Humanitarian visa announcement
The Australian Immigration Minister Alex Hawke announced on Friday 21st January that the Morrison Government will provide at least 15,000 places, through the Humanitarian and Family Stream program for Afghan nationals. Priority will be given to those who worked for the Australian Defence Force or Foreign Affairs and to vulnerable minority group, including women and children. ‘This reflects our sustained commitment to Afghanistan following Australia’s two decades of operations in the country’. Read the full statement here.
The response from refugee advocates has been swift, pointing out that people had been calling for this in September last year, without action from the Government. ‘People wrote, forums were held, stories shared of people being tortured and killed. People in the know asked for 20,000 ADDITIONAL places back then’. And, these 15,000 are from our existing intake of humanitarian visas, not additional. The announcement is 15,000 places over 4 years, from an existing allocation. Not one new refugee place has been allocated to the program. 5,000 places are simply family visas in the existing program.
15,000 visas for Afghans and 150,000 applications. One migration agent working to support a number of Afghans noted that no reference numbers have been received thus far for applications lodged including some very high profile cases in immediate danger. NONE of the 3,000 visas currently submitted have been processed.
Julian Hill MP says ‘Afghan-Australians have been waiting for years as the government has actively discriminated against them, failing to process their family visas. These people have never met their own children, or missed their children growing up. The Taliban are hunting people down right now. The government’s announcement on Afghanistan is insulting and offensive to Afghan Australians who have been here since 1860, to Afghans who risked their lives for our country who’ve been abandoned, and for Aussie veterans’.
We are in an election year for the Federal Government, so all announcements need to be analysed for truth, purpose and motive. This announcement by Alex Hawke needs that kind of scrutiny.
Article by Lisa Visentin in Sydney Morning Herald on 22 January 2022
Afghan human rights advocates have condemned the federal government’s “insulting” pledge to resettle 15,000 refugees from the war-ravaged country through Australia’s existing humanitarian channels over four years, as they renewed calls for a special intake similar to that made to Syrian refugees in 2015. Immigration Minister Alex Hawke announced the commitment on Friday hours after a Senate committee delivered a report scathing of the government’s failure to evacuate many interpreters and other locals who helped the Australian Defence Force before Kabul fell to the Taliban last year.
Barat Ali Batoor, a photographer who fled Afghanistan in 2012 and now lives in Victoria as an organiser at the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, said the announcement was “insulting and disappointing” and was an attempt to distract from the Senate inquiry’s findings. “Those who have helped us have been left to the mercy of the Taliban and many of them are facing heavy consequences for their support to the Australian troops.”
Arif Hussein, an Afghan-Australian and lawyer at the Refugee Advice and Casework Service, said the Australian government was failing its moral obligation to support the Afghan people. “This announcement doesn’t even begin to recognise the relationship that we had to the war – we spent 20 years there, lives were lost there – the promises we made to the Afghan people and the escalating humanitarian crisis that the people of Afghanistan face right now. It does not include additional humanitarian places for those fleeing the Taliban. In previous crises that the Australian government has reacted to – for example, the Syrian crisis – we have provided additional humanitarian places.” He said the allocation of 15,000 places over four years paled in comparison to the 145,000 Afghan nationals the Department of Home Affairs said were seeking resettlement through the Humanitarian program.
(Click on the link to read more of Lisa’s article)
