Hassan Elhassan has been sick, and his voice carries a quiet weariness. But, as ever, there’s work to be done.
The 33-year-old works as a consultant for a Sydney IT firm, but his day runs far beyond the nine-to-five. As soon as he finishes work, he commutes to a second job – a six-hour-shift at a local cafe that often closes up after midnight.
It’s a work ethic driven by a desperate need to support his family of six.
“They are all dependent on me,” the Sudanese-Australian tells Guardian Australia. “We are struggling throughout this whole time, with no visible end to it.”
Elhassan has lived and worked in Australia for eight years, but his parents and siblings arrived in Australia just one year ago on hastily arranged visitor visas.
They were fleeing Sudan’s violent collapse, the latest iteration of intractable civil war during which 20,000 people have been killed and 10 million displaced.
With his family’s assets lost to war and bank accounts inaccessible, Elhassan has moved house to accommodate them and burned through what little savings he had to support them.
It means he can no longer afford to apply for a partner visa to reunite with his wife from whom he has been separated for over 18 months.
Today, his family live on the shaded uncertainty of bridging visas. They can access healthcare in Australia, but can not access income or housing support. They are forbidden from working or studying. Newer arrivals from Sudan, he notes, have even fewer rights.
Elhassan’s family situation is a stark illustration of Australia’s inconsistent response to migrants who have fled humanitarian crises around the world.
For some national cohorts, there are specialist humanitarian visas which grant access to Medicare and social services, work and study rights and pathways to permanent residency.
For other groups, there are only some – or none – of these.
“Why are Sudanese [people] treated differently?” Elhassan asks.
“It grows this anger within people.”
Some can barely survive in Australia
Over the past three decades, Australia had issued at least 25 different visa types to assist people forced from their homes by humanitarian emergency, according to a policy paper from the Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law.
“When crises threaten lives, the Australian government often steps up – but not always in a predictable, efficient, equitable and effective way, if responses to Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan and Gaza are anything to go by,” the policy brief reads.
“For some people escaping these conflicts, travel to Australia has been relatively easy; for others, impossible,” the brief, written by Prof Jane McAdam and Dr Regina Jefferies, says.
“Some people who reach Australia have rights to work, study, healthcare and support, while others are barely surviving.”
The brief found asylum seekers from Ukraine were able to apply for temporary visas, which were valid for three years, carried work and study rights and allowed access to healthcare.
For Afghans escaping the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in August 2021, 15,000 humanitarian visas were offered by the Australian government over four years.
However, those visa holders could not then apply for permanent protection from within Australia.
But the Australian government did not create a special humanitarian visa regime for people fleeing conflicts in Gaza or Sudan, leaving those people to apply for a limited number of visitor visas.
The brief proposes an “emergency visa” to help people forced to flee humanitarian crises overseas, arguing a dedicated visa would streamline and depoliticise Australia’s response to emergencies overseas.
“We only need to look at Australia’s response to recent crises around the world to see how different it’s been if you contrast the visa situation for people fleeing Gaza than from those fleeing Ukraine,” Prof McAdam told the Guardian.
“Australia has extremely well established, longstanding and rigorous systems in place to check identity and security … but clearly there are political elements at play otherwise we wouldn’t have seen such diverse responses to the four conflicts.”
The proposed emergency visa would allow people to travel quickly to Australia, be valid for at least 12 months and have a pathway to a permanent visa if it was not safe or possible for a person to return home.
Critically, the visa would provide access to government services, including Medicare and Centrelink, as well as the right to work and to study.
People from an affected country already in Australia would be automatically granted a visa extension.
The Guardian put the policy proposal to the office of the home affairs minister, Tony Burke, who acknowledged “a lot of thought has gone into the proposal” and noted “some of the features described are worthy of consideration”.
‘We could care for them’
The call for an emergency framework has been echoed by others working in the humanitarian sector, including the Refugee Council of Australia and Amnesty International.
“We raised this as early as [December last year], when we first saw the initial numbers arriving from Gaza and that there was absolutely nothing on the ground,” Settlement Services International’s (SSI) chief executive, Violet Roumeliotis, told the Guardian.
She said settlement services were not told where and when new arrivals were landing in the country, where they were living or what support they were entitled to.
“People are going straight to the community, and the first you know about it is when people present with a range of issues,” she said.
“They are homeless or they have no income support, they are unwell and have no access to health.”
Community networks are also feeling the pressure. Amad Mohamed, a representative of the Sudanese Australian Advocacy Network, says he has been getting calls for help every day.
“They have no home to go back to … Their life has been in danger.”
“When they’ve reached a refuge, they are actually struggling to access services.”
Roumeliotis said the government services needed were available: “It is just a matter of coordinating and activating it.”
And when the system works, it can work well. When Afghans fleeing the fall of Kabul arrived in Australia, SSI members were at the airport.
“We were there from the moment they arrived, and then they were in our care. We were able to refer them to diaspora communities and other supports, state-based and civil society organisations,” Roumeliotis said.
What followed was a coordinated briefing of police and housing, education and health officials, on the needs of arrivals.
Roumeliotis said the call for a consistent response to those fleeing humanitarian crises was made more acute by Australia’s current political debate on visas.
“[It] vilifies a whole community,” she says.
‘No light on the horizon’
In western Sydney, Hassan Elhassan says he is out of the house from 8am to midnight, almost every day, “with no light on the horizon”.
He says it is hard to watch his parents and younger siblings struggling to adjust to Australia, the language and cultural barriers, and feeling further isolated by the restrictions of their visa regimes.
“It’s kind of adding to the pressure … struggling throughout this whole time and with no visible end to it.
“Because we don’t know, we don’t know when it’s just going to come to a conclusion.”
