Deeply suffers
This week, not quite to the hour, as Behrouz Boochani spoke in Parliament House, the Albanese government moved to suspend standing orders. It did not want debate on a bill to redesignate Nauru as a regional processing centre.
The timing might look like grim coincidence, except there is not a day in the past two decades when you could enter Parliament House and not encounter a regime conspiring on the punishment of refugees. It has become a constant of the building.
On Tuesday, the Albanese government was continuing with the same furtive secrecy. There was the same indifference to human life, the same sour opportunism.
Central to the bill was the same unchallenged belief that the only option is to continue with the scurvy system of offshore detention – that it is better to rush through laws guarding against its illegality than to send a single plane and bring back all the people languishing there.
Boochani had earlier decided he would not meet with Anthony Albanese. He did not want to be co-opted into any perception that the new government was different from the old one. On this issue, it isn’t. “I think if I do that it would be a part of that show-off,” he said. “The prime minister took photo with Biloela family and some other refugees just to send this message to Australian people that something changed. But actually, from my perspective, nothing changed while 30,000 people are living in detention or are undecided.”
Boochani called for an end to offshore detention. He called for a royal commission into the system of abuse that sent him to Manus Island for more than six years. “For many years I was watching Australia and
I was watching this particular place, the parliament, and always this parliament didn’t come to actually a real solution,” he said. “And still after all of the decade, that tragedy continues.”
Seven years ago next week, Boochani sent his first piece to The Saturday Paper. It was a fragment of diary, a note from a hell Australia had built but which its citizens were not allowed to see.
“Here in this prison, everything is abnormal and different from all the villages, cities and continents,” he wrote. “The prisoners sleep until afternoon. Life commences with the tumult of noisy queues for toilets. Every day, dozens of imprisoned refugees wake up from their sweaty and sticky sheets as the scorching sun of the tropics sits in the middle of the sky.”
Like all the work Boochani sent in his time on Manus Island, it was startling and vivid. It cracked open the system of offshore detention and described the horror within it. That piece alone, with its descriptions of soundless agony, of hunger and heat, of filth and self-harm, should have been enough for any government to close Manus Island.
It was not.
Boochani’s hope then was the same as it is now: for the government to act. His request to Albanese was simple enough and easy to honour. It is only through belligerent apathy that it was ignored.
Boochani ended his first piece not with an entreaty or a condemnation but with the image of a skinny man, leaning his back against a coconut tree, who in that moment, in an outlying corner of the prison, “deeply smokes, deeply suffers and deeply lives”.