Is it the runners? The Australian-brand water bottles at her feet? The T-shirt? Or knowing that her bare arms would be an affront to the conservative religious leaders in her country of birth?
The portrait of an unnamed asylum seeker with head in hands has, in one short week, become a tragic logo for Kevin Rudd’s ‘PNG solution’.
Perhaps the outrage caused by the picture is because the young woman is familiar. She could be easily mistaken for one of us. A sister, daughter, best friend, young wife.
The girl who might sit across from you in a cafe, bus or Melbourne tram.
The image, grabbed from a video shot by Immigration officials, showed passengers from the first boat – carrying 81 mostly Iranian nationals – that had been intercepted near Christmas Island after the new policy of processing and resettling asylum seekers in PNG took effect.
Its publishing was condemned by many. Immigration defended the action, saying that “the opportunity to demonstrate graphically to people considering getting on the next boat [was] an absolutely vital opportunity”.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of its publication, it’s an image that will linger uncomfortably in Australia’s collective memory.
To gauge reaction to Rudd’s controversial plan from within the Labor party, Neos Kosmos spoke to MPs this week whose electorates contain significant numbers of people from traditional and new migrant communities.
Anna Burke, Speaker of the House of Representatives and Federal Member for Chisholm, said that while she felt “uncomfortable” with the policy and had always been a critic of offshore processing, “it sends out a signal that says ‘do not get on a boat, do not risk your life’.
“If this was a regional solution I’d be more comfortable. There are better ways and means of dealing with this.
“Australia doesn’t have an asylum seeker problem – we have an issue of people losing their lives at sea, we don’t have an issue about being smothered by asylum seekers.”
Ensuring that Australia’s humanitarian intake, currently 20,000 refugees a year, can respond fairly to asylum seekers, says Burke, is key.
“As we sit now, our entire humanitarian intake is taken up with people arriving by boat, which precludes anybody sitting in a camp in Africa.
“I’m not saying one asylum seeker is any better than another asylum seeker. You’re in fear of your life, you’re being persecuted, and you have the right to seek asylum.
“But if the solution is that people won’t get on a boat because of the deterrent of ending up in Manus Island and being settled in PNG, that would be a good thing. I wait to see the results.”
With Australia’s humanitarian refugee program as it stands being swamped by boat arrivals, Maria Vamvakinou, Labor Member for Calwell, says the situation is “an emerging crisis”.
“We have a program that takes more refugees per capita then any other country in the world, and we want to increase that number further.
“We have 30,000 people in the detention network now and this is tipped to grow.
“At some point the brakes have to be put on, so that we can step back and try and manage this in a regional, and dare I say, a global way.”
With an electorate containing many migrants from the Middle East, Vamvakinou says that such communities support tough measures to prevent boat arrivals.
“I have a community within my constituency who are appalled at the fact that their families, who are genuine refugees from Iraq, who are displaced, are not able to get to this country by those who they say are getting in through the back door.
“Over a thousand people have drowned coming to Australia. Who’s to blame? There’s a whole network of activity that has to be dealt with,” says Vamvakinou.
“At the end of the day, we’ve got a problem, and we have to deal with it.”
One of the PNG solution’s most vocal critics this week has been founder and CEO of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre in Melbourne, Kon Karapanagiotidis.
A fierce advocate of asylum seekers’ rights, Karapanagiotidis says the PNG plan is not just unacceptable, but illegal.
“I don’t doubt that it will be prevented by the High Court. We’re looking at it and getting some legal opinions with a view to a High Court challenge,” he says.
“No one wants people dying at sea, but you don’t protect people by taking away their rights. What is not acceptable is for a first world country to send vulnerable people into danger.”
Karapanagiotidis says what is needed is “a more complex conversation, not a plan that is built on a house of cards. It’s not workable and it’s not sustainable”.
“The way to stop people getting on to boats is not by meting out retribution.”
There is one element in the photograph of the woman on Christmas Island that’s cause for hope. To her right, a partner, husband, brother, friend, has extended his arm gently around her shoulder in consolation. At least compassion is coming from somewhere.