Ten-year-old George Al Daoud arrives in Australia with a declaration. “My English is … medium,” he announces, smiling broadly.
George and his family are among the fortunate first to be resettled in Australia under the new Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot, which allows community groups across the country to sponsor new refugees.
Displaced from his homeland Syria for nearly half of his life, George has barely had the chance to go to school.
For his father, Shadi, to see his 10-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter, Elinor, in a classroom will be the realisation of a dream.
“The most important thing for me is that my kids will start school, because they’ve never been to school before,” he says.
Shadi worked as an electrician in the capital Damascus before Syria’s brutal civil war sent him and his family fleeing over the border into Iraqi Kurdistan. Life there, Shadi says, was wearying. The family eked out an existence on the margins among thousands of displaced, mired in uncertainty.
Arriving in Sydney on a wintry, rainy Friday night, George and Elinor clutched a toy bilby and a koala, gifts from their sponsor group. They tried their first Caramello Koala chocolates.
Shadi said the chance to restart lives shattered by the brutality of war was a dream come true for his family.
“My kids have a basic idea about Australia, they have learned the capital cities, they have been learning a little English. We are so happy to come here, because here life is better than in our country. Here we have equality, we have greater opportunities, a better future.”
Australia’s Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot (CRISP) – which will resettle 1,500 refugees over the next three years – is based on Canada’s long-running Private Sponsorship of Refugees program. PSR has run uninterrupted for more than 40 years and resettled more than 325,000 refugees, in addition to refugees resettled by the Canadian government.
Refugees resettled under Australia’s pilot program will be counted as part of the federal government’s existing humanitarian program, but the immigration minister, Andrew Giles, on Friday committed to making future community sponsorship additional to the government’s intake.
“We will see up to 5,000 places through these programs, and these places, critically, will be in addition to those places for resettlement supported by the government,” Giles said.
“The community sponsorship program is something that can change our country as well as changing the lives of people in need of resettlement.”
Shayne Davy is the leader of an eight-person group, formed through the Gosford Anglican church, that is sponsoring the Al Daoud family to settle on the New South Wales Central Coast.
She said they had been through a “group mentorship” program to be ready to support refugees when they arrived.
“I think we are as ready as we can be. We work well together as a group, and we are passionate about this. We are ready to welcome this family into our community.
“We can’t solve the problems of the world but we can reach out to help a single refugee family where we can – and already it is bringing our local community even closer together.”
Sponsor groups are responsible for assisting refugee families with initial housing when they land, as well as assisting them in navigating the quotidian elements of life in their new country: opening a bank account, enrolling children in school, accessing Medicare and Centrelink.
But beyond that, they are a support network for a newly arrived family, offering “guidance in how to navigate life in Australia – explaining Australian culture, showing people how to catch the bus from A to B”, Lisa Button, the chief executive of the Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia (CRSA) told the Guardian.
Button has led the campaign for years for an Australian community sponsorship program. After years of lobbying, and an internal government review, the CRISP program was announced by the previous government in December. The first three families, referred by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, arrived in Australia this week.
“It is just so exciting to see it become a reality,” Button said. “It was a real leap of faith to push this idea for so many years. It’s such an elegant and simple concept that if you give everyday Australians the opportunity to be generous and compassionate, and you put them together with refugees, that they are going to help each other and it’s going to work.”
During the pandemic border closures, CRSA ran mentorship training programs, allowing family groups to assist refugees already in the country and to prepare them for new arrivals.
“It’s a real ‘tight-loose’ arrangement: it’s tight at the beginning, we screen the community groups, train them, give them support and a clear set of responsibilities, and then we say ‘it’s over to you’. People are incredibly resourceful and clever and capable. We give them the opportunity and then we get out of the way.”
Australia has attempted community sponsorship previously, but the models have foundered, flawed by being prohibitively expensive, small and restrictive in who was allowed to apply.
Critically, refugees resettled under those pilots were not additional to the government’s own resettlement quota – that is, for every refugee sponsored by a community group, the government resettled one fewer.
Giles’ commitment to delinking the future program from the government’s quota is a critical advance, advocates say.
“This is about everyday Australians looking at what is happening around the world and wanting to lend a hand,” Giles said.
“The Albanese government is committed to ensuring that in the future sponsorship programs such as the CRISP will expand Australia’s refugee intake by becoming additional to existing refugee numbers.”
Adrian Edwards, regional representative for the UNHCR – the body which refers refugees for community sponsorship in Australia – said in a world of almost unprecedented displacement, “it’s easy for people to feel powerless about the scale of the situation of refugees globally”.
“This project offers a chance for everyday Australians to do something practical and tackle the refugee challenge one family at a time.”
