POPE Francis humbly washed the feet of people seeking asylum during Holy Week while a taxpayer-funded film, commissioned by the Federal Government to deter asylum seeking, made a Good Friday debut on Afghanistan’s television screens.
The 90-minute $5.97 million film project, titled Journey, dramatises the passage of people from Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan as they endeavour to seek asylum in Australia via Indonesia by boat.
Production company Put it Out There Pictures makes no secret of its project’s objective on the company’s website.
“The film aimed to educate and inform audiences in source countries about the futility of investing in people smugglers, the perils of the trip and the hard-line policies that await them if they do reach Australian waters,” they said.
However, the film suppresses the experience of people seeking asylum after they reach Australian waters or soil, a plight that has become the subject of international alarm following the Government’s human rights abuses, pervading lack of transparency and detention centre media ban.
The film concludes as the characters either drown or optimistically anticipate rescue by an unidentified vessel and crew, declining to show the group being locked in windowless rooms for 22 hours a day over a month on an Australian customs ship before being secretly forced to Nauru, as has occurred.
Neither does the film dramatise Australian officials on Navy vessels bribing people smugglers to perilously turn back while assisting them with navigation, reports of which the Government refused to confirm or deny.
Likewise, while Journey repeatedly bares the exploitation of seedy people-smuggling ringleaders, it neglects the reality of big business profiting from abuse in its implementation of offshore detention centre contracts.
The realities of indefinite offshore detention, the fault of both Labor and Coalition governments, such as physical, psychological and sexual abuse of adults and children, unsanitary conditions and high rates of self-harm and suicide attempts, were also conveniently omitted in the film’s plot.
Surprisingly, there is no dramatisation of contact between asylum-seeking characters with Australian officials after their departure from Indonesia or of offshore detention centres in the film.
This seems at odds with the Government’s public hard-line, military-led response that was implemented as a “by hook or by crook” deterrence strategy, and the film’s overt dissuasion objective, thus begging the question: is local and international scrutiny becoming too much for the Federal Government?
Brisbane Catholic Justice and Peace Commission member and teacher Erin Kennedy is critical of the film’s oversights and the significant public purse expenditure.
“For a fraction of the cost, we could have made a film to educate our leaders about the realities of our offshore detention centres and the legal right to seek asylum,” Mrs Kennedy said.
“Thank goodness for the integrity of the film makers behind Chasing Asylum, released in May, which will reveal the psychological and physical impacts of indefinitely incarcerating innocent people in unhygienic camps cut off from media scrutiny.”
Journey uses stylised Bollywood soap opera techniques to draw in its target audience, including spontaneous dancing and singing scenes, staccato editing of action sequences and close-up footage of impossibly beautiful and buff characters silently screaming with melodramatic music playing in the background.
Put It Out There Pictures’ website states that “drama is a potent way to bring lasting and meaningful change to some of the most vulnerable communities in the world”.
However, a retired senior medical officer who treated child asylum seekers for psychiatric injuries, Judy O’Donnell, of St Ignatius Toowong parish, was outraged at the idea that the “menacingly toned” film was produced with asylum seekers’ best interests at heart.
“As far as the film goes, it seems ridiculous to be trying to frighten people into giving up their chance at seeking asylum by showing how bad it can be, as these people know ‘bad’ already, and in a way that we can’t even imagine, otherwise they wouldn’t be contemplating such a risky venture,” Dr O’Donnell said.
“Where we should spend our energy and money is in working out a totally different approach to the whole issue of conflict and war, with its toll of displaced and desperate people.”
Journey is an opportunistic taxpayer-funded money-spinner for those who produced and promoted it, and a callous, shamelessly self-serving propaganda vehicle for a government that flagrantly contravenes United Nations conventions on refugees and the rights of the child.
May our politicians start exercising moral courage in their leadership and honour their humanitarian obligations by treating our asylum-seeking brothers and sisters with dignity, as Jesus commanded: “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you made me welcome.”
By Michelle McDonald
Michelle McDonald is a parishioner at St Bernard’s Upper Mt Gravat and Love Makes A Way asylum seeker advocate.
