The new government gives me hope that the cruel limbo of temporary protection visas might end
Australia has given me refuge – but it’s conditional. I’ve been living here for the past decade, temporary visa to temporary visa, never certain of my future. This is the experience of 31,000 other refugees like me living on a brief lease of life.
After battling almost insurmountable obstacles to seek safety in Australia, living in this limbo with a temporary permit is extremely stressful, especially for people who are already living with a lot of trauma.
We fled our home country because we were persecuted there, but our persecution continues today in Australia.
Yet the federal election results have given people like me hope.
Refugees seeking asylum are forced to leave their home country, to find a safe place to survive and build a new life. They hope that they can feel safe and be reunited with their families and loved ones. But Australia’s refugee policies have punished us and tried to break us in many ways, by keeping refugees permanently on temporary visas and separated from their families.
Tragically, this brutal policy pushed people to the breaking point including one of my close friends who took his life last year.
During the election campaign the Labor party committed to abolishing temporary protection visas (TPV) and safe haven enterprise visas (SHEV) and grant refugees permanent visas.
Upon election victory, the Albanese government has created a sense of hope in the refugee community – hope that we will see an end to this constant emotional suffering and we can reunite with our loved ones.
The ALP has been in government for more than a month now but so far there has been no commitment to scrap these cruel measures as promised. I receive calls daily from friends and other refugees on TPVs and SHEVs, asking when they can apply for the permanent visas, but more importantly when they might be able to see their families.
Due to this uncertainty, we have always felt second-class citizens in Australia.
We are deprived of the right to be reunited with our children, partners and loved ones. We don’t have the right to get loans to buy a house, to extend our businesses or to secure permanent employment because of our temporary visa status. We are not eligible to get fee-help to study leaving thousands of bright, young refugees without access to formal education and prospects for the future.
It is encouraging to see strong support in Australia for the abolition of TPVs.
The UNSW Sydney’s Kaldor Centre for international refugee law published a policy paper on Tuesday providing the government with expert advice on how it can shift temporary visas to permanent visas.
The tools and expertise are there, the Australian people have voted for it. We now need the Australian government to end this emotional suffering and give us hope to live peacefully and to rebuild our lives: enough is enough.
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I would hate to lose another refugee to this interminable suffering.
Finally, we can dare to hope that we will be equal to our Australian friends, we can go to university, be reunited with our families and have a home.
After a decade of hopelessness, we again feel alive and hopeful. We are looking forward to building our lives in safety at last.
• Zaki Haidari is a 2020 Australian Human Rights Commission Human Rights Hero, works at Amnesty International Australia as a refugee rights campaigner and an ambassador for the Refugee Advice and Casework Service (RACS)
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. In the UK, Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123.Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org
the same attack group and blew himself up in a bar in the final stages of the attacks. She said Abdeslam’s family was bereaved, just like her family were.
Returning to Paris for the verdicts, Alexander said: “I addressed Salah Abdeslam directly because I felt that we’d been through a similar experience, from two different sides. I wanted to point out that we were all in this room together because of something that came from intolerance and hatred, and this democratic process that we were going through was the flip-side of that …”
She told Abdeslam of the trust her family had set up in Nick’s name, which grants musical equipment to small charities, in order to show the defendants that “something beautiful had been created from the awfulness that they left behind”.
Alexander added: “The humanity of the trial will probably be the overwhelming thing that I and my family take away from it … Spending over 10 months in the same room as people who have lost relatives, or who have survived unimaginable things, with the people that created those unimaginable things … the humanity of what you see is phenomenal.”
Tony Scott and Justine MertonScott had gone to the Bataclan gig as a birthday celebration. Flying in from Leeds, they arrived late, so “fortunately” headed up to the balcony rather than their usual stalls. When the gunfire began and the attackers reloaded, they escaped up a stairwell, through a skylight onto the roof and through a bedroom window into an apartment. Three hours later, they were rescued by firemen’s ladder, “rather than being taken back down through the massacre site”, Justine said. Tony added: “But I still remember climbing down those ladders at the front of the building and there were bodies lying in front, on the floor, of people who had probably been out drinking in the bar. That sticks with me.”
Justine observed that several of the accused had, at the end of the trial, suggested they had been “affected” by survivors’ accounts. She felt that was important and worthwhile.
Being in court had also strengthened their “emotional bond” to the close-knit community of survivors who they call their “Paris family”.
There had been a young child sitting behind them at the gig – during the concert Justine had asked Tony to move so he didn’t block the boy’s view of the band. But they had wondered ever since what had happened to the boy in the attack. His mother’s evidence in court was the first detail they had on his survival and recovery.
Sébastien Lascoux, was the 36-yearold manager of a community radio station in Paris, when he invited his friend Chris to the Bataclan gig. Lascoux survived the attack, eventually escaping from the stalls over “a tangle of bodies, but not wanting to step on them or hurt them, so I apologised to them as I went”. Chris was killed as he tried to shield another friend from the bullets.
“Before I spoke at the trial, I was afraid of being overcome by emotion, I was afraid of speaking in front of the accused and becoming emotional in front of them,” Lascoux said. “In the end, I did cry while giving testimony, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to be a voice for Chris who was no longer there to speak himself.”
He said he was glad to have added his voice to the accounts of that night. But after testifying he was laid low with “extreme fatigue” for 10 days. He no longer goes to gigs and left his radio job, the journey to which had involved him walking past the Bataclan every day.
“As survivors, we all have different backgrounds and we felt things very differently, but the kindness and the feeling of understanding among us has been incredible,” Lascoux said.
Georges Salines, whose daughter Lola, 28, was killed at the Bataclan, was present at almost every day of the trial and testified about his loss.
“What I felt from the start was the absurdity of these terrorist attacks where young people killed other young people,” he said. “I asked myself for a long time why I felt no hatred. I understood it when listening to the sister of another attack victim, Father Hamel, killed in Saint-Etienne du Rouvray. She said: ‘We were so sad there wasn’t any room left for hate.’ I found that very true.”