“To gain that which is worth having, it may be necessary to lose everything else,” said the Irish civil rights leader Bernadette McAliskey. It perfectly describes the plight of those who sacrifice everything to seek asylum and refuge in another country. And there are now more people than ever before in this predicament. The numbers are important, whichever way you look at them. At the end of 2024, there were 123.2 million people who were forcibly displaced from their homes because of persecution, war, or human rights violations. Among them, 42.7 million were refugees and 8.4 million were asylum seekers. Australia currently offers 20,000 places per year under its humanitarian resettlement program. This number includes those applying both onshore and offshore for permanent protection. Australia's current humanitarian program limit is 0.00047% of the world's 42.7 million refugees, and 0.00075% of Australia's current population of 26.66 million. Despite these numbers, a perception persists in Australian society that there is a “refugee problem,” or, to quote the right-wing populist politician Pauline Hanson, that the country is being “swamped.” Which, it is—but not by refugees. It has been swamped by misinformation, and a quarter of a century of anti-humanitarian refugee and asylum seeker policies and prejudice. Australia was a place that once offered refuge and hope to those willing to lose everything to travel here, and I believe it is a country that can offer it to the world again.   

Northern Ireland in the early 1960s was a difficult place to live. Discrimination and political persecution were rampant, primarily by the majority Protestant and British population towards the republican Catholic community. Since the partition of the island of Ireland into North and South in 1920—the British establishment in the North feared reunification with the Catholic majority in the South. As a result, Catholics in the British occupied North were treated like second class citizens, disenfranchised from the legal and political system, denied housing and work, and forced to fend for themselves. “They breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin,” said Ian Paisley, the infamous Protestant leader, at a rally in 1969. Amongst those of the republican Catholic community, were my mother, her seven brothers and two sisters, and my grandparents. They were, in their own words, dirt poor, in the truest sense of the term. They lived on the charity of the Catholic Church, in a medieval bluestone building, on rural Antrim farmland owned by a local monastery. There was no running water, electricity or central heating. But there was a well nearby, kerosene lamps, and the solidarity of the republican Catholic community. The circumstances and injustice of their time led to a civil rights movement, driven by civil rights leaders like Eamon McCann and Bernadette McAliskey—and then the Troubles—which consisted of a thirty-year armed struggle against the Ulster Unionist and British military forces. 

In the early 1960s, my grandfather began running out of work. Although he was not politically radicalised, his Catholic identity meant he was treated differently—including being forced to sit at the back of the bus on his way to work. Over time, the work became harder to find.  My uncles faced similar treatment—upon leaving school, the only jobs available to them were as low paid labourers for local farmers. Any trade, formal education, or career, was systematically denied to them because of their ethnic identity like many poor Irish folks before them, so they decided to leave. First, it was two of my uncles, who moved to Melbourne, Australia, finding work on the railways. Followed soon after by my grandparents. The rest of the family followed; from the green fields of Antrim to the docks of Fremantle, and finally, to the eucalypts and sunshine of Melbourne. As they were “British subjects” the Australian government offered them a ticket for ten pounds, on a boat to the other side of the planet. The first few weeks in the country were a familiar migrant experience—living in a large shed in the western suburbs of Melbourne, with hundreds of other new arrivals, adjusting to the stench of summer and the mosquitoes. But they soon adjusted and adapted to a new world—one where they remain to this day.  

When war begins, or ends, so too does the movement of people. One of those movements occurred in August 2021. On August 15, 2021, after twenty years of armed conflict, the Taliban recaptured Kabul, and the American military forces withdrew. The images from that time, of desperate Afghan people clinging to plane wheels, looked similar to the fall of Saigon forty-six years earlier. “Those who fail to learn from history are forced to repeat it—let us hope that we will not have another Vietnam experience and that we have learned our lesson,” said the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) station chief, Thomas Polgar, before he was evacuated from the enclosing Viet Cong in 1975. Arguably, another “Vietnam experience” was had in the War in Afghanistan. They had not learned their lesson. And once again, an immense humanitarian tragedy and movement of people would follow. Following the US withdrawal, the local Afghan Hazara population faced renewed persecution from the Taliban regime and its affiliates, like they had twenty-five years earlier. Like the South Vietnamese in 1975, they fled their homeland any way they could, clinging to the landing gear of an outgoing American aircraft, or travelling thousands of kilometres in the hope of finding refuge and resettlement abroad.  

In August 2021, as an early career lawyer, I joined a volunteer legal service in Melbourne which offered to help the persecuted Afghan Hazaras still in Afghanistan, hoping to apply for offshore humanitarian Australian visas. Over the course of a few months, a team of lawyers, paralegals and refugee advocates gave advice, legal information and assistance to a number of Hazaras in Afghanistan. Australia was just one country on a long list of many others, where they hoped to find a safe haven. Given the caps on the humanitarian program, and the yearlong processing time for applications, we had to explain the significant obstacles the Australian government placed in their way. The year prior, Australia had granted just under 6,000 combined offshore and onshore humanitarian program visas. Considering other options like the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), New Zealand, the European Union, and Canada, was a necessity. In 2021, amidst a postwar refugee crisis and an ongoing pandemic, we couldn't offer them more than a lodgement receipt, and an estimated wait time of several years.  

The history of Afghan immigration to Australia dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. Colloquially known as “cameleers” many Afghans migrated and worked in central Australian desert regions as camel drivers, transporting goods, including wool bales and other agricultural resources, across the harsh Australian desert. Their experience with similar conditions at home equipped them and their animals for the job. Without them, the course of development of regional and outback Australia would have been very different, long before the luxuries of rail transportation in that part of the country were made possible. To this day, their memory lives on in different parts of South Australia, Western Australia and the Northern Territory. The name of “The Ghan,” a cross-continental train that carries tourists 2,900 kilometres from Adelaide to Darwin, is perhaps one example. It is unknown whether the train's name is a direct homage to the nineteenth century Afghan cameleers. However, their legacy lives on in the wild camels that roam across the deserts of central Australia—and their memory amongst some Aboriginal communities, who lived and worked alongside them. Above all, they are a reminder of a more welcoming multi-cultured past—a distant time where we shared a closer connection to those now vilified as “The boat people.” 

Nearly a century after the cameleers were replaced by rail and truck, another Afghan legacy in the Australian outback was created. On the 2002 Easter holiday weekend, about 40 refugees, some of whom were Afghan, scaled the barbed wire fences and indefinite misery of the Woomera Immigration and Reception Processing Centre, into the freedom of the land of golden soil. Onshore processing centres like Woomera were introduced in an attempt to deter the so called “unauthorised arrivals,” who had been coming to Australia to escape persecution in parts of Central and Southeast Asia. Woomera had housed up to 1,500 people at any one time, despite only being designed to house 400—and the centre was receiving international attention for its human rights violations. It was all part of a new hardline approach on the intake of refugees and asylum. In response to the Tampa affair in the year prior, Prime Minister John Howard declared to the Australian Parliament that “we will decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come”—a notorious phrase which has characterised Australia's approach to refugee policy ever since. The Tampa affair began when his government denied a distressed fishing vessel—the MV Tampa, carrying 433 asylum seekers and refugees, most of whom were Afghan and suffering from dysentery and malnutrition—from being able to stop at Christmas Island. The Howard government justified their cruel decision by relying on a technicality from an agreement with Indonesia from 1990 that Christmas Island, although being an Australian external territory, lay within waters which were the responsibility of Indonesia. In reality, they hid behind this reason so that they could implement a tougher policy on so called “unauthorised arrivals,” to garner political favour with a growing electoral base supportive of restrictive refugee intake. The Minister for Foreign Affairs at that time, Alexander Downer, told the Australian Parliament that “it is important that people understand that Australia has no obligation under international law to accept the rescued persons into Australian territory.” The refugees on board were eventually taken to Nauru before being resettled in New Zealand as refugees. Both the Tampa affair, and then the Woomera breakout, signalled the dawn of a new century and a new era of hardline Australian refugee policy.  

Following the Tampa affair, the so-called idea of “border protection”—in a country surrounded entirely by ocean—became a political football, and a populist catch cry. It turned electoral campaigns, and shaped political careers. It has been the justification for cruel and unforgiving refugee policy to this day. In the words of the self-described architect of Operation Sovereign Borders, Scott Morrison, border protection meant “the denial of permanent residence” to those seeking asylum, through the use of indefinite offshore detention, and “stopping the boats”—or the practice of turning away “unauthorised boat arrivals”—at sea. This operation built upon the systematic cruelty created under John Howard's similarly dystopian Pacific Solution, which began the indefinite offshore detention of asylum seekers in places like Nauru and Christmas Island. The objective of these policies was fundamentally anti-humanitarian, and politically self-serving— designed to reduce the number of boats turning up in Australian waters and prevent another Tampa or Woomera incident. The lives and wellbeing of those seeking to exercise their lawful right to seek asylum under Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees were overlooked, dismissed and forgotten about. The only numbers the Australian government really cared about were the number of unauthorised boat arrivals, or to be more specific, the number of boats themselves, rather than the number of human beings on them.  

In August 2024, I stumbled across a rug store in a local high street in Melbourne. Whilst looking through the store, I found a handmade Persian rug, made in the foothills of the Afghan mountains. The rug was interwoven with dark burgundy, purple, and blue fabric that sparkled and shone in the late afternoon sunlight. The owner struck up a conversation with me. “This will last you a lifetime,” he said. It was all I needed to hear, so I bought the rug. We struck up a conversation, and he then told me his story—one of Afghan emigration, and the pursuit of asylum 20 years earlier. He had escaped the Taliban's authoritarian regime, travelled across Southeast Asia, and joined one of the many dehumanised boat people of the Tampa and Woomera era who endured immigration detention, until his claim was processed. His story had a happy ending—he was ultimately resettled and his family later joined him to build a new life. His skill as a rug maker and businessman led him to create the store where I now stood. But the recent return of the Taliban had endangered the lives of his friends and family back in Afghanistan. They had already applied to the Australian humanitarian program, but they were unsuccessful—there weren't enough places. He asked for my help, so that they could make an application to another country, and in the coming months I found them assistance.  

Australia hasn't always been so restrictive with its refugee program. In 1949, following World War II, the Chifley government offered 89,200 places under its refugee resettlement program. This continued under the Menzies government throughout the 1950s. Between 1947–1953, this included 170,000 displaced people from Europe. Between 1945–1965, two million migrants arrived in Australia under the Assisted Passage Scheme. Amongst those, included my mother and the rest of my family. In the 1970s, following the wide scale displacement of the Vietnam War, the Fraser government offered 22,500 places under its refugee resettlement program, which despite being less than the Chifley government era, still exceeds the amount offered today. The current humanitarian cap is worsened by the fact it combines both onshore and offshore components of the program—a feature introduced by the Howard Government. This has only extended processing times and put more people—who are entitled under international law to seek permanent protection and resettlement in Australia—into purgatory. As of 2023, there were approximately 70,000 people waiting for either a primary decision on their application or a review or appeal. It only makes sense that the humanitarian program should be separated between onshore and offshore applicants, as is done in every other country offering a resettlement program.  

At the front door of my family home, we have a sign that says “céad míle fáilte,” which means “One hundred thousand welcomes” in the Irish language. Welcoming people into your home is a big part of Irish culture and hospitality. It is something my family has done since they arrived in Australia in the 1960s. In the early years, my grandmother would cook for whoever happened to be at home that evening. The family home would often be filled with friends and neighbours. No matter who they were, they got some stew, a scone or a cup of tea handed to them. Growing up, I found the same kind of hospitality when visiting an Italian Australian household, a Vietnamese Australian household or a Greek Australian household. The migrant experience in Australia has been one of a hundred thousand welcomes, to my family, and to many others. There are now four generations of my family in the country, from southern Tasmania all the way up to far north Queensland. There are nurses, social workers, carpenters, teachers and lawyers. All from a 10-pound ticket, and the promise of a place free of persecution.  

From the mid-nineteenth century until the early twentieth century, the circumstances in which refugees and migrants came to Australia—to quote John Howard's 2001 phrase—“was acceptable.” Acceptable as a form of essential labour to transport goods and materials through the vast Australian outback. Acceptable to a colonised country seeking to industrialise and develop. In the height of this period, before the introduction of motor vehicles and trucks, the Afghan cameleer was offered refuge and asylum. Over the course of the twentieth century, the circumstances in which millions more migrants and refugees came to Australia—whether by assisted passage, like my family, or via humanitarian resettlement like the Afghans or Vietnamese—was also acceptable. But since 2001, as a result of reactionary politics, and uncompromising refugee policy, that has all changed. The circumstances of those continuing to seek asylum and refuge have not changed since 2001—yet the refugee policies, and quotas, have. In 2025, in a world facing the immeasurable horrors and humanitarian tragedies from the wars in Palestine, Ukraine, and Myanmar—and the worsening issue of climate displacement—the demand for offshore and onshore resettlement will only continue. Like we have before, we can, and must, offer more to the world. To reimagine that famous quote from John Howard, we can decide who comes to this country, and the circumstances in which they come.