By Cam Lucadou-Wells
A Dandenong refugee advocate is pleading for lonely asylum seekers to be visited by their estranged overseas partners and children.
Wicki Wickiramasingham, a former Southern Migrant and Refugee Centre director, has written to Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Immigration Minister Alex Hawke to plead for family reunions.
In fleeing for their lives from their homelands, people seeking asylum have been separated from their close family members for up to 15 years, he says.
Such as a local Tamil asylum seeker who has waited in limbo on a temporary protection visa after leaving behind his wife and three young children in Sri Lanka.
Now his children are growing into adults without him.
In the meantime, the man is not allowed to sponsor their families to even visit them on a temporary basis.
He, like many others, is weighing up whether to risk going home and being “killed by the government troops” in order to see his family again, Mr Wickiramisingham said.
“His children are in their late teens and they don’t know their father. Covid has spread worldwide, and many are anxious to see their families.
“They don’t want to go back, but it’s like their only option – to apply to the United Nations to go back to Sri Lanka and hand themselves over to the Government.
“They don’t know what’s going to happen to them.”
Mr Wickiramasingham is proposing that TPV holders are allowed to sponsor their families to join them for between three or five years.
“We’re not asking for money but just for the right to visit them.”
Many have lingered on temporary protection visas for years, awaiting a decision without deadline on whether they can stay in Australia.
Some asylum seekers are deprived of work rights and income support. It forces them to work “cash in hand” or to seek charity handouts to survive.
There’s been no sign that the Government or the Labor Opposition will relent on current asylum seeker policies, he says.
Greater Dandenong is leading a multi-council campaign to improve asylum seeker rights ahead of the federal election.
The Back Your Neighbour campaign calls for a single refugee status decision process and an independent, timely and fair merits review.
It wants temporary protection visas for refugees replaced by permanent humanitarian visas.
They are also calling for the massive backlog of asylum applications and appeals to be heard, and for access to Medicare, income support, work rights and mental health services.
