Published: 25 October 2022
Last updated: 5 March 2024
Last month two Hazara families flew into Sydney from a Turkish refugee camp to start a new life, thanks to a group of refugee advocates. STEVE MEACHAM asks one of the group’s founders how they did it.
The meeting at Sydney airport last month between nine Muslims and the diverse group of volunteers including Jewish men and women who had helped orchestrate their safe delivery from Turkey was always going to be emotional - despite the fact they’d never actually met face to face.
Sure, the two families - one of five, another of four - had corresponded with Anna Buch and her fellow refugee advocates by Zoom. But that’s not the same as landing in Australia and knowing you’re finally safe and having a real roof over your head.
“We picked them up at the airport and took them out to the house and apartment we’d arranged for them in Merrylands (a suburb in western Sydney),” Buch explains.
“Rather than get them short-term accommodation for a week or two, we got them homes they could live in while we sorted out other things that needed to be done – like signing them up for Medicare, English lessons and public transport.”
How Buch and her fellow refugee advocates came to be at Sydney airport is a long and inspiring story.
Around 1500 refugees will be resettled under the CRISP project. It’s based on a Canadian model; private citizens get together and support a family coming into the country, financially and physically.
Buch is a co-founder of Supporting Asylum Seekers Sydney (SASS), formed in 2013 by a bunch of concerned citizens who began visiting Sydney’s Villawood Immigration Detention Centre every week because they felt none of Australia’s major political parties were showing the compassion refugees deserved.
SASS has since had to show flexibility amid Covid and changing government policies. These first nine refugees arrived as part of the Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot (CRISP), a partnership which was launched in July between the federal government and Community Refugee Sponsorship Australia (CRSA), a charity which matches refugee families with families able to support them.
