They say sport has the power to unite the world, and for one community organisation that certainly rings true. 'Reclink' is helping refugees who have recently moved to Australia find their feet in a new country.
When it comes to helping refugees settle in Australia, Reclink's got game. By Phoebe Deas, SBS News
If the problem we’re trying to solve is housing undersupply, then planning and tax policies, not migration, should be where the focus is.
Among those protesting is a group of Perth-based Sri Lankan Tamil refugees, who have staged a sit-in protest and vigil outside federal Labor MP Sam Lim’s office in Willetton.
Lim holds the seat of Tangney, which spans south Perth and has a strong Sri Lankan Tamil population: Tamil is spoken by 1.2 per cent of the electorate, which is four times higher than the WA state average and three times the national average.
The protest at Willetton took a turn on Monday afternoon when the first-time Labor MP and former police officer made an unscheduled appearance.
'Deeply insensitive': Refugee advocates left reeling by Labor MP’s comments. By Christopher Tan, SBS
Our work is needed now more than ever, in Australia and internationally. Growing inequality, conflict, climate change and technological disruption are making the challenges of displacement even more complex. We are uniquely positioned to undertake the deep, long-term thinking and rigorous research required to address these emerging issues.
Saadou Khalaf was a successful dentist and university lecturer in Gaza. In Sydney, he's a shopkeeper, or meat factory worker, or a warehouse packer, or anything else he can pick up a casual shift doing.
"I say to myself: 'You are a professional and you have to continue to be a professional,'" he says. "Any work that is given to me, I try to do in a very proper way."
He is thankful to be allowed to work at all, after arriving with his family in March on a three-month visitor visa that did not allow him to earn money. Since applying for a permanent protection visa, his bridging visa allows him to work and access Medicare — but that's not the case for other Palestinians who were initially granted six or 12-month temporary visas.
The number of Palestinians applying onshore for protection has continued to grow, increasing pressure on the Albanese government over its decision to require them to come to Australia on visitor visas first.
AAP FACTCHECK – Claims are circulating on social media that Australia is one of only four countries that has taken refugees from Gaza.
This is false. More than four countries have approved visas for Palestinians since the renewed outbreak of war in the region in October 2023.
The exact number of nations that have offered visas to Palestinians is difficult to establish due to significant variations in approaches taken by individual countries.
However, immigration data and media reports show at least 10 countries other than Australia have offered a safe haven to people fleeing the region since October 2023.
More than four countries taking in Palestinians fleeing Gaza. By William Summers, AAP
In the final days of the Afghan republic – in defiance of a looming takeover by the Taliban – the Hazara journalist Mani sang revolutionary poems in public in Kabul about women, freedom and justice. Now she is on the run, waiting for the Australian government to grant her a humanitarian visa.
A group of 25 federal crossbench MPs have written a letter addressed to the prime minister and immigration minister urging them to allow asylum seekers stuck in visa limbo a pathway to permanency in Australia.
Their letter follows the tragic death of 23-year-old Tamil refugee Mano Yogalingam in Melbourne on Wednesday.
Arash Azizzada — the executive director of Afghans for a Better Tomorrow, an advocacy group — said members of the Afghan community in the US, like him, feel a “sense of anger and disappointment” this election season “when we look at both candidates”.
“We are feeling pretty invisible this election season,” he added.
Azizzada’s group has spent the last three years pushing for more immigration pathways for those fleeing the Taliban, including an increase in special visas for Afghans who worked directly with the US and pathways to permanent residency for other evacuees.
The self-immolation of a 23-year-old asylum seeker will pressure Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to resolve the visa status of more than 8000 people whose futures have been uncertain since they arrived by boat more than a decade ago.
Mano Yogalingam, a father-of-one and factory worker who was 11 when he left Sri Lanka with his family, spent his final weeks camped outside the Home Affairs offices in Melbourne while protesting against Australian immigration policy. He died in hospital on Wednesday after lighting himself on fire at a skate park in Melbourne’s south-east on Tuesday night.
A Christian Tamil from Sri Lanka’s west coast, he arrived by boat in Australia in 2013 as a 12-year-old boy with his parents and four siblings, having fled alleged military persecution in the postwar upheaval of his home country.
After more than a year in detention, he was granted a temporary visa. He went to school in Melbourne, he made friends, he built a life and a place in his community. But he was never allowed to feel settled and at home.
For more than a decade, Mano lived with the constant uncertainty of a temporary visa; with the acknowledged unfairness of the flawed “fast-track” process; with the ever-present threat that he would be returned to a homeland he had only known as a child.
The Tamil Refugee Council said it believed the time Mr Yogalingham had spent on a bridging visa had been a contributing factor to his death.
A council spokesperson told the ABC Mr Yogalingham's claim for refugee status was previously rejected under the controversial "fast-track" system introduced in 2014, an outcome he had been seeking to appeal.
Grief and shock in Melbourne after Tamil asylum seeker dies by self-immolation. ABC News
The detainee, who spent nearly a decade in detention after his visa was cancelled in April 2014, was held at North West Point Immigration Detention Centre on Christmas Island.
Private security giant Serco is contracted to manage the centre.
Less than a week after his arrival, NR was forcibly restrained by five officers.
The incident came after NR asked to be moved to another compound rather than the one assigned to him, out of fear of another detainee who’d allegedly previously assaulted him.
When his requests were repeatedly rebuffed, he lashed out verbally.
Home Affairs refuses apology to detainee over treatment. By Farid Farid, AAP
International student enrolments will be capped at 270,000 in 2025, as the government aims to make the system "fairer".
The government is paring back student visas in an effort to get net migration levels under control and return them to pre-pandemic levels.
Education providers have expressed concern that caps will lead to both job and revenue losses. In 2022, universities collected about $8.6 billion of their $34.7 billion in revenue from international students.
The chief executive of Settlement Services International, Violet Roumeliotis, says Palestinian arrivals are “highly educated professionals and business owners”.
“Some were working in medicine and allied health, in engineering, in finance, social work.”
Of the Palestinians who have arrived in Australia, 80% hold at least one educational qualification beyond primary/secondary school and 73% hold a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to data from the general delegation of Palestine to Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific.
Engineering, science and technical professionals, as well as medical and health professionals, are the most common occupational categories for arrivals. “The issue for them, of course, is they have no work rights [in Australia],” Roumeliotis says.
Thousands of pistachio trees stand in neat rows at Robinvale in northern Victoria. The orchard spans almost 300 hectares (741 acres) and is among the oldest of Australia’s large-scale commercial plantings, stretching across the flat plains near the Murray River.
It’s a far cry from the mountains of south-west Iran, where Bahá’í man Mehran Mahdavi farmed before his family was forced to flee their homeland in 1980 to avoid persecution. But there are similarities. Both have harsh, dry summers and cold winters. Mahdavi, with a decade’s experience working in agriculture in Iran, could see the connection.
The explanatory statement for the regulation said the changes will “achieve increased departure outcomes, especially when paired with increased immigration compliance activity”.
This would have “flow-on effects reducing the status resolution population” and save the federal government money on status resolution support services and immigration detention costs, it said.
In March 2023 Guardian Australia revealed that a “record” 100,000 people who had sought asylum onshore remained in Australia, including 72,875 whose claims had been refused, who were yet to be deported.
Government gives itself power to pay any non-citizen to leave Australia. By Paul Karp, The Guardian
Recent conflicts in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza have seen large numbers of people displaced and unable to leave dangerous situations. In each case, Australia’s humanitarian response has been very different. For some groups, visas have been relatively easy to acquire; for others, it has been almost impossible. Varying visa entitlements also mean that some people have work rights, health entitlements and access to a wide range of services, while others are barely surviving. Concerns have been repeatedly expressed by the refugee sector, affected communities, experts and Parliamentary inquiries about these divergent and often inadequate approaches which can leave people living in uncertain and insecure conditions.
Australia needs a clear, equitable framework for humanitarian emergencies that would enable the government to provide a streamlined, predictable and effective response to assist people facing a real risk of persecution, extreme danger or other serious harm to find safety in Australia. It should be informed by Australia’s practices over time, as well as comparative practices internationally. It should also not be dependent on a person’s race, religion, or ethnic background – a lesson Australia learned long ago in dismantling the White Australia policy.
There has always been close coordination between Commonwealth immigration officials and ASIO to screen out any risks to Australian security. The arrangements are calibrated according to circumstances. The record shows they have been effective.
These humanitarian rescues have involved people from Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Latin America, Sri Lanka, Timor Leste, numerous African countries, Kosovo and Syria. The government decision to give temporary stay to thousands of muslim Kosovars was almost exclusively driven by broad community pressure arising from media coverage of their plight. The rescued people have at times been in the country of origin, a country of first asylum next to the conflict zone or in Australia. The Royal Australian Air Force has directly rescued people from war zones in Vietnam and Afghanistan.
Australia has never chosen to protect its security by excluding an entire population — men, women and children — from Australian assistance on the grounds that they are all in, or near, a war zone and dangerously suspect.
Australia has always found a way to bring in people from conflict zones By Peter Hughes, P&I
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