DIMA earlier this year touted the establishment of a multi – million dollar community care pilot program to provide practical assistance and aid to high risk asylum seekers (eg aid for housing, health, provision of Red Cross caseworker). At the time we were hopeful that this was the start of a genuine change by the department in its approach to caring for asylum seekers. However, in reality we have seen very little of this.

This is a program that is almost a year old and has provided assistance to less than 20 asylum seekers nationally! NGO’s have to make referrals to DIMA for clients to be considered for this program and then the decision rests with the department.

The serious problems with this project are:

  1. DIMA refuses to provide guidelines for eligibility for this program
  2. DIMA refuses to explain why an asylum seeker may be rejected from this program
  3. DIMIA continues to refuse many many high risk asylum seekers, for example it took 2 applications for DIMA to accept into this program a terminally ill man with only months to live, having rejected him the first time
  4. DIMA continues to deny access to many of the asylum seekers most in need
  5. The process for accessing the program is bueracratic and unresponsive to the crises faced

DIMA will need to make significant strides quickly for this program to really be anything more than a shallow PR campaign promoting the idea that they are really caring for at risk asylum seekers. It is a real shame as this program was a great idea with wonderful potential but the good will is just not there at the moment.

Kon Karapanagiotidis
CEO
ASRC