Behrouz Boochani’s novel No Friend But the Mountains (2018) and his collaborative film with Arash Sarvesanti, Chauka Please Tell Us the Time (2019) are vivid and poetic descriptions of Australia’s offshore immigration detention industry. Much more than descriptions of this murderous system, these works constitute artistic and philosophical resistance to the system—a system that Boochani calls Manus Prison Theory.

It should not come as a surprise that the demonisation of migrants and refugees is again weaponised in the hope of winning votes. This trend started twenty-one years ago with the Tampa and, despite the ‘never again’ promises, we are seeing the same cut-and-paste border security and fear narrative play out again. What has changed, however, is community sentiment.

My brothers in the Park Hotel prison in Carlton, Melbourne, are living in a hell that is unimaginable to those of us outside. Of the forty-five refugees held in those rooms without fresh air, twenty have so far tested positive to Covid-19. Each of those men is labouring under great pressure on their minds and spirits, the fear that no one will move them to a safe place to stop the transmission and to treat the sick.

Defenders of the Australian government’s offshore detention of asylum seekers have long justified their policies by pointing to the scale of their annual Humanitarian Programme. At the most direct, these defenses accuse countries like New Zealand of being hypocrites by claiming to care for refugees but taking very few through humanitarian channels. In the last year, however, the balance has changed, as Australia’s Humanitarian Programme has been cut while New Zealand’s projected intake has substantially grown. The need to revisit these relative intakes is to attend to a perception of a massive disparity between these countries that lingers, as well as to consider the moral claims behind these comparisons.

Young people like Hayat should not have to commit suicide because of the current policies and Australia’s refusal to resettle us. The ban on the resettlement of asylum seekers who registered with UNHCR in Indonesia after 1 July 2014 must be reversed. All that refugees here want is their freedom. They want to make their way in this world, create a life for themselves.

The ABF has insisted that no refugees or asylum seeker will be transferred to the Christmas Island facility upon its reopening, but only ‘those convicted of criminal offences’. Yet it has also indicated that moving higher-risk detainees to Christmas Island will allow the redistribution of other detainees within the network. This is a cruel development, and the human and economic costs will be considerable.

Everyone involved in this case on the family’s side desperately hopes to see a legal victory. And right now, that’s probably the only hope. But the lawyers can’t save everyone.

Labor’s willingness to vilify and abuse migrants and refugees is not just a historical fact, but a congenital disease of the party. It is discernible not only in the birthmark of White Australia, but in the malaise of the social democratic project globally, and its entrapment in late, brutal capitalism.

There have been three elections, four prime ministers and we are still being punished.

This is the third election we have witnessed since this inhuman offshore immigration detention poli-cy, Pacific Solution 2, was imposed on us. We have sacrificed six years of our lives to ‘protect the Australian borders’.

David laughs as he recalls his pathway to work in Australia. An employment officer at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre helped him get the job but it was the first time the company had ever hired an asylum seeker. To get to the factory, David woke before 4 am, walked twenty-five minutes to his bus stop then rode the bus for an hour. He’d then walk an additional hour to arrive at work, just before his shift started at 7 am. He couldn’t be late; he was ‘representing all asylum seekers’.

Mr Dutton, how in all conscience can you continue to humiliate and dehumanise severely ill refugees in your own personal and political thirst for power? You continually use hate speech in order to prevent due justice to be given to us, the remaining refugees on Manus and Nauru. We are not responsible for shortages in hospital beds. We are dangerously ill only because many treatable illnesses and injuries have not been given adequate medical attention for years.

In my academic work for the past five years, I have examined a series of refugee-themed documentaries, and audience responses to them to argue that we need to move beyond the expression of transient empathy to take responsibility for systemic change.

We – none of us have understood what dreams meant, none of us have had childhood, none of us have understood what life is, none of us have had wishes, because we have all been struggling to find some place to breathe, to stay alive, to fill our empty stomachs.

Boochani’s dedication to his work as a reporter and a creator is fundamental to this unique project. It can never be forgotten that this film was made at risk of further violence. We may never have known the confinement wing Chauka existed if it wasn’t for his tireless investigation, including waking friends to snatch an interview, asking painful questions and always always witnessing, listening, believing.

Around 2 o’clock I join a peaceful protest walk. It is the eighty-seventh day of peaceful protest. Men are holding banners and cards with different slogans on them, like ‘Four years are enough’, ‘PNG is not safe for us’, and ‘Safety is everyone’s human right.’ The main purpose of the protest is to let people know that we don't want to be resettled in Papua New Guinea. We are also asking for an end to this indefinite detention.