By CAM LUCADOU-WELLS
FORMER asylum seeker Hayatullah Rahimi has fled the Taliban in Afghanistan and won permanent residency in Australia, but his struggles are far from over.
Mr Rahimi, appointed by Refugee Council of Australia as a Refugee Week ambassador, is a staunch advocate for refugee rights and determined to give back to his new homeland.
At Casey council’s Refugee Week forum on Wednesday, he described his experience of being an Afghan-Hazara refugee in Pakistan for eight years.
He arrived in Australia in 2007 – and was on a temporary protection visa until he gained permanent residency in 2010.
During his period on a TPV, Mr Rahimi was without a welfare safety net or a HECS subsidy.
So, unable to afford to study, he worked in a factory.
Mr Rahimi, who is studying a social work honours degree, works as a case manager supporting new arrivals and refugees.
“These people have gone through the same circumstances I went through,” he said.
He has also appeared on TV and radio nationally and internationally to share the experience of being a refugee.
“There’s a lot of Afghan people with their own businesses.
“They share their food, their culture – they are not a burden to Australian society.”
Refugee Council of Australia policy officer Asher Hirsch told the forum that it was time to link Australian values to “our human concern for persecuted people”.
That began with the national anthem that boasts of “boundless plains to share” for those who’ve “come across the seas”.
The anthem’s next line “With courage let us all combine” is the theme of this year’s Refugee Week.
Mr Hirsch said it took courage for refugees, who faced persecution in their homelands, to “step out into the unknown and… to start again from scratch in a completely unfamiliar land”.
Australians who spoke up against unjust treatment of persecuted people were also courageous albeit “on a much more modest level”, Mr Hirsch said.
He said a “humane and sensible approach” was to end offshore processing, get children out of detention and process asylum seekers’ claims fairly as they wait in the community.
He said refugees often made a positive difference – they were more likely to start their own businesses than any other group of migrants or Australian-born people.
Children of refugees were more likely to get better university qualifications, be professionals or managers, own their own homes than children of Australian-born parents.
More than 800,000 people had arrived as refugees in less than 70 years, he said.
“Australia is overwhelmingly a country of migrants and refugees.”
