WA activist Victoria Martin was one of the speakers on a panel at Marxism 2014 discussing the campaign for refugee rights in Australia. These are edited extracts of her remarks.

One of the fictions of the contemporary nation state is that it is legitimate to leave borders completely porous to capital but to control the movement of people.

You can see this in the kind of rhetoric that permeates the asylum seeker debate. The lie that is put forward by our government, and which was raised to new heights of absurdity by Bob Carr when he was foreign minister, is that asylum seekers are economic migrants.

The great majority, 90 percent, are found to be owed a duty of protection because they meet the criteria of a refugee under the refugee convention.

The economic migrant charge is put forward because it delegitimises the right of people to economic security. Part of the persecution that most ethnic minorities face is the seizure of property, the moving of people off their lands, the creation of laws that allow one ethnic or religious group access to economic benefits that are denied to another group.

We need to be giving consideration to this reality as we think of ways to challenge the rhetoric.

There’s an interesting thing emerging around these issues: rhetoric that privileges certain kinds of freedom. Freedom of the market, that’s a good thing. My right to be a bigot, my right to be a racist – my right to that certain kind of free speech is paramount.

The same organisations and individuals that champion such freedoms also think it legitimate to detain people without charge or trial – a violation of habeas corpus that got through our parliament with barely a whimper. Detention without charge or trial – let’s not forget that is what we are talking about. Every single asylum seeker I have ever met or spoken to was under absolutely no illusion about that. They could not see and I could not see anything that they had done that causes harm to anyone else.

The harm that is done is done by the Australian government: harm to fundamental legal principles. This isn’t just to remind asylum seekers that their rights are something granted on a whim by the state, but also to remind each and every citizen that this is a power that the contemporary capitalist state reserves.

It is a power that could be applied to each and every one of us, because that mechanism of control has already been ceded. Most capitalist governments now have categories of persons who live and exist outside the rule of law, and who have no legal rights within those states. In Australia it is Aboriginal people who don’t hold the same rights that the rest of us do – rights to their stolen wages etc. – and asylum seekers.

What I would hope that we as activists don’t forget is the daily resistance that does occur. So I want to tell you a story of the most profound courage I have ever had the privilege of witnessing.

I get to associate on a daily basis with people who remind me of the critical importance to humanity, to human psychology, of the concepts of freedom and justice. Because every asylum seeker who leaves their country and gets on a boat knows they are taking a risk. They are prepared to risk everything for freedom, everything for justice. No one knows more profoundly than an asylum seeker what those concepts mean.

On the night of 15 February, I was scrolling through Facebook and saw a message. What this person had written was very simple, along the lines of “We need help – can someone give me the phone number for the BBC?” I privately messaged them, asked them where they were, gave them the BBC number and numbers for the ABC and several journalists. Over the next 48 hours we exchanged messages several times.

The Refugee Rights Action Network had its regular weekly meeting on 17 February. I was sitting there in the meeting with Facebook open in my phone. My friend was sending me messages, because it would seem I was the only person in Australia who had replied to his plea for help.

Over the course of the next four hours he kept going outside, looking at what was going on, and coming back inside to the computer room, to give me a blow-by-blow real time account of what he saw.

And let’s be humbled for a minute. What this man witnessed was murder.

He knew full well the risk he took by staying in that room while the violence was going on around him. He could have up and left the minute he knew there was an incursion into the camp. He chose to stay in that room and make sure that the outside world knew what was going on. He did that over a period of almost four hours.

I got up the next morning and had the terrible experience of watching our immigration minister front up in front of an incompetent and craven media and tell a bald-faced, craven and disgusting lie to the Australian people – a lie that he maintained for over a week.

Were it not for the brave people inside Manus Island detention centre, and a tragically few number of staff that leaked the truth, we would not know. Our resistance needs to start matching the resistance and the bravery of the people inside the detention centres. We need to move this campaign to the next level of action.

The churches have moved into some of the space that previously a lot of activists like myself were trying to fill. We need to move into a more militant space. We need to be doing more direct action. We need to be listening more closely to what people who have been through the refugee experience and who have taken the risks that they have taken are saying. We need to match that, reflect that and echo that.