The traumatic life of Australia's refugees and asylum seekers detained for years in the Park Hotel

00:02:06 We're right in the middle of the city.

I'm standing outside the Park Hotel in Melbourne.

This is a hotel that's been used as an immigration detention facility

for the last couple of years.

And there are currently about thirty men being held there

for about nine years in total.

If you look up in the window, there's also a sign

that says, Where is the humanity?

Those are the windows where the refugees are being held.

If you look on the road right behind me, you can see there are some messages

that have been left here by activists.

And these messages appear on the streets quite frequently

by activists who are trying to draw attention to the issue

and keep the focus on these refugees who are in detention.

You can see on the wall itself, it's been freshly scrubbed.

Whoever is running this facility is very quick to cover them up

or wash them away after they've been put on the walls

or on the streets in front of the hotel.

This used to be the hotel entrance and you can see it's been completely blockaded.

Looks also like there's been something thrown at the glass

and there's been cleaned off

The Park Hotel is just down the streets from The Conversation office is.

We're about one block that way behind me.

The other direction is the Melbourne CBD.

This hotel was in the news when Novak Djokovic was in Australia

for the Australian Open and his visa was revoked.

He was brought here to immigration detention,

and so there was a great, huge global spotlight on this hotel at that time.

And as a result on the plight of the refugees

who were being held here, which quickly dissipated when Djokovic left the country.

The first asylum seekers to try and reach protection and safety in Australia

by boat came in the 1970s as a result of the Indo-Chinese refugee crisis.

And that was really a particular time in history.

There were significant numbers, at that time of people coming

by boat, but there were also people that Australia was resettling

as refugees out of the region from Vietnam and elsewhere.

But since then, there have been successive waves of other asylum seekers

coming by boat from really a range of places

all around the world from Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq.

More recently from Syria, as well as from other parts of Asia,

Africa and the Middle East.

So the people who are locked up in hotels in Australia today

actually first arrived here about eight or nine years ago.

Most of them would have arrived in the second half of 2013 or early 2014.

Unfortunately for them, at that time, Australia was trying to look tough

on immigration by sending asylum seekers who arrive by boat offshore

to the Pacific island nations of Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

By late 2014, Australia had pivoted away from this policy

and stopped sending people offshore.

But the group who were already there at that time got stuck, detained

in harsh conditions for years while processing was dragged out.

Now, many went on to be recognised as refugees, but Australia insisted

that they would not be permitted to return here on a permanent basis.

So they remain stuck in limbo for years on end.

They were locked up many in hotels,

and a number of them have now been there for many years.

The reason for detaining them in hotels is particularly unclear and extraordinary, given that

That's something we saw really clearly during the COVID-19 pandemic

and the hotel quarantine phase.

How difficult it was for people to be held in closed confines in hotels.

What we have seen here is many years' worth of being held in detention in hotels

often crammed in together with many other people.

Recently, the Australian Border Force confirmed that none of the people

who were detained at the moment have security concerns raised about them

by Australia's security agencies.

There's been some vague insinuation that there might be character concerns.

But the suggestion that someone might have a character concern

without putting that evidence to them or giving them a chance to rebut it

is not really a basis for indefinite detention.

The vast majority of them have been found to be refugees.

So they have been through the full formal legal process.

If we think through the journey that these people have been through,

they have faced torture, trauma, persecution.

They might have had loved ones very close to them be killed.

They've had to leave behind their homes and their families fled in difficult conditions.

When they finally reached Australia, they were met with detention

and then deportation to another country,

where many of them lived in incredibly difficult circumstances

for many years, again still in detention.