Australia is a crocodile. Sounds crazy, doesn't it?
Yes. But it's true.
It has a vast belly that straddles from immigration detention centres in Perth across to Sydney, Melbourne to Brisbane, claws that reach Christmas Island and Nauru, a snout that snatches PNG whenever it wants. Not any more an insane notion than the idea that if you are desperate to seek safety and make it to Australia by boat, then you haven't made it at all, because former prime minister John Howard 'excised' the land of Australia from the 'migration zone'.
Oh, the things we can invent with our words and deeds. The idea of "protecting our borders" against those who need protection the most is a standout classic.
Since the Labor Party introduced mandatory detention, how much have we lost in lives as well as dollars?
How much suffering and despair has it created?
Today, July 19, marks 11 years since former prime minister Kevin Rudd announced that asylum seekers who arrived by boat would never be resettled in Australia.
Unbelievably, about 50 refugees and asylum seekers are still in PNG. Some of them are so profoundly damaged they are unable to function. And the Australian government has left them destitute, claiming they are PNG's responsibility.
The crocodile has laid eggs across the globe. Now the EU and the UK have become our admirers, and are hatching plans to "externalise" asylum seekers, feeding meat to client states. A example of fake concerns for saving lives at sea.
Honorary Professor Philomena Murray describes how the process of how they hatch as "externalisation":
"Firstly, there is policy admiration, emulation, policy transfer and parallels of cruelty across several states in Europe - within the EU, the United Kingdom (UK) ... Secondly, these externalisation approaches de-legitimise the rights of asylum-seekers and refugees. Thirdly, states ... no longer take legal and political responsibility for those who seek to cross their borders.
Fourthly, they deny access to timely processing of claims for protection and to health care and welfare. They also prevent access to: scrutiny of their practices by civil society and the media; to adequate oversight by the legislature; to experts and international observers and to accountability mechanisms for service providers, all in an approach marked by secrecy and lack of provision of adequate information."
What a dystopia we have engendered. Add varieties of AI-supported surveillance, and its perfect: Hollywood could not do better.
Well, take heart: the refugee movement has not given up.
We have sunk the government's plans for the "Deportation and Migration" bill that would have made it a criminal offence to refuse deportation. That bill also proposed that fear of being executed was not a valid excuse not to return to one's "home" country. How that would delight a crocodile.
And we've managed to get the Australian government to promise some funding to hopefully allow those it abandoned in PNG to survive for the moment.
As the 11th anniversary for those suffering in PNG rolls around, the picture is bleak. We have to look around at how those working in related fields are faring. In this respect, Newcastle is a light in the darkness.
The lesson I am learning from the Newcastle-based environmental group Rising Tide is that you need a whole community onside to win. Their strategy is to work with the Hunter community, including those who work in the mining sector, to demand a planned and rapid transition to end coal mining in the Hunter by 2030.
To uphold refugee rights, that has to also become our strategy. We also have to talk to our community that upholding those rights is not a threat: denying them is.
The anniversary is today, July 19. At 4.30pm we will be at the corner of Hunter and Auckland street Newcastle. So don't dream human rights are over.
Join us, talk to us, laugh and sing with us to keep those crocodiles at bay: they never even smile. We can win.
