No Place Like Home

by Caroline Overington

  ‘There had been a big fuss and bother, people setting fire to the buildings and The Daily Telegraph splashing pictures of people on the roof, so the Red Cross got sent in,’ Abby said.

  ‘They were always coming in, to do this, that and the other. On this particular occasion, they wanted to see the files of people who had been in detention for what they called an “unusually long” time.

  ‘Ali Khan’s file was right on the top of that pile.

  ‘He’d been in detention forever,’ Abby said.

  ‘The Red Cross worker – he couldn’t have been older than my grandson, about twenty – was looking through his paperwork. Ali was all hunched up in the plastic school chair. God knows what he was thinking. The Red Cross worker was flicking through the pages, then going back to the start, then flicking through them again – there was only something like four A4 pages – that’s incredibly unusual; most of the files are a good two inches thick, because the detainees have been back and forward to court – and he kept saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t understand this. You’ve been in here since when? And why are you here exactly?” Because there was a copy of Ali Khan’s Australian passport on the file! A photocopy of it was pinned to the file.

  ‘The Red Cross worker said to him, point-blank: “You should not be here. This is criminal.” He looked at me. I was like, don’t look at me! I didn’t know whether the passport was fake or what the story was.’

  I suggested to Abby that the Red Cross worker – unnamed, to this day – must have been astounded to find that an Australian citizen had been held in an immigration detention centre for upwards of five years. She shrugged and said, ‘But it happens, doesn’t it? He’s not the only one it’s happened to. And you know what bureaucracy’s like, or maybe you don’t. The file comes in, it gets put away somewhere, new files land on top of it, and before you know it, five years have gone by. Unless you’ve got somebody agitating for you, which Ali Khan never did.’

  Having discovered the mistake, the Red Cross worker made an immediate application to the Federal Minister for Immigration to have Ali Khan released into the community.

  ‘I remember that, because our CEO at the time was asked about it, and his big thing was: is the media going to find out? Because it wasn’t our fault that Ali Khan had been put in Villawood and kept there, but a detail like that, it tends to get lost when the media gets hold of it.

  ‘Everyone agreed: we’ve got to keep it quiet. Nobody can know. Even the Red Cross bloke. He was saying, “Ali Khan has already suffered a human rights abuse. We’ll be talking about compensation for him later. In the meantime, let’s get him out of here and settled in a house, and into an English language course.” And that’s what was supposed to happen.’

  The Red Cross worker ascertained from Ali Khan’s file that he had been sent to Australia from a camp in Tanzania. He’d been granted refugee status on the grounds that he’d been persecuted in his village for being an albino and that the risk to him, should he ever return to his home country, was real.

  Armed with that knowledge, the Red Cross worker contacted a member of the African Community Support Network, explained the situation and the delicacy of it, and asked if they could send out a community liaison officer (you’re nobody in this game unless you’ve got a title) to see Ali Khan, and to discuss with him where he’d like to live.

  ‘I remember that day,’ Abby told me.

  ‘A quite marvellous woman came out to Villawood. She was dressed in these amazing coloured robes with what looked like a big pile of washing on her head. She was a big lady, with jangling bangles, a jet-black face and a big smile.

  ‘We waved her through all the security procedures and I walked her down the hall to a special room, where Ali Khan was sitting, curled up like a cat, feet up on the plastic chair. I was slightly ahead of her in the hallway, swinging my keys. I was happy for Ali Khan. He was going to get out. I swung the door open – you know the kind of door, cheap, plywood, light as a feather – and held it back so this lady could swing in.

  ‘And swing in she did, all robes and jangling, and then, bam, she’d taken one step into the room, taken one look at Ali Khan, and she was coming straight back out, and she was shaking – shuddering and shaking. It was like she’d seen a ghost. I said, “Is everything alright?” but she couldn’t speak. She was pointing one of her fingers into the room, saying, “Erbu, erbu!”

  ‘Later on, I found out what it meant: evil.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Ali Khan was released from Villawood into the community on 7 February 2011. It would have been quite dark; they didn’t open the doors for him until 8 pm – I suppose to avoid any media that might have been tipped off, but as far as I know, none had been.

  He was taken by mini-van to a Red Cross group house in the city, much like the Salvation Army centre where he’d spent his first night in Australia. The experience with the African community liaison officer had convinced his new overlords – the Red Cross – that he couldn’t be placed with other African immigrants.

  He’d have to go in with asylum seekers from other countries.

  There were plenty of them living in the community by the time Ali Khan got released from detention. Just recently, I heard reports that DIMIA had started putting them in with university students, in the empty college beds. A group was supposedly living in a converted warehouse. I remember thinking to myself, what next? Tents? Because the flow of people is not slowing. I can’t see how it ever will.

  Everyone knows the media can be a bit skittish in the way it covers things. First there was a big hoo-ha about so many people being kept in detention for so long, and about how all the detention centres were so full and the conditions were draconian.

  Then, when the government started resettling people into the community while their claims for asylum were being sorted out, there was another big hoo-ha, this time over how much that would cost.

  One story I saw claimed that people who had arrived by boat were getting $10,000 worth of free stuff, as soon as they stepped onto Australian soil. The resettlement package provided to them included flat-screen TVs and three-piece lounge suites and all manner of other comforts, brand new. A ‘treasure trove of goodies’ was how it was described on one newspaper website: they were getting new beds, new mattresses, sheets and pillowcases, a washing machine, a fridge, a bucket and mop, and what they call a ‘welcome basket’ – fresh bread, eggs and milk, and maybe a packet of biscuits.

  That’s more than people on the pension get, as more than one commentator was quick to point out.

  The house that Ali Khan went into was described in one newspaper as being ‘brand new, with all the mod-cons’. Having seen some public housing in my time, I couldn’t really believe that so, a few weeks after I read that report, I went out to have a look. It was a new house. That part was true, but it had been built so cheaply it was already starting to fall apart.

  From the look of things – the pile of cheap sneakers on the front porch – a new family had moved in. I’d gone there, hoping to get a look inside so I took my collar out of my pocket, did up my top button, slipped the collar on, and went up the broken concrete path to knock on the door. Maybe that sounds like a cynical action – you don’t mind looking like a priest when you think it might help? – and that’s a fair enough criticism. I don’t mind when I think it will help.

  The house wasn’t being well kept. Cobwebs gathered around the corner windows. A dirty venetian blind was hanging on a diagonal in the front window. I knocked but nobody answered. I had the feeling that somebody was home, though. You know how you can just tell. I went back to my car and waited.

  I’d guess I’d been sitting there for about half an hour when a woman in a black hijab came up the street, her large body rocking from side to side. She was carrying two plastic bags, one in each hand, cheap ones from a discount shopping centre, both weighed down with two-litre bottles of plain-package water.

  She went through the gate of Ali Khan’s old h
ouse. The front door opened for her. I waited a few minutes, and knocked again. It took a while, but this time somebody answered. It wasn’t the woman I’d just seen on the street. It was a man in a long robe and socks. I did my best to explain myself. I was the New South Wales police chaplain – a priest – and I’d been at Surf City on the day of the siege, and one of the boys who had been caught up in the siege had once lived in this house, and so forth.

  I got the feeling he had some idea what I was talking about, and didn’t really want to get drawn into it, but he was from one of those countries where hospitality is everything. He stepped back from the open door and invited me in. It was incredibly hot inside the house – it had been built from Blueboard, with no insulation – and the plastic fan was struggling in the heat.

  I looked around for signs of the splendour the media had gone on about, after the siege. There was a portrait of a serious young man, perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, with olive skin and dark hair, in a plastic frame on the wall. Somebody had wrapped tinsel around the frame. I could tell just from looking that the boy was dead. Not in the photograph, obviously, but the way they’d hung his portrait there – a small, plastic thing in the middle of the wall – you could just tell.

  There wasn’t much in the way of furniture. The family had a laminate table in the corner. The only thing on it was a bottle of Coca-Cola, with the label scratched off. There was a round rug on the floor. I counted three mattresses in the adjacent dining room, none with sheets.

  Despite the fact that nobody had opened the door when I’d knocked the first time, it was obvious that the house was full. Young men in trendy jeans – the industrial kind, with arty creases – came out of their bedrooms to look at me, the priest, standing in their lounge room. I don’t think they really understood why I was there – a priest, in a Muslim house – but they smiled and nodded and asked zero questions.

  Small talk was made. Women came out from the kitchen with a tray with tea glasses, a pile of sugar cubes and some sweet biscuits. I was encouraged to eat and drink and everybody smiled. I tried to explain again why I was there.

  Finally, one of the young women – she was dressed in a modern way, in skinny jeans, sneakers and a white headscarf – said to me in perfect English, ‘I understand. You want to know about the people who lived here before. We know all about it. But we had nothing to do with them. We have only been here for a few months. They were already gone when we got here. The house was vacant. We don’t want any trouble.’

  I assured her that I wanted to create no trouble for them.

  She said, ‘If you are interested, I can show you the room where the boy slept.’

  I said, ‘How do you know which one it was?’

  She said, ‘Two of the bedrooms were disgusting when we arrived. I had to get down on my hands and knees to scrub. One room was extremely clean. The police have come by several times, to take photographs and measurements, while we’ve been here. I asked one of them: “Which one did the young boy sleep in?” And he confirmed it for me: he was very neat.’

  ‘And the others?’

  ‘I think the others were crazy,’ she said.

  She’s right, of course. The two people already in the house when Ali Khan arrived were crazy. Not crazy in the sense of being mentally ill. That I could accept. They were crazy, stupid, ridiculous, irresponsible, criminally immature people, whose idiocy brought on a tragedy.

  The first of them went by just one name: Safi. He’d arrived in Australia by boat, illegally, about two years before the siege at Surf City. His story was that he was from Afghanistan, and that his grandfather had served with the 106th Hazara Pioneers – an army unit that fought alongside the British – and he needed political asylum because he was certain to be killed, once the Taliban warlords figured out that his family had always been sympathetic to the West.

  This might have been just bad luck but Safi was one of those people who suffers from blinking. It made it difficult for him to lie. I can imagine him blinking all the way through his first interview with Australian immigration officials. He told them he’d left Afghanistan during the war and travelled via Pakistan to Indonesia.

  Like the family I’d met at Villawood, he’d paid people smugglers to get him to Australia. The journey hadn’t been quite as fraught. Instead of bashing up against Christmas Island, he and the other passengers were told to wait until they were in Australian waters, after which their captain would leave the boat, and they should use their mobile phones to call the Australian Navy.

  They were to say they were distressed at sea and, under ancient maritime law, the navy would have to come and get them.

  They shouldn’t resist arrest. On the contrary, they should surrender to Australian authorities, who would give them water safety vests. They’d be assisted aboard the navy ship, and should sit quietly until they were off-loaded onto Christmas Island, which by then had its own detention centre.

  There would be a team of pro-bono lawyers ready to do the paperwork that was needed for all of them to apply for asylum.

  Safi had done a fairly good job of sticking to the story that had been crafted for him: he said that his brothers and uncles had already been killed by the Taliban; that he was in fear of his own life; that his family was well-known for providing assistance to the allied forces, so he’d be captured if forced to return to Afghanistan.

  Maybe it was the blinking, but DIMIA didn’t buy it.

  They turned his claim down.

  In rejecting his claim, they said they simply didn’t believe that he was the grandson of an Afghan Hazara – and that was a pretty good call. All the evidence now available suggests that Safi was actually a plumber from Quetta.

  DIMIA decided to deport him, which sounds like a simple enough thing to do. In reality, it’s bureaucratic torture. Say what you will about Australia’s approach to refugees, they’re given every possible avenue to appeal. Safi appealed to the Refugee Review Tribunal, which refused to overturn the decision. That took six months. Then his legal team – paid for, like everything else, by the Australian government – appealed to the immigration minister, who has the power under what they call section 417 of the Migration Act, to overturn the decision.

  The minister declined, so Safi’s team sent the lawyer to the High Court, seeking a review of both the Refugee Review Tribunal decision, and the minister’s decision not to intervene.

  None of this is particularly unique to Safi. Hundreds of people are on the same expensive path to Australian citizenship, or to deportation.

  The government has to be sure that it’s dotted every ‘i’ and crossed every ‘t’, before anyone can be put on a plane. That includes things like: could Safi read the documents being put before him, in Farsi, and in other languages? Had they given him all the assistance required, under various UN agreements to which Australia is a signatory?

  In the meantime, the law regarding the status of people like Safi was changing. He had been taken into detention upon arrival in Australia but, over time, he found himself released into the community on what used to be known as a ‘bridging visa’.

  He wasn’t allowed to work. He wasn’t allowed to study. He would have to rely on the Red Cross for pretty much everything while his case made its way through the courts. He was, however, entitled to public housing. As it happened, there were new houses going up in Auburn.

  That was good luck for him – and it was bad luck for Ali Khan.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  It probably says more about the shortage of housing than it does about anything else, but it’s not uncommon for DIMIA to get a range of different people to share a house together, whether they know each other or not.

  Safi was the first to go into the new house at Auburn but he was not the last. Within about a few weeks, a second man – Brian Harding – had moved in. The strange thing about that was, Harding wasn’t a client of DIMIA (that’s the word they use, ‘client’). He wasn’t even a boat person.

  Brian Harding
was born in Australia, to Australian-born parents. He’d gone to Bankstown High School. He’d also been a student at the local TAFE.

  How he ended up in emergency accommodation provided by the Department of Immigration is quite a saga.

  Harding had quit high school in year 10 to study for a trade. He had never had much in the way of paid work: he’d done part of an apprenticeship at the local butcher, and part of a crane driver course. He didn’t finish either course.

  Sometime in his late twenties, he took up smoking weed and watching porn. I don’t have much experience with either but I’m told that while they might feel great at first, they can soon make a person feel awful about himself.

  Most people respond to those feelings of self-loathing by giving up what’s making them feel bad. Harding converted to Islam. That might sound extreme but young people have always gone looking for meaning. In my day, he’d have shaved his head and gone Hare Krishna, or maybe he’d have done what I did: terrified by the idea of adulthood, I’d thrown myself at the feet of Jesus.

  These days, I notice down at Bondi, it’s all yoga poses.

  Harding went at Islam with everything he had. He changed his name to a Muslim name. He clipped his hair short and grew a beard. He prayed five times a day – all of which would have been fine, except that somewhere along the line, he morphed into a crazy person, deciding that Western democracies were corrupt and that the only solution was to impose Sharia law.

  As to whether Harding posed an actual terrorist threat at any point, all I can say is there are undercover cops working in all of Australia’s radicalised Islamic communities – and there are plenty of informers in those communities, too – and Harding wasn’t on anyone’s suspect list. People didn’t see him as a leader. They saw him as a jerk. The only person who seemed to take him even remotely seriously was Safi.