Nation needs these people
HOW is that a country can chance its arm running a migration program that accepts refugees with no demonstrated work skills and often gaping holes in their background, yet thumb its nose at an upstanding family invited here to work in the first place and has not stopped working since?
How do we reconcile the prospect of deporting as good a bloke as the Scottishborn electrician Mark Green, when we rolled out the welcome mat for a layabout like Man Haron Monis, whose name occupies a special place in infamy as the perpetrator of the Lindt Cafe atrocity?
Just to be clear from the start, none of the above is intended as an attack on the refugee program. Australia is the richer for the contribution that successive waves of migrants have made, be they people who have come here seeking refuge from war or starvation, others who came under targeted skills programs, as Ten-pound Poms or as business migrants. I am not advocating any winding back of these programs and believe if anything they should increase, especially for people from Ukraine given the hell they have gone through, and the Afghans who have suffered under the Taliban.
But the case of Mark Green and his family is such a no-brainer, rendered more absurd by the innate riskiness of the practice of accepting people as refugees on trust that they will fit in and put in.
The thing about Mark and his family is that they don’t need to be taken on trust, as they have already earned our trust.
Mark arrived from Scotland 10 years ago and settled in Adelaide with his wife Kelly and daughter Rebecca. As I mentioned, the reason he came was simple. We asked him to. Mark is an electrician and 10 years ago there were big gaps in the labour market for sparkies working in the solar panel industry. Those skills shortages are even worse today.
So Mark left his life in Scotland and came to SA to start a new one here. He did so because we needed him to and asked him to. Since then Mark has been on the tools every working day of his new life here, save for a couple of occasions when the solar panel companies employing him went under. At no stage has he sought or received a single cent from Centrelink. When his former employers folded he dusted himself and found new work as fast as he could.
His wife Kelly has worked hard, too, and has a great circle of workmates at Vili’s Bakery, the iconic SA business that supplies pies, pasties and sausage rolls to the nation’s supermarkets.
Their daughter Rebecca studied hard and did well at Adelaide’s Seaview High School, a modest public school where, as non-citizens, the Greens were forced to pay a whopping $8000 a year in fees to the state government so she could attend.
Rebecca finished Year 12 a couple of years ago and wants to study a health degree at UniSA so she can work in aged care tending to the elderly. But she’s not allowed to, because she’s a non-citizen.
Aside from working so hard, and showing such a demonstrated commitment to their new home, the reason for the Greens imminent departure is absolutely not their fault. A former employer of Mark’s stuffed up his work visa paperwork and then lied to him about it, meaning the family is now on a bridging visa, and was meant to get on a plane back to Scotland at 10.40pm on Wednesday. If not for a call from SA Premier Peter Malinauskas to the federal Immigration Minister Andrew Giles, they would have landed back in Scotland a couple of days ago. Now, mercifully, Mr Giles has indicated he will look at their case and extend their stay by one month, during which he will decide whether to use his ministerial decree to grant them permanent residency. It should be the easiest decision in the world.
I have seen one key criticism that has the effect of urging the minister to say no.
The argument goes that by having granted permanent residency to the Nadesalingam family from Sri Lanka earlier this month, the Minister risks creating an ad hoc migration program where cases are decided on the whims of populism. Let’s look at that case. While I have no issue with the Nadesalingams staying as they seem like decent people based on the assessment of their supporters, they did not arrive here legally, and they were also not found to be refugees. If they got a yes from the Minister, how would the Greens get a no?
Beyond that, there is a baseless argument being made that another exercising of ministerial discretion would reinforce the precedent set by the Nadesalingam case. This view presupposes that the use of ministerial discretion is a new thing. It isn’t. It has been around for years and exercised for years.
While in Sydney, I became mates with a couple of asylum seekers at the Villawood Detention Centre, one of whom we successfully lobbied the former Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone to release into the community.
This country needs people like the Greens.