Two more residents of the Melbourne public housing towers on which the Victorian state Labor government imposed a âhard lockdownâ last week have spoken out via the WSWS to express their anger and opposition to the police operation.
On Saturday July 4, in mid-afternoon, Premier Daniel Andrews suddenly announced that the 3,000 residents of nine 20- to 30-storey towers in the inner-city suburbs of Flemington and North Melbourne would be confined by âdetention ordersâ inside their cramped apartments.
On the pretext of stopping the spread of COVID-19, 500 police officers surrounded the buildings and were deployed to guard every floor and stop residents leaving their flats. For days, working class residents, many of whom come from refugee and immigrant backgrounds, were starved of basic necessities and healthcare. Households with many children and/or elderly and vulnerable members were particularly affected.
Only after a weekâamid mounting outrage among the residents and throughout the working classâdid Andrews announce the partial lifting of the restrictions on all but one of the towers. The residents of that block, 33 Alfred Street in North Melbourne, remain locked in their small poorly-ventilated flats.
Last Saturday, to add to the inhumanity of the police operation, wire fences were erected around that building, supposedly to permit the residents to exercise in what resembled a prison yard. Such was the disgust and anger among the residents and their supporters that the fences were removed early on Sunday morning, shortly after midnight.
It is now clear that the Labor governmentâs operation was not only brutal. It failed to curb the spread of COVID-19 throughout the public housing estates. In fact, by detaining the residents inside their buildings, where social distancing was impossible, the government ensured that the contagion intensified. Entirely predictably, shared corridors, lifts, laundries and rubbish facilities, poor ventilation and plumbing have worsened the spread.
By Sunday, 237 cases had been detected across the Flemington and North Melbourne estates, and another 28 cases had been confirmed among residents of public housing in nearby Carlton, another inner-city suburb. Health authorities say up to 25 percent of the 472 residents living in 33 Alfred Street itself may have been infected with the virus.
Emel is a Kurdish-Turkish immigrant and working-class mother of two young children. During her interview, conducted in Turkish, Emel told the WSWS that she received no official notification of the police lockdown of the Flemington flats where she lives. âFive minutes after I heard about the lockdown on the news, the building was surrounded by police,â she said.
Emel expressed frustration at the long delay before any supplies were delivered by the Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS). âOn the second day we received the first batch of food,â she said, âI didnât know it was comingâI heard about it on social media.â
The food was left on the ground floor. âThere are 180 families in our building and we donât know who has the virus and who doesnât,â Emel said. âEveryone has to use the lifts to go down to pick up the food. This means the virusâin this small, crowded buildingâis going to spread.â
Emel said many families had dietary requirements, which were not considered. Her family, which has gluten intolerance, managed by avoiding the bread and other food items, âbut some families have very serious diabetes concerns and the food packets were not prepared with these in mind.â
Emel explained that âthese buildings arenât fit for people to live in under normal circumstances, but under the conditions of the coronavirus and the lockdown, they have turned into hell. There is no clean air or sunlight. The rooms are small. The building is not clean⊠It is like a prison.â
Denouncing the government response, Emel said: âWe have had no healthcare or social workers in our building.â It took doctors until the Wednesday to test residents for COVID-19.
âWhy was there such a strong police blockade here?â she asked. âThe first thing that came to my mind was that this was the Australian and Victorian governments showing through us that they were on track to becoming a police state. This is class war. They wouldnât do this in a rich suburb like Toorak or Kew. This is a poor, migrant, refugee community. Our incomes are the lowest in the country. They want to make us look like trash.â
Emel continued: âMany of us come from Africa, the Middle East and we know what police violence, police states and military states are. So many of my neighbours are asking me: âWhy are the police here?ââ
Emel said the police lockdown had ânothing to do with a fight against the pandemic. This is not and cannot be the way to fight against the pandemic. The struggle against the pandemic has to be scientific and transparent. It cannot be done by sending 500 police here. It is done by sending healthcare workers, social workers, psychologists.â
When the WSWS asked Emel what she thought about the spread of COVID-19 internationally, she denounced the governmentsâ back-to-work campaigns. âIn every country, they said to workers that they should self-isolate for 14 days. But then they sent all the workers back to work. Workers, who have to bring bread home, are forced to go to work⊠This is true for Australia and everywhere in the worldâthe pandemic most affects the workersâŠ
âWe could shut down the whole world for a month, but we are not doing this, because the profit-hungry corporations will not allow it⊠For them, workers will go back to work, the virus will spread and people will die. They donât care.â
Noting recent findings of doctors and scientists, Emel said: âThey are now saying that the virus can stay in the air for longer and travel⊠Everything outside of what is essential for people to survive should be shut down⊠All of the lost jobs and incomes of the workers have to be compensated. Nowhere in the world has this happened and it wonât happen.â
The WSWS spoke over Reddit with a first-year university student who wished to remain anonymous. His family fled war-torn Somalia and lives in one of the North Melbourne flats. He said they learned of the lockdown via text message and it âwas not communicated before the police arrived. No prior notice at all, so you could imagine the shock of people running low on supplies.â
He said the DHHS âprovided us with one sachet of culturally inappropriate food for my family of 9. It came on the second day at 11pm⊠It was thrown onto the floor.â The teenager said there was âno healthcare or social workers' presence or communicationâ and it âwas hard for us not to feel like caged dogs.â
When asked about the confirmed cases in the buildings, the student said: âIt is quite appalling that those [who have] tested positive arenât being removed to a different area. Instead they go back to pressing the buttons of lifts and touching common areas... Iâm not surprised that almost 100 cases in the last few days have been found so far in just the towers alone.â
He added that the towers were targeted for a police crackdown because they are in âa much poorer areaâ and âlots of us are immigrants.â