If you've come here to help me: solidarity beyond borders Buy this issue The Migration Amendment Bill, that would guarantee required medical treatment for people imprisoned in Australian offshore camps, is needed. It is also the smallest possible step that could be taken in dismantling the brutal Australian border regime: a regime enacted not just in the camps, but across all levels of Australian life. Issue Contents Features How could it all have happened? Janet Galbraith Beyond ‘refugees’? Max Kaiser But what are we backing when we #BacktheBill? Jordy Silverstein Editorial Editorial Sian Vate Browse the issue: Features Published in Overland Issue If you've come here to help me: solidarity beyond borders · Prison How could it all have happened? Janet Galbraith I want to tell you of the way in which two SERCO guards are present 24/7 in the room of a dying person, of someone who cannot walk, hardly talk, cannot eat, drink, function, and when communicating, communicates with absolute visceral fear of the knowledge that they (Australia) are killing her/him. I want to tell you of how these guards say ‘this is what happens when you come by boat’. Published in Overland Issue If you've come here to help me: solidarity beyond borders · Borders Beyond ‘refugees’? Max Kaiser The left, for the past ten years (with some exceptions), has faithfully tailed the benevolence and generosity line of liberals and ‘refugee’-NGOs. The humanitarian line – that these are vulnerable people seeking safety and protection, and being treated as lesser human beings – is undoubtedly true. But it also fatally politically limited. If our demand is to ‘bring them here’, we have to ask: what will happen to them when then they arrive in Australia? Published in Overland Issue If you've come here to help me: solidarity beyond borders · The law But what are we backing when we #BacktheBill? Jordy Silverstein This Bill then, supported by the crossbench and a range of NGOs and lobby groups, should only be seen as a deeply ambivalent ‘solution’. Just like the Kids off Nauru campaign – which created the hashtag #KidsOff – this Bill has spawned a campaigning hashtag (#BacktheBill) and provides a very partial remedy to a much larger problem. It is a crisis response to a crisis purely of the politicians’ making. Editorial Published in Overland Issue If you've come here to help me: solidarity beyond borders · Refugee rights Editorial Sian Vate The system of excessive control, denials, dehumanisation and identity-emptying bureaucracy that determines existence in the Manus camp is the same one that we live with on the mainland, and that we experience day to day in our interactions with a myriad of institutions and authorities. However, as Behrouz Boochani says, Manus is the centre of this system. Previous Issue Tribulations from the digital frontier Next Issue 233 Summer 2018