A few years ago, during the turmoil in Afghanistan, a friend of mine and his family were offered a humanitarian pathway to Australia by the Coalition government. They arrived carrying trauma, uncertainty, and a fragile hope that safety might eventually become stability. Today, they are still building that stability – appointment by appointment, physio session by physio session – while relying on the national disability insurance scheme (NDIS) to support their son’s rehabilitation, who was left paralysed after illness.
Like many humanitarian migrants, my friend is not distant from policy debates – he is simply too busy surviving them to follow them closely. He has not yet heard that the Coalition, which once supported humanitarian resettlement, is now proposing a significant tightening of welfare eligibility: restricting access to a range of supports, including the NDIS, to citizens only.
On one level, the argument is familiar. Public systems are under pressure. The NDIS now costs tens of billions of dollars a year, and both major parties have been seeking ways to control growth and ensure long-term sustainability. In that context, it is politically straightforward to argue that citizenship should define access to publicly funded support.
But this is not only a question of budget discipline. It is a question of what kind of social contract is being quietly rewritten.
Under the proposal, access to about 17 payments and services – including disability support, carer payments and parental leave – would be limited to citizens. For many migrants, that line does not fall at the start of their journey, but somewhere in the middle of it.
Because for many migrants, citizenship is not an entry point. It is an endpoint. It comes after years of living, working, paying taxes, raising children and building lives in a country that already feels like home. The years before citizenship are not marginal – they are where most of the migrant experience actually unfolds.
I know that space well: the waiting periods, the repeated forms, the effort of proving continuity in a life still being rebuilt, the constant checking of eligibility before asking for help. It is where contribution comes before recognition, and where belonging is felt long before it is formally granted – but always with the reminder that it is conditional.
The proposed changes harden that conditionality. They draw a clearer line between those who are fully entitled and those who are not – regardless of contribution, length of stay or level of integration. In doing so, they reflect a broader political instinct seen in other democracies: tightening access to welfare around legal status.
In the United States under Donald Trump, similar instincts shaped policy and rhetoric, linking access to services more explicitly to formal belonging and prioritising citizens in the language of fairness and sovereignty. The effect was not only exclusion at the margins, but a narrower understanding of belonging itself – less lived and participatory, more legal and conditional.
Australia is not the United States. But it does not need to replicate that model to move in a similar direction.
What makes this proposal significant is not only who it excludes, but how it reshapes responsibility within the social contract. It suggests that contribution before citizenship matters less than formal status. That paying into a system does not necessarily guarantee access to it. That vulnerability – whether disability, caregiving, or early parenthood – should be treated differently depending on legal standing.
There are, of course, real pressures behind this debate.
The NDIS for example is under sustained financial strain, and ensuring its long-term sustainability is a legitimate policy challenge. But sustainability is not only about restriction. It is also about the values a system protects while reforming itself. A system that draws sharper lines risks becoming not only leaner, but narrower in its sense of responsibility.
For migrants, the effects do not exist in isolation. They sit alongside visa precarity, housing pressure, and a long and complex path to citizenship. Together, they shape how belonging is experienced: whether it feels secure and gradual, or conditional and uncertain.
My friend is still working long hours, still taking his son to appointments and hoping each session brings a small improvement. He is also, quietly, still waiting – like many others – in the space between contribution and recognition.
Australia’s migration story has long been built on a simple idea: that people arrive, contribute, and gradually become part of the country not only through law, but through life. Policies that narrow access to care risk changing how long that journey feels – and who is fully allowed to complete it. Because when welfare becomes a border, it does not only define who is inside or outside the system.
It defines how long people like my friend and me are made to wait before we are fully seen as belonging.
• Shadi Khan Saif is an editor, producer and journalist who has worked in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Germany and Australia
