Azar has not slept properly in days.
In May, her 70-year-old mother Frances went to Iran to see her sisters — her first visit to the country in roughly a decade.
Frances is now one of around 3,000 Australians and their families registered with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) for assistance to leave — almost two weeks after Israeli bombs started falling on the capital Tehran.
Laws designed to put certain migrants behind bars if they are deemed to threaten community safety have effectively failed, the immigration minister has conceded.
Tony Burke said the bar in the legislation, which was altered after a High Court case, was too high for anybody to have met.
What's next?
The government passed another law last year allowing Australia to pay other countries to take members of the NZYQ cohort, a law the High Court is now testing after the government paid Nauru to accept three of them.
Preventative detention laws for migrants have failed, Tony Burke concedes. By Tom Crowley, ABC News
When my parents first arrived in Australia, they thought the government had put them in a five-star hotel. The Midway Migrant Hostel was just a group of sturdy brick buildings that looked like brown slab cakes – but compared to the cardboard and plastic tents in the camp at the Thai–Cambodian border where they’d been staying only a month before, these buildings were evidence of a life after death: the death of half of our family in the Killing Fields.
In this glorious afterlife, the residents of the Midway Migrant Hostel even had visitors, souls so pure and kind that they could only be sent from God. And indeed they were.
A regional GP tells a parliamentary committee that 95 per cent of women she sees for reproductive care are choosing abortions so they don't breach visa conditions.
The inquiry hears that many PALM scheme workers live in substandard housing.
And while it’s critical that there is a focus on this lethal lack of aid for Palestinians, the daily killing and maiming of children has become an afterthought. This is my fifth mission to Gaza since the horrors of 7 October, and in all that time almost nothing has been done to stop the world’s deadliest conflict for children in recent memory. There have been more than 50,000 children reported killed or injured in 20 months. Fifty thousand.
Israel, please let aid organisations do our jobs in Gaza. By James Elder, Unicef, The Guardian
Created in 2024, the People Fleeing Conflict Program from Western Sydney University was designed to support Palestinian, Lebanese and other people seeking refuge in Australia by providing a safe environment where students can work towards achieving their academic and personal goals.
The Sydney program taking Roua closer to her dream of being a nurse. By Ellie Busby, SMH
"In the past, the Australian music industry felt very white, very male-dominated, very rock-oriented.
"Because GRID (Grassroots in Development) is open-minded, it supports diverse artists and genres. Their music tells stories of people coming from other countries, particularly from war-torn countries and places where life is a struggle," Ma said.
For Baraka, who quit a full-time job in construction to chase his music dream, recent success is sweet, but his goal is to touch people through his songs.
How Fiston beat the odds to crack an $8bn Aussie industry and go global. By Sandra Fulloon, SBS News
Today, on World Refugee Day 2025, close to one in ten Australians is a refugee or descendant of someone displaced.
By the end of this year, Australia will resettle its one-millionth refugee since the end of World War II.
This is a legacy built through decades of bipartisan policy, community support, and the belief that when people are given safety and opportunity, they can contribute and thrive. It’s also a legacy that stands in contrast to our harsh treatment of people seeking asylum by boat, which continues to rightly attract criticism. Still, when it comes to refugee resettlement, Australia has a foundation of which we can all be proud.
The question is whether we will rise to meet the moment we are in now……………
…..In the past five years, nearly one million people from just eight refugee-producing countries were granted permits to live and work in OECD countries and Brazil through regular migration programs. That’s a 3-to-1 ratio compared to traditional resettlement.
Australia has played a key role in some of these early efforts. The Skilled Refugee Labour Agreement Pilot, developed in partnership with Talent Beyond Boundaries, has enabled hundreds of skilled refugees to migrate to Australia to fill workforce gaps. The Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot program has supported communities to sponsor and provide settlement support to incoming refugee families. And just last year, the Refugee Student Settlement Pathway was launched, allowing young refugees to study at Australian universities with a pathway to permanent protection.
Sussan Ley didn't feel the Liberal Party alienated migrants in the last federal election, but accepts that some voters felt that way.
"I want to know why they felt that way," she told The Feed. "Because I certainly, as the deputy leader in the last parliament, never, ever felt that way."
Ley's predecessor, Peter Dutton linked record levels of migration — which peaked at 536,000 in 2022-23, but which Treasury estimates will return to 260,000 next year — with exacerbating demand on housing supply and pushing up prices.
The extent of the sexual violence is such that it is at least condoned, if not actually encouraged by leadership. It has been reported time and time again since the conflict began. Sexual violence is being used as a weapon, a tactic of war and the pattern of attacks raises the possibility of genocide. The US issued a statement in early 2025 that, based on available information, genocide was being committed in Sudan. At times, perpetrators have committed attacks with particular cruelty, using firearms, knives and whips to intimidate or coerce, alongside derogatory, racist or sexist slurs and death threats. Women and girls are not just being left vulnerable – they are being actively targeted.
Sudan: The horrors intensify as millions are abandoned. By Brenda Fitzpatrick, P&I
Canstruct, which has previously been linked to a series of donations to the Coalition, was paid $1.82 billion to run Australia’s asylum seeker processing regime on Nauru for five years up to late 2022, making at least $450 million in profits.
Police are examining allegations that many millions of dollars paid to the firm by Home Affairs were misused or misappropriated by Canstruct in misconduct enabled by major departmental lapses. One avenue of investigation is Canstruct’s claiming of insurance costs from the department for a raft of luxury goods under a clause in the contract allowing it to claim business insurance expenses.
St Vincent de Paul Society national president Mr Gaetani highlighted Australia’s continuing mistreatment of thousands of people who fled by boat to Australia more than a decade ago and still have no path to safe, permanent settlement, with many living in destitution.
Since the 1930s, Australia has welcomed refugees fleeing global conflicts — from Jewish refugees before and after World War Two, to Southeast Asians after the Vietnam War.
Following World War Two, Australia entered formal agreements with international bodies to accept displaced people from Europe.
In November 1947, over 800 men and women from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania arrived in Fremantle. They were the first of 170,000 displaced persons resettled in Australia after World War Two.
Later decades saw more structured resettlement, particularly in response to major global conflicts.
Over the past 40 years, Australia has continued to resettle people from war-affected regions, including the Middle East, Africa and Myanmar.
Dr Carina Hoang was 16 years old when she fled war-torn Vietnam with two of her younger siblings.
It was May 1979, and the trio boarded a small wooden boat — 24 metres long and four-and-a-half metres wide. On board with them were around 370 others.
"We were packed in four layers of people, like sardines," Hoang says….
…Australia's then-prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, was widely credited for accepting Southeast Asian refugees. Between April 1975 and March 1991, more than 130,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were resettled here, according to Rachel Stevens, a lecturer from the Australian Catholic University who specialises in immigration and refugee policies.
The 1970s also marked two major turning points for immigration policy in Australia: the formal dismantling of the White Australia policy by the Whitlam government in 1973 and the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act in 1975, which made it unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their race, descent, national or ethnic origin or immigrant status.
However, Stevens says Australia's intake only ramped up in 1978-79. She attributes this to the 1976 arrival of 'boat people' for the first time, which "forced the Fraser government to formalise the refugee intake process".
Laura John, Associate Legal Director at the Human Rights Law Centre said:
“Permanently exiling people to a third country is a cruel, lifelong punishment. No one should be exiled to a country that is not their home, and where they are likely to face serious harm.
“If these deportations are successful, they could pave the way for countless others and set a dangerous precedent for the type of treatment that is deemed acceptable for refugees and migrants.
“We will keep fighting to ensure that every person has the right to dignity, safety and fair process, no matter their visa status.”
High Court challenge for man facing deportation to Nauru returns to court , Human Rights Law Centre
"I thought how could I provide a means of income to these women? They had experience in tailoring and textiles. Some were widowed or without a male companion … Afghan women deserve freedom."
Humanitarian migrants often struggle to have their qualifications recognised and experience an ‘occupational downgrade’, according to a new report.
For at least 60,000 years, hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups flourished, each with its own distinct language, customs and lore.
The invasion of British settlers in the late 18th century precipitated decades of colonial violence and dispossession, yet many groups resisted and survived. Today, there are more than 150 First Nations languages still spoken across Australia, making it home to one of the oldest continuous cultures on Earth.
Since the arrival of the First Fleet, millions of people have crossed the seas, seeking to call this vast continent home.The gold rushes of the 1850s attracted migrants primarily from the United Kingdom, Europe and China, while thousands of South Sea Islanders were brought to Queensland in the second half of the 19th century to work on sugar plantations.
After Federation in 1901, the first national immigration law was introduced, which became known as the White Australia policy. It primarily targeted people of Asian descent and was widely denounced as xenophobic, restricting non-British migration to Australia well into the middle of the 20th century.
The post-war years witnessed a boom in immigration from continental Europe, but with successive waves coming from the north-west, followed by southern and eastern Europe.
Then, in April 1976, following the end of the Vietnam War, a boat carrying a small group of Vietnamese men reached Darwin Harbour. They became known as Australia's first 'boat people' — a term that would come to shape policies and attitudes for the next 50 years.
……new report from the Department of Social Services' Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS).
The report found that after arriving in Australia, most refugees struggled to have their skills and qualifications recognised.
Before arriving in Australia, 30 per cent of women and 19 per cent of men worked in managerial or professional roles.
But after a decade of residency in Australia, those figures dropped to 17 per cent and 10 per cent respectively.
For many who seek refuge, storytelling begins as survival. To gain protection you must narrate your suffering to a case officer who decides if it is legitimate. Later you are invited to become an inspirational example. In both moments the narrative is moulded by what makes others comfortable.
This pressure erodes dignity. As Dina Nayeri notes in The Ungrateful Refugee, it flattens lives into something palatable for an audience when what people need is space simply to be who they are. It reinforces narratives that dehumanise refugees.
As a storyteller, I believe we need a model grounded in antifragility, a term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, to describe how growth can emerge from pressure and uncertainty.
What we miss when we simplify refugee stories. By Samah Shda, City of Sydney News
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