The end of detention: 'We are free but we need to recover from all those years'
The last time Ebrahim Obeiszadeh had a job was in 2013, when he was working at a sugar factory in southern Iran.
It was the first and only job he had before he embarked on a dangerous journey to Australia, where he hoped to be granted protection from the political persecution he says he suffered in his homeland.
He didn’t make it. In July 2013 the navy intercepted the Indonesian-crewed vessel he’d boarded to try to reach Australia. And so began eight long years of detention at the behest of the Australian government that ended, abruptly, on Tuesday.
Initially, Obeiszadeh was taken to Christmas Island for processing and then to Australia’s offshore centre on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea. He spent six years there and still has trouble mentioning the names of asylum-seeker friends who took their own lives in that place.
In mid-2019, he was brought to Australia for urgent medical care, under the nation’s short-lived medevac laws. The laws gave doctors more power to decide whether asylum seekers held at offshore centres in PNG and Nauru could come to Australia for treatment.
In all, 192 did come before the laws were repealed less than a year after they passed. Obeiszadeh was among them.
He thought that after a short period of quarantine he’d be released into the community while he was treated for a large cyst on his kidney and mental health issues.
Instead, he spent close to two years detained at the nondescript Kangaroo Point Central hotel and apartments, just across the river from Brisbane’s CBD.
He says he repeatedly asked authorities how long they intended to keep him there, but never got an answer.
“Then I was trying to push for a third country (resettlement) options and nothing happened. Then I tried to get community detention and nothing happened. Then I decided to start the hunger strike,” he tells Guardian Australia. At one point he even asked authorities to return him to PNG, because at least there he had slightly more freedom.
On Tuesday this week, Obeiszadeh and 49 other asylum seekers were released from the hotel. He says he still doesn’t know why.
But what he does know is that he’s been given three weeks of governmentfunded accommodation in student digs at South Brisbane and after that, he will have to support himself.
Obeiszadeh is happy to have been temporarily released into the community on a final departure Bridging E Visa, which is issued to asylum seekers who “have come to Australia for medical treatment from a regional processing country and have not returned”.
But he’s also full of trepidation. Under the terms of the visa, he must finalise his arrangements to leave Australia, and while he has the right to work and access Medicare, he is not entitled to accommodation and income support from the government.
That means joining the job market, in a country where he’s never lived freely before, in the middle of a pandemic, and with the trauma of his detention far from healed. If he fails to find a job within three weeks, he will be forced to rely on charity.
“I have no idea what is going to happen. If I could find a job and I could pay my rent everything is going to be OK,” he tells Guardian Australia.
“I think three weeks’ accommodation is not enough. It’s not just me, everyone I think is going to financially need to be supported. It’s really going to be hard for everyone to find a job, a rental place, to go into a normal life after being eight years in detention.
“I think people need more time to heal from long-term detention.”
It was December last year when the federal government began the quiet, staged release of asylum seekers brought to Australia under the now repealed medevac laws.
But in every case, the news came not from the government but from asylum seeker advocates who have waged a long and very pubic fight for them to be freed from their “hotel prisons”.
The Asylum Seeker Resources centre says 115 people from the hotel cohort have been released since then, but estimates about 100 others remain in what the Department of Home Affairs calls Alternative Places of Detention (Apods), that also include transit centres in Melbourne and Brisbane.
Jana Favero, the centre’s director of advocacy, says the minister for home affairs, Peter Dutton, has refused to say how he decides who gets out and who doesn’t. But from the outside it seems “arbitrary and haphazard”, and she warns it is having serious mental health consequences for those left behind.
“We have people in exactly the same legal situation – one has been released and one has not. And that weighs heavily on people’s minds. People are scrambling to find some thread of commonality but there isn’t any,” she tells Guardian Australia.
“With this government there’s this absolute veil of secrecy over everything they do, in particular in relation to people transferred from PNG and