Photo on front page of Preston Leader (now closed down) on 10 MARCH 2020
Hotel
hell for refugees
No
freedom in sight for asylum seekers at Mantra Bell City
By
Richard Pearce, Preston Leader, 10 March 2020
The
55 asylum seekers detained in Preston’s Mantra Bell City for 7
months have had no sign of impending freedom, despite increasing
public support for their release.
The
men were brought to Australia from Manus Island and Nauru, some
having spent up to six years offshore.
But
seven months later there is no sign they will be returned or
released, leaving them in permanent purgatory inside the 4-star
hotel.
The
men have received great community backing, with more than 100 people
turning up to Bell Mantra on 29 February to show their support,
holding signs calling for compassion and their immediate release. The
refugees are being housed in 27 rooms, taking up an entire floor of
one wing of the hotel.
The
Leader has estimated the cost
over 223 days, at $160 a night, to be $963,360.
Social media posts have also detailed an extensive guard presence,
with rooms checked about three times a day.
The asylum seekers were brought here under the Medevac Bill, a piece
of legislation allowing refugees access to healthcare as long as they
had recommendations from two Australian doctors.
They would have been released into the community after treatment but
that legislation was repealed in December last year, leaving their
fate in the hands of the Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton.
Refugee Action Collective spokesman Chris Breen said while the idea
of staying in a hotel might seem like a holiday, there was no
mistaking the men were prisoners.
“It’s become a place of torture”, he said.
“They can’t open the windows to get air. They’re stuck inside
19 hours a day.”
“The only way they can get exercise at all is if they request to go
back to Broadmeadows Detention Centre.”
Some
of the men have used social media to seek support for their
cause.
“We
have been locked up in hotels by the Australian Government,”
Kurdish musician Moz Azimi wrote on Twitter.
An
Australian Border Force spokesperson said detainees transferred to
Australia for medical treatment were expected to be returned
afterwards.
The
spokesperson said decisions to place detainees in hotels or other
forms of accommodation were determined case-by-case.
They
refused to answer when the asylum seekers would be released.
The
Department for Home Affairs and Bell City Mantra were contacted for
comment.
This photo was provided by Gary Jaynes on 30 JUNE 2020 and the middle column of the wall obliterates the bottom word on the banner. The banner reads:
"FREE REFUGEES FROM MANTRA THEY ARE NOT CRIMINALS"
"FREE REFUGEES FROM MANTRA THEY ARE NOT CRIMINALS"
Demonstration in Bell Street, Preston, outside Mantra Hotel in support of Asylum Seekers incarcerated in one of the concentration camps in Australia
Photos by Gary Jaynes 4 JULY 2020
---------------------------------------------------------------------
My Article submitted to Overland, but not accepted for publication
18 March 2020
SOUTH AFRICA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; AUSTRALIA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; ISRAEL - APARTHEID POLICE STATE
"HOTEL HELL FOR REFUGEES" Headline on front page of Preston Leader on Tuesday 10 March 2020 (This is a Murdoch paper!!! )
Whatever happened to our so-called democracies?
Starting with South Africa, the world waited with bated breath for dramatic changes when Nelson Mandela became the first black president of a united South Africa and possibly the end of apartheid - and the police state.
Mandela retired after his first and only 5-year term as president - he was, of course, quite elderly by then and after the criminally hard life he had had in South Africa's infamously dreadful prison on Robben Island, he rightly thought a younger generation should govern for South Africa.
He wrongly favoured Thabo Mbeki who was disastrous during his periods as president because he was an AIDS denier to the extent that even today, a few presidents later, HIV/AIDS still presents a major health challenge for the South African people.
A little later Jacob Zuma became president and corruption set in, with disastrous results for the economy and all other facets of South African life.
One of the disasters of this period was the Marikana massacre of many miners who had gone on strike because of the murderous mismanagement of the company owning certain mines.
The person who is now the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was apparently the person who ordered the police and the army to open fire on the miners. In an earlier incarnation he had been the president of the organisation Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Then he became a business man and also very rich.
Disaster all the way, and the rich got richer and the poor poorer - if possble - and South Africa still remains a mess - in 2020.
I arrived in Australia from South Africa in 1978, hoping apartheid and police state would not be as bad as in South Africa.
Idle hope! After all, apartheid started in Australia on 26 January 1788 and the nature of the British colonisation of Australia was that it was already a police state. Instead of improving over the years, the police state has intensified to the extent that asylum seekers managing to get to Australia - escaping mostly from brutal regimes around the world and arriving here to ask for asylum, hoping to have peace in their lives, are locked up in concentration camps from which escape is virtually impossible.
Some slightly more humanitarian politicians - and they are few and far between in Australia - managed to pass legislation to bring refugees to Australia from the concentration camps on Manus and Nauru for medical treatment. This legislation was overturned by the government as soon as it was possible, and 55 asylum seekers have been locked up in a Mantra Hotel in Preston in Melbourne for the last 8 months with no chance of any relief in sight and no hope of change from a government and opposition determined to follow a police state mentality of locking people in concentration camps and throwing away the keys.
What is mostly ignored by most white Australians and many migrants in the last 200 years or so is that the indigenous inhabitants of this ancient country are still treated like savages in their own land and they are imprisoned at alarming rates where they are also suffering deaths in custody by a brutal police regime determinedly maintained by the police state governments of the country.
Some of those of us who have experienced the 'joys' of living in a police state despair of any changes in Australia because so many people behave like sheep and also can - or won't be bothered with making any sorts of protests and leaving the rest of us with that hopeless feeling that there is never going to be any changes - ever!
At the age of 93 I thought I had seen and experienced most of the worst aspects of human nature but the longer I live the worse it gets - and I haven't spoken about Israel yet.
Israel is not only a police state, but one with fascist tendencies. Israelis resent being compared to the Nazis but most of what they are doing to keep the Palestinians under control is to keep them incarcerated in their concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank on land stolen from them by the zionist settlers. Even those Palestinians who were and are in Israel as citizens of their own land are treated like second or third class citizens without full citizens' rights because the zionist project is to occupy the rest of Palestine which has some old Jewish names - Judea and Samaria - for them called after some of the old tribal groups of a few thousand years ago.
Israel wants a Jewish state and if that is what they want, Israel under no circumstances can be called a democracy - it hasn't been that for most of its existence - but a theocracy similar to Iran and other similar religious states.
.........and Israel is the propagator of much of the anti-semitism in the world in the 21st century.
Posted by Mannie De Saxe at 4:12 PM
Labels: anti-semitism, apartheid, apartheid South Africa, Australia, democracy, Israel, police states, South Africa, theocracy
SOUTH AFRICA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; AUSTRALIA - APARTHEID POLICE STATE; ISRAEL - APARTHEID POLICE STATE
"HOTEL HELL FOR REFUGEES" Headline on front page of Preston Leader on Tuesday 10 March 2020 (This is a Murdoch paper!!! )
Whatever happened to our so-called democracies?
Starting with South Africa, the world waited with bated breath for dramatic changes when Nelson Mandela became the first black president of a united South Africa and possibly the end of apartheid - and the police state.
Mandela retired after his first and only 5-year term as president - he was, of course, quite elderly by then and after the criminally hard life he had had in South Africa's infamously dreadful prison on Robben Island, he rightly thought a younger generation should govern for South Africa.
He wrongly favoured Thabo Mbeki who was disastrous during his periods as president because he was an AIDS denier to the extent that even today, a few presidents later, HIV/AIDS still presents a major health challenge for the South African people.
A little later Jacob Zuma became president and corruption set in, with disastrous results for the economy and all other facets of South African life.
One of the disasters of this period was the Marikana massacre of many miners who had gone on strike because of the murderous mismanagement of the company owning certain mines.
The person who is now the president, Cyril Ramaphosa, was apparently the person who ordered the police and the army to open fire on the miners. In an earlier incarnation he had been the president of the organisation Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Then he became a business man and also very rich.
Disaster all the way, and the rich got richer and the poor poorer - if possble - and South Africa still remains a mess - in 2020.
I arrived in Australia from South Africa in 1978, hoping apartheid and police state would not be as bad as in South Africa.
Idle hope! After all, apartheid started in Australia on 26 January 1788 and the nature of the British colonisation of Australia was that it was already a police state. Instead of improving over the years, the police state has intensified to the extent that asylum seekers managing to get to Australia - escaping mostly from brutal regimes around the world and arriving here to ask for asylum, hoping to have peace in their lives, are locked up in concentration camps from which escape is virtually impossible.
Some slightly more humanitarian politicians - and they are few and far between in Australia - managed to pass legislation to bring refugees to Australia from the concentration camps on Manus and Nauru for medical treatment. This legislation was overturned by the government as soon as it was possible, and 55 asylum seekers have been locked up in a Mantra Hotel in Preston in Melbourne for the last 8 months with no chance of any relief in sight and no hope of change from a government and opposition determined to follow a police state mentality of locking people in concentration camps and throwing away the keys.
What is mostly ignored by most white Australians and many migrants in the last 200 years or so is that the indigenous inhabitants of this ancient country are still treated like savages in their own land and they are imprisoned at alarming rates where they are also suffering deaths in custody by a brutal police regime determinedly maintained by the police state governments of the country.
Some of those of us who have experienced the 'joys' of living in a police state despair of any changes in Australia because so many people behave like sheep and also can - or won't be bothered with making any sorts of protests and leaving the rest of us with that hopeless feeling that there is never going to be any changes - ever!
At the age of 93 I thought I had seen and experienced most of the worst aspects of human nature but the longer I live the worse it gets - and I haven't spoken about Israel yet.
Israel is not only a police state, but one with fascist tendencies. Israelis resent being compared to the Nazis but most of what they are doing to keep the Palestinians under control is to keep them incarcerated in their concentration camps in Gaza and the West Bank on land stolen from them by the zionist settlers. Even those Palestinians who were and are in Israel as citizens of their own land are treated like second or third class citizens without full citizens' rights because the zionist project is to occupy the rest of Palestine which has some old Jewish names - Judea and Samaria - for them called after some of the old tribal groups of a few thousand years ago.
Israel wants a Jewish state and if that is what they want, Israel under no circumstances can be called a democracy - it hasn't been that for most of its existence - but a theocracy similar to Iran and other similar religious states.
.........and Israel is the propagator of much of the anti-semitism in the world in the 21st century.
Posted by Mannie De Saxe at 4:12 PM
Labels: anti-semitism, apartheid, apartheid South Africa, Australia, democracy, Israel, police states, South Africa, theocracy
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