Darwin Airport

[boxy]

Threatened Riot

Police say the dispute started yesterday when a woman and two teenage boys were lining up to buy phone cards at the Airport Lodge, which is operating as an immigration detention centre.

Why is the airport being used as a detention centre for 50 or more?

[TomB]

It's not, a developer has built a facility for transit workers to overnight at the airport, on land leased from the airport, and the govt have basically leased the whole facility as a detention centre. It basically has nothing to do with the airport directly.

[boxy]

Ah... doesn't sound much like detention, to me anyway

[boxy]

'Appalling' overcrowding linked to asylum tensions

By Jane Bardon

An asylum seeker advocate says she believes disturbances at two Darwin Immigration detention facilities at the weekend were caused by overcrowding.

There were scuffles in the Asti Hotel on Friday as asylum seekers queued to get into the dining room, and disturbances at the Airport Hotel on Saturday in the queue for the telephone.

Pamela Curr from the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in Melbourne says she has heard from detainees that overcrowding pressures are growing.

"People spend their lives standing in queues, either to get into the dining room to eat, to get to a phone to make a call," she said.

"From our perspective there is one ring-in phone for 400 people, there are eight functioning computers for 400 people.

"The pressure on the facility is just appalling."

It's "apalling" to queue now? FFS, if that's worse than where you came from... off you go, back on the plane.

[TomB]

Well to be fair they live in facilities which were not designed for long term tenure, they are not allowed to leave their "detention centers" and I think you and I would go stir crazy under those conditions. Whether that's worse than what drove them to become refugees or not is debatable I suppose.

[boxy]

Well, you've should be willing to take a bit of "hardship" (queueing ) if you're looking to be rescued from a fate worse than a fate worse than death (that's... pretty bad) without threatening to riot if you don't get your way.

Unless you've got an overdeveloped sense of entitlement

[Outlaw Yogi]

overdeveloped sense of entitlement

Almost everywhere you go these days .. although I term it perverted sence of entitlement.
And people wonder why I'm such an unsympathetic/insensitive bastard.
If I had to seek shelter in a foreign land, I'd do my best to fit in/adapt, not bung on tantrums for the locals ... or they might say "Go on, git, we don't want your sort 'round 'ere".

[TomB]

I don't think queuing is the hardship, probably more like a catalyst for the tedium/frustration.