Culture

#LetThemStay Protesters Have Been Hanging From Melbourne’s Art Centre Spire Since 3am This Morning

"They'll be staying up there for as long as they can, until that message is heard by the government."

by Hannah Hawkins  19 February 2016

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It’s exiting its second week now, but the #LetThemStay campaign has only continued to pick up speed. After thousands rallied across Australia to demand the 267 asylum seekers currently waiting to be sent back to Nauru remain in the country, six state leaders offered to resettle them, a Victorian school principal risked jail by campaigning for the asylum seeker students to complete their education here and 100 of the country’s biggest comedians joined the ever growing list of people pleading with the federal government.

Protestors stepped it up a notch last Thursday, when two women suspended themselves from the Yarra Bend overpass above Melbourne’s Eastern Freeway and hung a #LetThemStay banner between them. And in Brisbane yesterday afternoon, after hospital staff refused to release 12-month-old asylum seeker baby Asha out of fears she would be returned to Nauru, two more women suspended themselves from a bridge, also with a #LetThemStay banner.

Now the same Melbourne women — 25-year-old Katherine Woskett and 22-year-old Hannah Patchett, who’s also a professional rope access worker — have gone even further and scaled Melbourne’s 162-metre-tall Arts Centre spire, which they began climbing at 3.30am this morning. When they protested on the Yarra Bend overpass last week they were up there for around three hours, but this operation is now going on nine.

Their spokesperson Helen War has told Jon Faine on 774 ABC Melbourne that they are likely to stay up there for several hours — but probably “not days” — to “amplify their message”. War confirmed they were up there specifically to protest the deportation of the 267 asylum seekers, and added that “they’ve definitely taken the message to new heights today”. “At this stage, these women have decided to stay up there, with the message ‘let them stay’, until that message has been heard properly by the Government, who are still staying silent on this issue,” she said.

Woskett and Patchett were let off with just a stern warning after their Eastern Freeway protest, which they said they did because “people across Australia are sick to our stomach that neither side of politics is representing our views”, but they could face trespass charges for this one, as the spire is private property belonging to the state government. There’s been a strong show of support for the women online, as well as from a small group of protestors at the bottom of the spire.

Although the pair have their mobile phones on them, Senior Sergeant Dean Delle-Vergini told The Age they were refusing to talk to police. “They are not actually taking calls from us at the moment,” he said. There’s been no comment from Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull or Immigration Minister Peter Dutton on the protest yet, but police have said they will try to climb the spire to negotiate with Woskett and Patchett as a “last resort”.

Dutton came under fire this week after it was reported Australia has resettled just 26 Syrian asylum seekers almost five months after Tony Abbott announced an emergency intake of 12,000. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Canada has resettled 20,490 Syrian refugees in just three months — 800 times more than Australia. A spokesperson for Dutton said his government “takes our national security extremely seriously” and “rigorous security checks are being conducted”.

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Story via The Age.

Feature image via WACA/Twitter.