Whenever I applied to a university, they would ask for a birth certificate or a passport. I don’t have these things. All I had was an expired ImmiCard, and even then, I didn’t know how to apply for a new one. They would say, “Sorry, we can’t help you.” Even when my siblings and I are trying to book a driver’s licence test, we are required to show our passports or birth certificates. They wouldn’t accept my expired Immicard. Getting rejected by the bank, by NSW Services, and by universities. Even when I get a job, they’re like, “Oh.” We have to reapply for our Medicare card every six months. Even then, it takes a long time, and sometimes there is a gap in between cards. You can’t guarantee I won’t be sick during that gap. There were so many times when my family was sick, but we were still waiting on the new Medicare card to arrive, so we had to pay the full medical fee out of pocket. How can anyone say to us, “You’re nothing. You are stateless.” How can anyone be stateless? We all come from somewhere. You are someone, regardless of whether you have the documentation or not. No matter what. (August 2024) For the past decade, so many things like this could have been prevented if the government had made laws that actually worked, that allowed us to live like human beings rather than trapped animals. Because even though we aren’t in the detention centre anymore, it’s the same treatment. It’s like being treated as an alien. No matter how confident you are about who you are, people still won’t see you the way you want them to see you because you don’t have all the right documents and papers. That’s what’s frustrating. I would always think, “I’m more mature than half of these government officials that I meet, immigration agents, Centrelink agents, university people.” These people, you know, they’re educated. You expect them to have some common sense, but as one of my high school teachers would say, “Common sense is not as common as you think”. What the Burmese military wants to do is try to get rid of us, completely erase us from history. They’ve completely erased us from legal documents, from government papers, from parliament, from everything. Then we come to these new countries, and the same thing still happens. The majority of us continue to experience these struggles. It’s frustrating for me. They’re succeeding. They’ve succeeded. That’s what they want, for us to be completely erased. For me, it’s very important to always be represented properly on paper. Not just by word. I need it in documentation, because this is what they don’t want me to have in Burma. They want to erase us not just from the country, but also from papers, history, and from anything where it shows our existence. If I have papers saying I existed during this time. It proves something at least. I at least existed in this one context. This is who I am. For me, it is very important to be represented properly and to make people respect that. I’m a Rohingya. You have to write Rohingya on my documents. Don’t write—for example, ‘unspecified nationality’, like what was recorded on a document issued to my mother once. Understanding Statelessness in Australia | Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness 91