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.
We're right in the middle of the city.
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for the Australian Open and his visa was revoked.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.
