Chris Hayes (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges Australia is a major contributor to the Syria humanitarian response plan, designating approximately $220 million dollars to Syria and neighbouring countries between 2016 and 2019;

(2) notes that:

(a) western Sydney is a primary settlement region and has received one-fifth of Australia's recent humanitarian intake, as a result of years of ongoing conflict in the Middle East; and

(b) local health, education and migrant service providers, particularly in Fairfield and Liverpool, are running beyond their funded capacity and as a result, have been put under considerable pressure when trying to assist families to settle and integrate into our local community; and

(3) further acknowledges:

(a) that the insufficient funding to support these frontline services has widened the gap between supply of and demand for settlement services to support vulnerable individuals, particularly from the minority Christian, Assyrian, Chaldean and Mandaean communities; and

(b) the need to effectively invest in the settlement of refugees to enable them to integrate into the community, fulfil their potential and make a positive contribution to this country.

Western Sydney's played a very significant role in the humanitarian response of the government to, in particular, the Syrian crisis. In my region, which encompasses Fairfield and Liverpool in New South Wales, we received 7,000 of the 12,000 refugees who came as part of that special humanitarian response. I think it's well known that my area, as a matter of fact, did the heavy lifting on the government's response to the Syrian crisis. However, and pretty regrettably, the funding allocated through resettlement of refugees in my region in no way reflects the level of response that has taken place. Multiple migrant resource service providers have felt the impact of government cuts when it comes to settlement services. This has meant that crucial services to ensure the quality of settlement have been affected and the level of support to the migrant families in most need has certainly been downplayed, and, in many cases, neglected.

Earlier this year I met with the New South Wales Settlement Partnership program, who voiced major concerns about the narrowing ability to provide the local community with the full suite of programs that migrants, and particularly refugee migrants, need to properly settle in a local community. The Western Sydney Migrant Resource Centre emphasised that in the 2017-18 financial year, through settlement casework support alone, they provided services to over 12,000 individuals. However, despite this increase in the services provided by the Western Sydney MRC, their funding was cut by 30 per cent. What does this cut mean to an organisation like that? It means that they had to halve the youth support services that they delivered. It also meant they had to cut the number of employment participation workshops from 35 in the year to just four. I understand that for another organisation, CORE Community Services, the cuts meant that they lost three full-time positions and one part-time worker, which has put a heavy strain on that organisation in the delivering of settlement services. I spoke to Carmen Lazar from the Assyrian Resource Centre. She also raised concerns about the risk of not being able to provide elderly refugees who are isolated and suffering from numerous health issues with the necessary social cohesion activities and educational support.

With the rapid influx of refugees into my area, the resource centres are now struggling and are reaching a breaking point where they will not be able to actually do the necessary work to help people properly settle and assimilate into this country. This has also meant that the gap in supply and demand of these settlement services has widened to such a point that the services are falling way short of being able to provide our local community with what's needed to actually help people settle properly.

Proper resourcing of these organisations—and not the continual cutbacks we have seen under this government—is not just an investment in the lives of these emerging communities; it's actually an investment in the future prosperity of our nation. Only last month Oxfam released a report on the impact of family separation on refugees and humanitarian migrants in Australia. They found that there is a direct correlation between the size of our refugee and humanitarian intake and the nation's long-term productivity growth and economic performance. For a government that is constantly banging on about delivering Australia a better economic future, wouldn't you think that, in respect to Labor's policy on refugee intakes, the correlation with our future economic benefit would be an incentive for the government to properly fund settlement services for the refugees that it has committed to? By increasing funding to migrant services now, not only do we support vulnerable migrant families but we effectively invest in their futures. These benefits will ultimately flow to second- and third-generation migrants and will go a long way towards helping them make a positive contribution to this nation.

See this speech in context