Behrouz Boochani Has Listed All The Times The Liberal Party Have Lied About Refugees
"The whole policy towards refugees in Australia is based on secrecy and lies."
Behrouz Boochani has collated the Liberal party’s track record of lying about refugees after the Prime Minister was called out for twisting the legal status of detainees in Melbourne’s Park Hotel on Monday.
— Content Warning: This article discusses child abuse allegations. —
The writer pulled out multiple examples from over the years on Wednesday, to highlight ScoMo’s “history of lying”. Boochani started off by recalling the death of Reza Barati, a 23-year-old Iranian refugee who was murdered on Manus Island during a riot at the offshore detention centre in 2014.
“It was [my] son’s dream to settle in Melbourne and become an architect. Instead, he was returned to Iran in a coffin,” said Berati’s father to the ABC, blaming Morrison for his tragic loss.
1/8 Australian PM @ScottMorrisonMP has a history of lying. He was immigration minister in Feb 2014 when Reza Barati was killed inside the Manus prison camp
— Behrouz Boochani (@BehrouzBoochani) January 19, 2022
Morrison was Minister for Immigration and Border Protection at the time, and a later Senate inquiry found him to be “selective with the facts”, including falsely stating that the violence took place outside of the grounds, and shifting responsibility onto the detainees.
“This is a tragedy but this was a very dangerous situation where people decided to protest in a very violent way, and to take themselves outside the centre and place themselves at great risk,” said Morrison in the days after Berati’s passing. Boochani said Morrison was “intimating [Berati] was doing something wrong, caused his own death”.
He then shifted his attention to Minister for Defence Peter Dutton, who back in 2017 oversaw the immigration and border protection portfolio. Boochani reflected on Good Friday of that year, when drunken Papua New Guinean soldiers stormed the Manus Island detention centre and fired machine guns.
“This time, it was Dutton who jumped on TV and lied to the Australian public, saying that the refugees had brought a local child inside the prison camp and sexually abused him,” said Boochani. “It was a huge and horrific accusation and was proven not true. When media asked Dutton to release footage to prove his accusation, he refused to.”
Two years earlier, the PNG Government also disputed Dutton’s claims that refugees had used weapons during a standoff with security guards during a three-day altercation.
Even the years-long campaign by the Coalition to ‘stop the boats’ lacked any semblance of truth, when the policy was never about saving lives of people seeking asylum, nor as Boochani explained in The Guardian in 2019, was it about boats being in Australian waters anyway.
“The whole policy towards refugees in Australia is based on secrecy and lies,” said Boochani.”The huge problem that faces Australia is that many people are aware that this policy toward refugees is based on lies and the practice of lying, yet many seem to want to believe the lies.”
“One positive change in the lead up to this federal election is that it is not only the refugees who know Morrison is lying,” he said. “The people of Australia cannot unknow what they know, that is that Morrison is lying — something we refugees have known for a very long time.”