Tailored to our needs

June 18th:
It was dull and cold, and a little bit misty this morning when I set out from home for Geelong down the highway past all the new housing estates growing on either side of the road like gigantic cement forests-developments that usually made me grumpy by the time I reached Geelong.
The Westfield car park at least was almost empty when I arrived but you can’t face a political rally without a good coffee. But I was outside my usual ‘safe-coffee zone’ and wandered dazed for some minutes along the waterfront past new upmarket hotels and cafes before at last staggering into a small café down the lane, called ‘Down the Lane’! At least it had a copy of today’s Age.

With only two weeks to go before the Australian election and candidates prepared to ‘meet and greet’ it was time to join other refugee groups, listen to speakers and then to march through the centre of Geelong to publicise the policies, or lack of in some cases, relating to asylum seekers and refugees.
I joined the other placard holders. We gritted our teeth. At every rally we heard the same criticisms but nothing changed. Why do we  have to keep repeating this same old ‘stuff’?

But my feelings of impatience changed when the rally began with a group of young Karen refugees singing ‘Love will make a Way’ followed by a song in Karen dialect – ‘The morning Star’. The guitarist with a coloured headband, bent over in concentration and some in the group grinning at each other as they read lyrics from folded sheets or from their i-phones. The sight of these young people, full of the usual hopes and dreams of the young, did make change seem possible. How could hard-hearted policies resist young boys and girls like these?

The first speaker, Sarah Mansfield, a local GP and also the Greens candidate for the Federal seat of Corio, reminded us that there had been no change in policies for the last fifteen years and that as a medical practitioner she found the current policies ‘distressing.’ She focussed particularly on the secrecy and privacy around asylum seekers, the boat turnbacks and the use of lies and fear for political purposes. She concluded by warning that ‘if you continue to try to silence us, we will only speak more loudly.’

‘Chris’, a schoolteacher and father of two, had been a teacher on Nauru and Assistant Manager of Education there. He said he had never spoken publicly before but ‘felt compelled because he was sick of the ‘ongoing lies’ about Nauru and the treatment of refugees there. He outlined a number of his own experiences which were totally at odds with the official line being promoted by government. He said for example, that lies had been told in the Senate about the use of numbers, not names by Wilsons Security staff for children on the island. He also talked about the difficulty of providing education for refugee children now in Australia.
There were other speakers too but I found it impossible to digest more examples of injustice. I’ve heard too much, read too much and feel optimism slipping away again.

But then something happens after the rally that raises my hopes. I’d heard on the local networks that a young Iranian refugee, Amir, had set up a tailoring shop in central Geelong, so I dig out a pair of Target jeans I bought some time ago, so long in the leg they seemed designed for a seven foot basketballer, not for me.

Amir’s shop lies in the centre of Geelong in a series of streets that I call ‘the blasted heath’, a disaster zone of empty shops, gutted by the arrival of the Westfield Empire and the loss of jobs in Geelong, particularly at Ford. Amir is polite, friendly and entrepreneurial. The jeans are shortened within the hour and I walk back to the carpark on bouncy feet.

My imagination takes flight. What if the City of Greater Geelong set up a program that convinced landlords of empty shops to rent them out to refugees like Amir on minimum rents until the businesses were established?

Was I pushing metaphors too far to see these empty buildings as a symbol of the spirit that’s lacking in our refugee policies today?
Getting refugee businesses into these empty shops may be difficult to achieve while 30,000 refugees are bound by Temporary Protection Visas. And while politicians use asylum seekers are pawns in their power struggles.
But my ‘what ifs’ do last all the way home and for the rest of the day. That’s what seems to happen when you sometimes mix with other hopefilled people.