KEEPING VIGIL

A small group of people have been meeting weekly now for almost a year, holding vigils outside the offices of the Shadow Immigration Minister Richard Marles in Geelong and that of Sarah Henderson, the Federal member for Corangamite, in Waurn Ponds.
This appears to be a respectable, non-threatening looking group who meet on the street each Thursday morning, but their placards seem to tell a different story – ‘Detention destroys Children’ and ‘Asylum Seekers are not Criminals.’ Although in this group of resisters, there’s not a tattoo, a piercing or a motorbike in sight, this is a group to be reckoned with, merely because of the power of their ideas. This is a low-key, David and Goliath sort of demonstration and they are not going away quietly.
Jenny Wills, one of the convenors of The Vigil Group as they call themselves, explains that the group initially began its first vigil in March 2014 because of what it saw as the injustices of asylum seeker detention. ‘Human rights must be for all people;’ says Jenny ‘you can’t just be selective and locking asylum seekers away offshore is obviously unjust.’
The Vigil Group condemns the policies of both Labor and Liberal and the demonising and vilification of refugees by politicians and officials and especially the incarceration of refugees in detention centres both on and offshore.
There’s an old cultural significance about vigils which were usually held on the eve of major religious festivals and the concept carries a semi-religious significance; it derives from the Latin vigilia, and carries the idea of a watchful wakefulness. So what influence could this small, inoffensive group’s watching possibly hope to have on what appears to be intractable public opinion?

In the twelve months of holding their vigil, there have been both positive and negative responses from passers-by, people shouting out or tooting their horns both for and against their stand. Jenny, whose former career was in local government, believes strongly in participatory democracy and does see ‘some impact in simply being a reminder and a conscience to the Federal members of Parliament.’ Jenny shows me formal documents from the Department of Immigration which now officially call asylum seekers ‘illegals’, a label that appears to have crept into the bureaucratic vernacular while nobody was looking. ‘If I’d written this while I was in local government’ says Jenny ‘I’d have been told to take it away and write it again.’
Perhaps a group like this represents a coming storm in political activism. This group embodies the cohort who forged the social changes of the 1960s and these ‘baby-boomers’ are not satisfied with merely cruising the highways as grey nomads in their campervans. To the astonishment of some ‘millennials’ (the current social-media savvy youth), the baby-boomers have hit the streets too with their i-phones, tweeting and face-booking for political change. Research at the University of Vermont showed that ‘technological advancement will allow boomers access to use forms of the internet more easily, which will facilitate efforts to organise and mobilise.’ Has the persuasive power of this group been underestimated by those in power?
When I request a response to the Vigil Group’s weekly presence from the politician’s office staff, they are a little more phlegmatic. ‘What group?’ responded a staff member. ‘We wouldn’t even know they were there unless somebody told us.’ Is this group overestimating the power of its influence in the face of big government?
However, the Vigil Group sees itself as just a small part of a larger movement, a grass roots lobby group which appears to be gaining more traction in recent days, especially given the brawl developing between the Federal Government and the Human Rights Commission after the release of its report into children in immigration detention – The Forgotten Children.

The Vigil Group is one small cog in a bigger wheel, a larger campaign for more progressive and compassionate policies for refugees. My requests for a response from the two politicians go unanswered. Allowing for busy schedules in their electorates, it may be a mistake for politicians not to engage with these small minority groups, who, with their persistent determination may yet be a force to be reckoned with.