new documentary that shows the Nauru and Manus Island detention centres for the “Hell on Earth” and “human dumping grounds” they are.

Australian Academy and Emmy Award-winning producer and director Eva Orner said in a Q and A after a recent Sydney screening: “I thought maybe part of the reason it is not outraging people enough is we haven't seen it, so one of the things I wanted to do was to show it — I didn't know how hard that would be.”

The documentary guides us through the journey of those seeking asylum in Australia. We hear from asylum seekers in Indonesia about why they fled their home, juxtaposed with Australia's “don't come by boat” propaganda.

The documentary then takes us inside Nauru and Manus Island detention centres in a way not seen on film before.

The Australian government goes to great lengths to stop journalists having access to detention centres, especially filming inside them. Orner creates the documentary from hidden camera footage smuggled out of the camps.

The low-grade clandestine footage of the terrible conditions is all the more powerful because of the lengths the government goes to stop it being seen. We see hot, overcrowded, mouldy and disease-prone tents, drawings on walls depicting hopelessness and suicide, guards abusing asylum seekers and more.

This is predominantly through the eyes of social workers that went to Nauru and Manus in response to an advertisement for a “working holiday”. Experience of working with asylum seekers was not required.

The initial naivety of these workers is replaced with horror at the situation they find — including such things as being asked to learn how to use a Stanley knife to cut down people who attempt suicide.

Attempts to voice concerns about the abuses they uncover — including first hand witnessing of guards beating up asylum seekers — is met with a mixture of intimidation, bureaucracy and silence from the immigration department and local police force.

Eventually, some make the decision to speak out in the face of powerful anti-whistleblowing laws.

The documentary uses simple interviews that often conceal the person's identity, gradually building up the atrocities shown through the low-grade secret footage. It never uses re-enactments, fancy infographics, music that causes a strong emotional reaction or a narrator to tell us what to think.

The director shows the audience the unfolding horrors and invites them to make up their own minds.

The scenes on the days leading up to the 2014 murder of Iranian asylum seeker Reza Berati by a security guard are particularly pertinent. It shows raw footage of guards talking about shooting protesting asylum seekers. Scenes with asylum seekers giving first-hand accounts of his murder and a former security guard speaking out make up the documentary's most powerful section.

Select excerpts of speeches from Australian politicians dispassionately continuing their support for the policy of offshore mandatory detention, juxtaposed with the increasing horrors in detention, drew a rumble of boos from the audience at the Ritz Cinema.

Apart from clinically showing the bipartisan support for offshore detention, Orner's only analysis is that detention exists to stop the boats and that the Australian government has failed on the asylum seeker issue.

The film says Australia should raise its refugee intake, giving the example of Australia's acceptance of Vietnamese asylum seekers in the 1970s and Europe's response to the Syrian refugee crisis — in particular, Germany's intake of Syrian refuges.

However, the film omits how European nations are building walls and deploying armed fleets to stop asylum seekers.

More importantly, it never discusses why racism exists in Australia or how asylum seekers are used by governments as a weapon of mass distraction from social and environmental attacks.

The film also neglects the story of those fighting against the detention regime. The only time the documentary shows footage of a protest in detention is in the days leading up to Berati's death.

Among other protests not mentioned is the mass hunger strike of more than 700 asylum seekers in Manus detention centre at the start of last year — the largest hunger strike in world history.

There is also no time given to the refugee campaign in Australia, apart from dedicating the film to Malcolm Fraser at the end.

Absent are the stories of solidarity, such as examples of asylum seekers drawing pictures in Nauru depicting their suffering and sending them to activists in Australia, who paint them on banners featured in street protests.

Chasing Asylum never gives a sense of agency. There is no sense that refugee activism can make a difference or that there is a refugee campaign in Australia people can join.

However, as a visceral examination of the conditions in offshore processing, Chasing Asylum is intensely brilliant. It is the first documentary to visually pull together horrors of children in detention, sexual assault, abusive guards and conditions that directly contribute to deaths.