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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.

When world number one tennis player Novak Djokovic arrived in Australia earlier this month, he intended to defend his title at the Australian Open.

Instead, his visa was cancelled and he was detained at a hotel in Melbourne - the Park Hotel.

Before Djokovic’s arrival, the Park Hotel was home to around 30 refugees and asylum seekers who were being kept in indefinite immigration detention.

Eventually Djokovic left. But those refugees can’t.

Today, 7am producer Elle Marsh, on the moment the world’s attention focused on Australia’s treatment of refugees. And what happens now, most of the media have moved on.

It’s Thursday January 27.

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RUBY:

Elle, for the past year, you've been talking to the men detained at Park Hotel in Melbourne and reporting their stories, reporting what's been happening to them there. I think it was about two months ago now that we last spoke about their situation.

ELLE MARSH:

Yeah, that's right. I've been speaking to some of the people inside the hotel for a while now. These men have been detained indefinitely and have been protesting their imprisonment for years.

The men inside Park Hotel say that their basic human rights are being denied, that they are suffering, and that this hotel isn't a hotel at all. It's a torture prison. And during this time that I've been reporting this, there hasn't been that much of a national outcry for these men.

RUBY:

Mm that’s changed recently, though.

ELLE MARSH:

That's right. Yeah, it all changed when world tennis number one Novak Djokovic arrived.

RUBY:

Right, because he was detained at the Park Hotel hotel after his visa was cancelled by the Australian government.

ELLE MARSH:

Yeah. And when he arrived at the hotel, the media descended, and it became a huge story.

Archival tape – U.S News reporter:

The biggest story in tennis right now surrounding world number one Novak Djokovic.

Archival tape – UK News reporter:

after being detained at Melbourne Airport for eight hours. Novak Djokovic has now been denied entry into the country

Archival tape – UK News reporter:

Mr Djokovic failed to provide appropriate evidence to meet the entry requirements to Australia, and his visa has been subsequently cancelled.

ELLE MARSH:

That was two weeks ago - and back then the whole world was focused on Park Hotel, and by extension the refugees who were being imprisoned there. But now that Djokovic has gone, The media has quickly moved on, and the refugees are still being detained there. And I guess the question is whether any of this attention is going to change their situation.

RUBY:

Mmm ok. So lets talk more about those men - the 30 or so men who are at this moment indefinitely detained at Park Hotel. There's one man in particular who has spoken publicly in recent weeks - Medhi. Can you tell me about him?

ELLE MARSH:

Yes. So Mehdi is a refugee from Iran, and the day that Novak Djokovich arrived was actually his birthday.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

My name is Medhi, and I came to Australia by myself when I was 15 years old at twenty second of July 2013.

ELLE MARSH:

He fled his home when he was just a teenager…

Archival tape - Mehdi:

The tragedy was, first day I came to Australia and then I was in line. They didn't ask me, What's your name? They gave me a number. And I wasn't sure what this number is. And then after a few days, I found out that number is my identity. And since then, until now, that number is my identity.

ELLE MARSH:

Since leaving Iran and arriving in Australia, he’s spent 10 years in Australian immigration detention facilities. And right now he's in Park Hotel. His days are spent confined to his room, and time sort of… blurs.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

Like sometimes I don't even know what month it is. What day we are… because everything keeps repeating.

ELLE MARSH:

It's all very monotonous. And so when Djokovic arrived, it was, I guess, a timestamp of sorts.

RUBY:

OK, so what was it like then? For someone like Medhi who's been detained for close to 10 years, who's a genuine refugee in indefinite detention to have someone like Novak Djokovic enter the same hotel and to briefly be under the same roof as him?

ELLE MARSH:

Yeah. He says that it was, it was a pretty bizarre and strange experience, finding out that there was this tennis player in the room below him.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

I woke up and my friend told me Djokovic there, and I was like, I was laughing at him.

ELLE MARSH:

So, you know, he looked outside of his window and saw that there was, you know, crowds beginning to gather below the hotel when he found out that Djokovic should arrive.

Archival tape – Crowd cheering

Archival tape - Mehdi:

Then I found out he’s here and all this cameras around, and it was kind of confusing.

ELLE MARSH:

These crowds were all for Djokovic. They were singing Serbian Christmas carols and waving Serbian flags, and Mehdi found it pretty strange. And then he started to receive phone call after phone call at all hours of the day.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

basically since I woke up, until I got to sleep and sometimes I rested... my eyes are gazing at the phone. I was just talking, replying, tweeting, people are texting me from all over the world. Still now.

ELLE MARSH:

All of these journalists from all around the world were trying to speak to him. But when he answered, they only really wanted to speak about Djokovic and ask him questions about this tennis player.

For weeks, Djokovic was the biggest story in the world. Every morning, you'd wake up to live blogs and front page news stories about his visa cancellation and local refugees and local refugee organisations were fielding media requests from CNN, Slovakian newspapers even like, you know, community radio stations in the Netherlands. And one of the people that kind of became the face of this was Mehdi.

Archival tape – US News reporter:

We're joined by Mehdi Ali an Iranian refugee who's been held in detention by Australian authorities for nine years.

Archival tape – UK News:

Take me through your story. The past nine years, I mean, you were little more than a child.

Archival tape – UK TV News:

Mehdi tried to enter Australia by boat when he was 15. Part of a persecuted religious minority from Iran. Today, he turns 24.

ELLE MARSH:

He was speaking to so many people during this time.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

It's kind of rough for me and not just kind of tough to keep repeating myself. And the people… is a story, too for me, it's my life which I'm still dealing with, you know?

ELLE MARSH:

And for the first time it, it felt like people were actually paying attention.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

And but I'm doing it because. I can't stay quiet. I don't like to be out there, but I'm doing that because it's… I've got nothing to lose.

It's basically I'm doing that… because I'm too desperate and I don't know what to do. It’s like a desperate person is drowning in the sea, you’d do anything to survive right?

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment

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RUBY:

Elle, World Tennis number one Novak Djokovic’s attempts to appeal his visa cancellation - they were ultimately unsuccessful and after spending several days at Park Hotel, he was deported. He went back to Serbia. But what about the roughly 30 men who are still there, who are still at Park Hotel? Has anything changed for them at all after all of this media attention?

ELLE MARSH:

Well, not really, because they're all still being detained in the hotel, and there's actually a fair bit of frustration about why they are being linked to the whole Djokovic saga.

You know, Medhi sees his experience and story as wildly different to the famous tennis player.

He did a lot of interviews over the couple of weeks that Djokovic was in the country, and by the time we spoke to him, he was pretty sick of speaking or even hearing about the tennis star.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

And I was just, I was like, I don't understand what's, what's the link between us?

ELLE MARSH:

He really didn’t see the two situations as comparable.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

They have to concentrate on the issue here. And the humanitarian disaster, which is happening at this specific moment in this country. Human beings rights are getting denied by the federal government.

ELLE MARSH:

Here we have Djokovic - this famous, wealthy tennis player, and this is a minor inconvenience in his life. But for these men, this is their life, there isn’t a way out.

RUBY:

Mm-Hmm. So it sounds like for Mehdi and for the other men who are detained at Park Hotel, there's a duality to the situation because all of this media attention, it might be good for them. But there is this frustration at even hearing their names in the same breath as someone like Novak Djokovic, because ultimately he can leave this situation and they can't, so it's really not comparable.

ELLE MARSH:

Hmm. Yeah, that's exactly right.

So the situation is really incredibly desperate. Some of the other refugees I spoke to, the only link that they saw between Djokovic and the people inside Park Hotel is that they're both being used as political pawns by the government. A government that wants to be seen as tough on borders.

When Djokovic’s visa was cancelled, Scott Morrison came out and said, Well, rules are rules and there are no special cases. And he said the same thing when he was asked about the men being detained in a park hotel.

Archival tape – 2GB:

The Novak Djokovic case has raised another issue. He was kept in a Melbourne hotel that also holds asylum seekers that have been denied visas. There are refugees in that same hotel that had been detained for more than nine years. How is that acceptable?

Archival tape – Morrison:

Well, the specific case has been I mean, it's not clear that to my know… to my information that someone in that case is actually a refugee.

ELLE MARSH:

You know, he said rules were rules and that these men were found not to be refugees and had chosen not to return.

Archival tape – Morrison:

They may have sought asylum and been found not to be a refugee and have chosen not to return.

ELLE MARSH:

Which is actually completely false and inaccurate. And Morrison, as a previous immigration minister, knows that. The majority of the men in Park Hotel have been found to be refugees. Many of them have been offered to be resettled in places like the US and New Zealand.

Medi has also been recognised as a refugee and can't return home. He's pretty frustrated that people still don't know the simple facts of the situation.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

I'm not blaming the international media, I'm blaming local media. And unfortunately, there's so many people that weren't aware of the circumstances. They were texting me and saying, “Oh, we didn't know about this. That’s sad.”

ELLE MARSH:

And a lot of that frustration is actually directed towards local media for perpetuating the situation.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

It's the media's duty to aware people of things they are not aware of, of cruelty that's happening in their country and they're not aware of. It's kind of sad, but also I'm kind of excited because people are finding out about it.

RUBY:

And so Elle I suppose the big question now is, will any of this the media attention, the increased international scrutiny, will any of it actually make a difference for the future of of these men? Because we've heard the Australian government double down yet again on its immigration policy, so is anything actually likely to change or is this just going to be another traumatic chapter in these men's lives?

ELLE MARSH:

That's a good question, and I'm not exactly sure how to answer it. There have been some small, promising signs. You know, a few weeks on from this saga, lawyers, advocates and refugees inside park hotels say that, you know, local media attention has pretty much dried up. But you know, international outlets are still covering this, and they’re covering this in depth.

At one, small pro bono human rights law firm that represents some of the men at Park Hotel - in the past few weeks, over $100,000 have been raised to help them in their legal fights. So, you know, I mean, one of the issues here is that there isn't adequate resourcing to support these men, particularly in their court cases. That’s a major hurdle, it costs something like forty to eighty thousand dollars to run one of these cases. So, such a small win.

We do have an election coming up soon. Maybe the Australian public, now that they're more aware, might put this on the… on the map a bit more.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

And I think the majority, they don't care what they don't know.

ELLE MARSH:

Mehdi says that yes, some people don't care about them, but he believes that lots of people also just don't know. They don't care, or they don't know about what's going on in Park Hotel.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

And for nine years. I don't blame the people, I don't blame the country. I'm blaming the system, the authority.

ELLE MARSH:

There are still refugees being confined indefinitely, not just in Park Hotel, but in immigration detention facilities across Australia - and they don’t have answers about when they’ll be free. So I think the main measure of if any of this attention will make a difference, is if these people will be released.

It is one thing for people to not know about the situation that these men are in, and for there to be no action. But now, because of Djokovic’s short stint in Park Hotel, the whole nation and the whole world knows. And it's whether we choose to act or to look away.

Archival tape - Mehdi:

You know what it means to have a refugee status? It means I cannot go back to my country right, it’s not safe.
What's next for me? You don’t know, I don’t know either.

Tomorrow I’m going to get out of here or forever I don’t know. I cannot go back and I cannot go further. I got stuck in a cage, without no explanation and without no reason. It's cruel.

RUBY:

You can read Mehdi Ali’s stories for the Saturday Paper online at The SaturdayPaper.com.au

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Also in the news today,

Tens of thousands of protestors marched across the country in the annual Invasion Day rally on Wednesday.

Speakers at the rallies called for the date of the Australia Day public holiday to change, and spoke out against ongoing injustice.

This year's rallies commemorated 50 years since the Aboriginal Tent embassy was established in Canberra, and marked 234 years since British military forces landed on Gadigal land.

And in Western Australia, health authorities recorded 24 new local cases of Covid-19 as an Omicron outbreak in the state’s South West continues to grow.

On Wednesday, WA Premier Mark McGowan said the outbreak was one the state would not be able to get under control.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am. See ya tomorrow.

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