Located in a converted terrace in Sydney's inner west, the Balmain Uniting Church is one of the first suburban churches to offer sanctuary to asylum seekers at imminent risk of deportation.
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"We would do whatever it took to stop the government from taking them, we would stand in the way of the authorities," said Reverend Nicole Fleming. "And we are ready to go to jail, if that's what it comes to."
On Wednesday, the High Court ruled that Australia's offshore detention is legal, clearing the way for 270 asylum seekers – including 37 babies born in Australia – to be returned either to Nauru or Manus Island.
Fleming was incensed by the decision. "I read one of the High Court judges referring to asylum seekers as 'aliens'. But we are talking about human beings here."
Other members of her congregation were similarly dismayed. "One rang me saying: 'What can we can do?' "
And so, after getting approval from the national director of Uniting Justice, Fleming went ahead and invoked the centuries-old principal of church sanctuary, offering protection from civil authorities to any refugee who could make it onto church grounds.
"It means we would provide them with accommodation and whatever protection we could."
A former social worker, Fleming became a Uniting Church minister 15 years ago, and has been the celebrant at Balmain since 2011. "Our congregation is small – 45 on a Sunday if everyone shows up. But we have a history of seeking social justice and equality for all people."
After the Tampa crisis, in 2001, church members formed Balmain for Refugees, which continues to assist asylum seekers who need legal support. Civil disobedience is an important part of the church's ethos.
In 2014, Fleming and another member of the Balmain congregation were among 10 people who staged a "pray-in" at the Manly office of then Prime Minister Tony Abbott. "We were arrested and released without charge. But in other states, people who did similar pray-ins had to go to court."
"All people have a right to refuge from persecution, especially the most vulnerable. We are not doing our Christianity right if we don't support these people," she said.
Other church members agree. "When this idea was first raised, I thought about what the word sanctuary means," said Balmain congregation chairwoman Felicity Barclay. "It means refuge, safety, freedom from persecution. If churches can't provide that, then who will?"
Barclay says it's the role of the church to step in and act when the government and authorities won't. "It's all about putting faith into action," she said. "I work for a non-profit community pre-school, so I have particular concerns about children in detention. It's not rocket science to see that detention has a deleterious effect on children, and so find it extraordinary that the government is sanctioning it."
The legality of the church sanctuary initiative has been challenged by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. But Fleming hopes that her church's actions will embolden others. "No matter what our theological differences, people are on board with the idea of offering compassion and recognising our common humanity."
Nauru: How long can we keep lying to ourselves?
Wonderful idea, sovereignty. It conveys this reassuring sense of control; a sense that on each of our own patches, we're in charge and things happen by some exercise of our own free choice. And maybe that sense isn't an illusion. Maybe, for example, Nauru just happened to choose to open a "regional processing centre" for asylum seekers. And maybe it just happened to put an Australian government office in it. And maybe it just happened to ask the people in that office – who just happen to be Australians – if they could wear Australian government uniforms with the Australian coat of arms on them while they deal with the detainees in that centre.
Maybe it's mere happenstance that Nauru has made visas all but impossible for journalists to obtain if they want to scrutinise these detention arrangements, in a manner eerily similar to the way the Australian government routinely denies journalists access to our own detention centres.
Maybe that same happenstance accounts for the fact that the single journalist to have been the exception to this rule in the past two years is a dedicated supporter of the Australian government's asylum-seeker policies.
And maybe Nauru's sudden decision to open the gates of its detention centre so its detainees could roam freely around (but not leave) Nauru had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that the Australian government was – at precisely the same time – in danger of losing a case in the High Court that would bring its offshore detention regime crashing down.
And maybe all that has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the Australian government pays for that centre. And nothing to do with the fact under our government's agreement with Nauru, we have the right to step in and take over the centre whenever we like. Maybe all this is some completely free, unbounded choice of Nauru's that miraculously happens to coincide with the Australian government's interests again and again.
So maybe it's true that while the arrival of boats of asylum seekers in our waters is severe enough to mean people smugglers are robbing us of our sovereignty, our own official, uniformed control of Nauru's detention centre somehow leaves theirs perfectly intact.
Or maybe that's all crap. It matters because whatever it is, we're building our asylum-seeker policy on it. That has been true for years now. Perhaps you've noticed how often when controversy arrives, say in the form of some act of abuse in these detention centres, these things become matters for Nauru. Nauru has become a screen behind which we hide our own culpability; its sovereignty a charade, really – a sort of legal fiction we use to obscure the consequences of our own policy even as we claim its successes.
This week we learned those consequences might have included the rape of a five-year-old boy. And this week, the High Court confirmed the government has every legal right to send him straight back to the scene of that alleged crime. And who could honestly claim to be surprised if the government did exactly that?
The horror of this thought is obvious. But perhaps the greatest horror is that as a nation, we've now become so hopelessly addicted to the fictions that justify it. It's not just the fiction of Nauru. It's also the fiction of Australia, which you might recall we've declared simply doesn't exist if you're coming here by boat. You can dock in Sydney Harbour if you like, and as far as the law is concerned, you simply never arrived here. But there's also the fiction that Nauru and Papua New Guinea were ever anything more than a dumping ground for us.
If these countries were truly something more, we'd have known from the beginning how the asylum seekers we were sending there would be resettled. Or indeed that it was going to happen at all. But there was never any plan. There still isn't. The "regional processing centre" in Nauru seems drastically misnamed given precious little processing is actually happening. Remember last year when we heard the 600 remaining detainees on Nauru would be processed within a week? Many weeks on, 537 remain.
This as we've paid Cambodia $55 million to resettle almost nobody (or four nobodies to be precise). And while we've been belatedly scouring the region looking for countries to take asylum seekers off our hands, we've flatly rejected an offer from New Zealand to resettle 150 of them each year. Resettlement in New Zealand, you see, would encourage more boats.
Note, here, the tacit admission that our policy is to send them to places so bad they couldn't possibly want to live there. Only then, it seems, will they stop coming. It's a problem that goes back to the very inception of this policy, implemented in the last throes of Kevin Rudd's political career. Labor's present objection that people were not meant to be "languishing in indefinite detention" is so profoundly hypocritical because it ignores that the Rudd government had never arranged anything else.
Ultimately, this whole issue exists in a world of make-believe: make-believe borders, make-believe compliance with the refugee convention, and make-believe resettlement policy. Among all the moral injuries we've inflicted on ourselves in this sordid area of politics – and there are many – the most overlooked is how adept we've become at lying to ourselves.
One day, when the history of this period is written, it will be a story of how successive governments have legislated their lies. How John Howard, then Julia Gillard made real their pretence that boat arrivals never got here, so we could be good international citizens yet still owe these people nothing. How Tony Abbott passed a law in June last year to ensure Rudd's Nauru arrangement was legal, and how that law pretended it had been in force ever since 2012.
I don't know if we can do this forever; if eventually our lawmaking won't be able to outrun our lying. But I know that buried in this week's High Court judgment is unanimous agreement the government simply cannot detain people indefinitely on Nauru. At some point, the clock runs out. And on that day, maybe the alarm will sound on these mighty fictions that have been sustaining us. Then who will we be?
Waleed Aly is a Fairfax Media columnist and a lecturer in politics at Monash University.
- Waleed Aly