Category: Refugee Stories

Bare Floors and Hidden Vaults

How Australia protects old wealth and forgets new workers

by Bob Wilson, COFA Committee

This month, I read two articles that left me thinking about two very different kinds of invisibility.  The first is the hidden wealth of a million trusts tucked inside this country’s financial architecture — a $3.1 trillion arrangement that, as one commentator put it, “beggars belief” in its purpose. The second is the invisible poverty of a young Afghan man I’ll call Mohammad, who has spent the past two years in a bare Housing Trust flat in Adelaide, sending nearly every dollar he earns back to two families — both on the other side of the world, one waiting on a visa. Both kinds of invisibility are deliberate. One takes expensive legal advice to construct. The other costs nothing, because nobody told Mohammad  (not his real name) there was any other way.

The SBS piece I stumbled across while scrolling through my morning news feed explained how discretionary trusts — the family trust variety — allow wealthy Australians to distribute income across beneficiaries who happen to occupy lower tax brackets: a couple, three non-working adult children, perhaps a niece or nephew for good measure. The trustee decides each year who gets what, steered by whoever has the most favourable “tax profile” — which typically means whoever earns the least.

This opaque system has doubled in size in twenty years. It is perfectly legal, extraordinarily popular among those with assets to protect — rental income, share portfolios, family businesses — and until now, essentially invisible to most of us. Babies, the article noted with something approaching dark comedy, can receive distributions from testamentary trusts and claim the adult tax-free threshold — a concession, as one law professor observed, on behalf of a great-great-grandparent the infant never met.

Babies as tax instruments. You have to admire the creativity, if admire is quite the right word.

Mohammad is twenty-nine. He drives a truck during the week and an Uber on weekends, still paying off the car. He met the truck’s Pakistani owner at his mosque, which is how these things often begin — someone from the community, someone who speaks your language, someone who seems to know how things work here.

The owner suggested he come and drive for him; register as a sole trader and get an ABN from the tax office — “better for both of us.” What was not mentioned — what is rarely mentioned — is that the ABN arrangement strips away sick leave, annual leave, and superannuation. No safety net. No accumulating retirement savings. Just a flat payment and the illusion of independence. For new arrivals from countries where worker protections are unheard of, and where informal arrangements are simply how the world works, there is no reason to suspect the offer is anything other than generous.

So this month, we joined Mohammad and his wife, Fatima, to welcome her arrival in Adelaide. We knew she had spent two years teaching herself English online while waiting for her visa — two years of patient, determined study in a country where formal education for women is banned. She was preparing for a life she could only imagine.

Her smile and her spoken English were remarkable. Far ahead of Mohammad’s, if truth be told. He had long since abandoned his free TAFE English classes, deciding that working seven days a week was the only option available to him.

Judi and I met them at a restaurant for dinner. We talked about the flight, her family at home, first impressions of the city. She asked about schools, about the neighbourhood, about whether there was a library nearby. She had plans. Later in the week, we helped her navigate her first encounters with Australian bureaucracy — Medicare, a bank account, the paperwork that comes with beginning.

We then dropped her at their community housing unit, and she invited us in for the first time. The flat stopped us both in our tracks.

It was bare in the way that takes a moment to fully register. A thin mattress. A small table. Almost no furniture to speak of. Not the set-up of someone who hasn’t had time to settle in — the set-up of someone who made a decision, every week for two years, to send the money home instead. Two families supported on the wages of a man working seven days, sleeping on a mattress, eating simply, asking for nothing.

I confess I felt something uncomfortably close to shame. I had helped Mohammad with his documents. I had followed Fatima’s visa application through every frustrating bureaucratic turn. What I had never done — not once — was sit down and ask him how he was being paid.

I know that the people who design and use family trusts are not villains. Most are doing what their accountants recommend, operating within rules that successive governments have chosen not to change — until, perhaps, now. The Albanese government has announced a thirty per cent minimum tax on discretionary trust income from 2028. A furore that has dominated the news cycle for days. The Australia Institute cautiously welcomed the change. Several accounting bodies promptly described it as “disruptive.” The right-wing shock jocks declared it the end of civilisation as we know it.

The arguments, as always, are complex. Farmers use trusts. Small businesses use them. The line between legitimate succession planning and systematic tax minimisation is not always crisp.

But here is what is now plain. The wealthiest ten per cent of Australian households hold more than ninety per cent of private trust wealth. And the workers least likely to benefit — wage earners, casuals, those paid through informal arrangements — are also the workers most vulnerable to being told, by someone they think they can trust, that an ABN is the smart move.

What troubles me most is that the community connectors — I don’t know what else to call them — are themselves often migrants who found a foothold early and now pass on what they learned, or what suits them. Their message is dressed as opportunity: become your own boss, minimise your tax, take control. What it omits is the dismantling of protections that took Australian workers generations to win. Sick leave. Annual leave. Super. These are not perks. They are the floor beneath everything else.

Mohammad didn’t know there was a floor. He was living on bare boards, quite literally, while someone else quietly removed it.

Fatima moved through that sparse flat with a quiet dignity that made me want to look away from my own discomfort. We made offers of help with furniture. She had plans. She was already, in the best possible sense, arriving.

I made a mental note — more than a note, a commitment. When the time is right, I will sit down properly with Mohammad and talk through his working arrangements. What he’s owed, what he’s entitled to, and what it would take to move him from conveniently contracted to properly employed. It is, I’m aware, a conversation I should have had two years ago.

Australia has a million trusts and a system for protecting the wealth of people who already have it. It has rather fewer systems for protecting the wages of people who are earning it for the very first time, in a country that can be generous or exploitative depending, largely, on who greets you at the door.

Mohammad was greeted at his mosque — or it could just as easily have been a neighbourhood church. I hope that, in some small way, we can do better by him now.

Refugee Week 2026: A Million Stories

Over the last few weeks, Judi and I have been on a mid-year break, visiting family and friends interstate. The travel was fun — by plane, then train, then car.

As we loitered in the main street of a small country town, my attention was drawn to a poster on the noticeboard outside the Community Hall. Refugee Week 2026: A Million Stories. Someone had blu-tacked it slightly crooked, which felt about right for this year’s celebration. Nobody straightened it. People had other things on their minds.

It is June, and in Australia that means winter — cold mornings, shorter days, and the particular kind of political chill that has been settling over the immigration debate for the better part of two years. The newspapers and internet feeds scream numbers at us. Migration caps. Net overseas arrivals. Housing shortages blamed on the wrong people in the wrong tone of voice. Politicians competing to sound toughest on borders, as if compassion were somehow a character flaw.

Into all of that, quietly, Refugee Week arrives — as it always does.

This year it carries extra weight. Forty years ago — November 1986 — a couple of hundred people walked through Sydney in a street procession that nobody much noticed. Afghan families. Eritrean families. Vietnamese families. A picnic in the Domain afterwards, organised by a small charity called Austcare and a retired army general who thought the world should do better. It was a modest beginning for something that would eventually spread to more than twenty countries. Australians, it turned out, have a talent for welcome — even if their governments and elected politicians sometimes forget it.

And now, in 2026, Australia has just issued its one millionth humanitarian visa since the end of the Second World War. One million people who fled something — war, persecution, the particular terror of having no good options — and arrived on these shores to begin again.

One million stories, most of them unknown to the people sitting next to them on the bus, in the waiting room, at the school gate.

Even on holiday, with my laptop closed on the desk at home, the WhatsApp messages find me. A family waiting patiently in Iran for their Australian refugee visas after escaping the trauma of Afghanistan. Then, suddenly, one morning, officials arrive at their door with the news that they can no longer stay. Bundled onto a bus heading towards a border they never wanted to cross again, they are now back in hiding in their own country, reaching out again for help. I have nothing to offer except short messages of concern — and the hollow feeling that comes with pressing send.

I’ve been thinking about that number ever since. One million. It makes me go quiet.

I’ve been volunteering with COFA and CRSA  long enough to know that behind every statistic is a Tuesday afternoon at my desk. A form that doesn’t make sense, submitted to a bureaucracy nobody asked them to understand. A home visit where a child does homework at the kitchen table while her parents try to decode a Centrelink letter. Conversations online or in person with families who made it, and families still waiting — and the complicated feelings that live in the space between those two sentences.

There are days when the gap between those two sentences feels like a chasm.

That family in Iran — let’s call them the family I cannot help — are not a statistic. They are a father who once had a job to support his family, a mother who once had a kitchen, children who once had a school. They escaped one country at war, waited patiently in another, and were then bundled onto a bus towards a border they never wanted to cross.

My WhatsApp response took about forty seconds to type. I stared at it for a long time before I pressed send. Thinking of you. Stay safe. We are here. Three sentences that meant everything and changed nothing.

This is the quiet shame of Refugee Week — the part that doesn’t appear on the posters.

And yet.

Forty years of this week happening — stubbornly, reliably, on the same patch of the calendar every June — tells me something. It reminds me that Australians keep showing up. Not the politicians, not always. But the people. The volunteers. The community circles. The retired army general in 1986 who thought a picnic in the Domain was worth organising. The COFA members in Adelaide who have been sitting across kitchen tables from newly arrived families for more than two decades, helping them decode the forms and the systems and the silences.

One million humanitarian visas. One million Tuesday afternoons.

I straightened the poster in my mind as we walked on down the main street of that small country town. Judi walked quietly by my side. The winter sun was pale and thin, but it was there. Somewhere on the other side of the world, a family I cannot help right now is waiting again. Somewhere in Adelaide, a family I can help was also waiting — and next week I would be back at my desk.

That will have to be enough. For now, it is.

Bob Wilson

Asylum seekers’ plea to the Minister for Immigration

Man from Manus

In our previous post we shared the wonderful news that Milad has left to settle in New Zealand. This is a translation of a letter Milad wrote to the Minister for Immigration seeking the exercise of the Minister’s power to intervene in his case. This was written before he was offered the chance to relocate to New Zealand. It is a heartbreaking read and a powerful documentation of a personal experience with Australia’s immigration system.

I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1988.

Today I decided to write all the events which happened when I started to come to Australia.

I travelled by plane from my country to Malaysia in May 2013 and then to Indonesia. I stayed in Bali for two days and after that I travelled to Jakarta by plane again. Me and eight other men who tried to travel to Australia stayed in one room together for 45 days. After that we travelled to another place in Indonesia. From there we were transferred to a boat to travel to Australia.

Before we got on the boat in Indonesia, we were kept in a house for 6 days, from 16 July to 22 July. They took our phones from us. They said this was necessary, so that the police would not know where we were. We had one bag each to take on the boat. It was a wooden boat and inside that boat were 74 other asylum seekers. At 5.00am in the morning, the boat started to move. We were on the water for 2 days and 2 nights. After this, the boat started falling apart from the middle. We were in international waters at the time. The water started entering the boat, and we only had one more day before the boat completely sank.

With a satellite phone we called the Australian coast guard and told them what was happening to us and they came with the navy, and they transferred us to the navy boat. Wewere taken to Christmas Island, arriving on 24 July 2013.

I have learnt that the Australian law changed on 19 July 2013, preventing resettlement in Australia for asylum seekers arriving by boat. We only found out about the change when we got to Christmas Island. We realised afterwards that the reason they took us to such a remote place and kept us in a room with no phones for 6 days, was so we would not find out about the change in law and could not change our minds about making the journey.

The Australian immigration told us that no one is allowed to come to Australia after 19 July. Anyone who tries to come after this date will be transferred to Manus Island on Papua New Guinea. We were told we could return to our country of origin, or we would be transferred to PNG. I couldn’t go back to my country so I waited to be transferred to PNG. After 15 days on Christmas Island, me and forty other men were transferred to Manus Island by airplane on 8 August 2013. Every week they transferred 40 men from Christmas Island to Manus.

When I arrived on Manus, they transferred me to Fox Detention Centre. It was a very old place. The facilities were very poor. It was actually not a detention centre. It was a military camp for PNG soldiers. It had been converted into a detention centre for the refugees.

Fox detention centre was very dirty and there was no security. Anyone from outside could come in. There were 200 refugees in Fox, with 5 toilets and bathrooms, and one big shelter as a place to eat. The food was dirty and unhealthy. Infested with insects.

When we first went to Manus there were two detention centres. After 5 months they started making two more detention centres. The new detention centres were named Oscar and Mike.

I spent one month in Fox Detention and then was transferred to Oscar. While I was there for four months, they were still building Oscar. It was made up of lots of big white tents. When it was finished, all the refugees in Fox were moved to Oscar, and new refugees were brought in to fill Fox again.

After four months in Oscar, I was transferred to the Mike Detention Centre, which was also not completed, and was being built while we stayed there. There were also two other detention centres, Delta and Charlie. 70 asylum seekers wh arrived in 2012 were kept there. At the time I moved from Oscar to Mike, those 70 were transferred to Australia.

In Oscar Detention, we had many difficulties with sleeping and hygiene and food and security and toilets and bathrooms. We did not have permission to use mobile phones. We could only use landline telephone twice a week for 30 minutes each time to talk with family.

Our mental and physical health was going down every day. There was more and more tension between us and between us and the guards. There were more fights. Also, local people came to the detention centre to beat us. We believed that this was pre-planned by Australian immigration. We believed it was to scare us and to push us to return to our countries of origin. That was really cruel.

Even if it was not pre-planned with no bad intention and everything just happened naturally, it still was so cruel to keep the refugees in a place that was very insecure and without any hygiene while they were having their claims processed.

When I was in Oscar detention, I became very sick with internal pain. I went to the IHMS. After a Doctor saw me, he decided to send me to the local hospital in an ambulance. When we arrived there, the  Manager of the hospital did not approve me to be treated there. I went back to the detention centre – a 45 minute drive on bad roads, very bumpy. This caused me to vomit from the pain.

When I arrived at the camp, the Doctor gave me a few pills and told me to go back to my room, and that I would get another appointment after a few days. I was living with so much pain over those days until the next appointment arrived. Days went by, and no appointment was made. I was in terrible pain all this time. [Until now, 7 years later, I have had no treatment for this issue, and I manage with Panadol.]

When I was transferred to Mike detention centre, living conditions were much improved. There were four people to each ship container. But we only had one very small fan in the room. During the daytime it was intolerably hot. You could not stay in the room. In the first month we were there, we received lots of different news about the Australian immigration policies which caused us to become agitated, and this led to a peaceful protest by the refugees, sitting on the ground with signs and flags.

On the second day, the refugees planned a second peaceful protest. At about midday, an Australian security guard warned the refugees that ERT would get involved, and that we
should not leave the detention centre.

The refugees began a peaceful protest at 6.00pm. But this time, some people outside the detention centre started throwing stones over the fence at the refugees. The situation escalated to the point where there was serious conflict between the refugees on one side and security personnel and locals on the other. At this point chairs, toilet paper, stones, and everything was being thrown around. I got hit in the head by a chair, and still have the scar.

After two hours ERT arrived. They advanced into the detention centre in formation, pushing the refugees back, and then they retreated in a line, and the refugees followed them. They went backwards and forwards, getting further and further out of the detention centre. The refugees did not follow them outside the gates because of what the Australian security guard had said to them. We could see police hiding in the jungle with guns, ready to respond to the refugees if they left the compound.

We understood afterwards that the plan was to make it look like the refugees were trying to escape into the jungle, which would give them an excuse to shoot them. After the ERT and refugees were going backwards and forwards for some time, but the refugees would not come out of the detention centre, the police in the jungle started shooting many times – maybe 40 to 60 shots. When this happened, the refugees scattered, retreating into the centre, back to their rooms. Then ERT, security guards and locals rushed in after them, and went to each room, dragged refugees out, and beat them.

Many of the local people and security guards who came into the centre were drunk and as well as beating us, stole our belongings, destroyed chairs, beds, everything. It was complete chaos. I was lucky because I did not to get beaten.’ After the riot, with one person dead, and about 270 seriously injured, many refugees decided to return to their country.

In 2015, a year after the riot, I also tried to return to my country, Iran, because I was under so much pressure mentally, and also great physical pain. I felt that it was better to go back to my country to something I knew even though it was bad, than to stay on Manus where I never knew what would happen.

When I applied to go back to my country, I expected I would spend a week on Manus, two weeks in Port Moresby, and then back to my country as had been the case for others. But nothing happened for many weeks. I later discovered that the Iranian government had changed its policy because Australia had forced two Iranians back, and lied about it to the Iranian government, saying they had returned voluntarily. After this, the Iranian government refused to accept refugees who wanted to return.

When a migration officer told me that I was not able to leave, this was the start of my mental health issues. I felt trapped on Manus, with no options, and complete uncertainty about what would happen to me. For the first year after I was refused the chance to leave, I was angry, frustrated and struggling mentally. I used my mobile phone to post messages to facebook against my government and against the Islamic religion. Soon after, my parents received an anonymous message telling them to tell me to stop doing these activities, or they would get into trouble. They would be locked in detention until I was returned to Iran. The anonymous caller also said that I was lucky that I couldn’t come back to Iran. After this, I deleted my facebook to protect my parents.

Once I deleted facebook, I had nothing to do, and this further affected my mental health. At the end of 2017, Immigration tried to send us to a different place of detention in Manus Island. No one wanted to go there and expressed their refusal. To make us move, they stopped all services, power, food and water to the detention centre. This lasted for 23 days. We were living on nothing. We tried to find water by digging a well. We escaped from the Centre at night to take food from the locals or find coconuts. By the end of the 23 days, we were very tired and wanted something to happen.

Finally immigration returned with the local police. We knew what was going to happen, so we gathered together, so as not to be separated. When the police returned, I was the person directly facing the police as they entered the compound. They took me and beat me with a stick on my legs, and pushed me towards a bus. They forced me to enter the bus. There was an immigration officer on the bus. He punched me in the mouth. This caused the inside of my lip to bleed. The police and immigration forced all the refugees onto 10 or 20 buses in a similar way.

On about 23 December 2017 we were transferred to a new detention centre 45 minutes away in the town, Lorengau. The people who had their claims refused were sent to the Hillside detention, and those who had positive claims were sent to west and east Lorengau detention.

I lived in this new centre until October 2018. During this time there were many difficulties. For example, the camp was burnt by a refugee on one occasion. When this happened, some refugees went to live with friends at East and West Lorengau. The rest of us lived in the centre while it was completely black from smoke damage. There was no kitchen to prepare food. Immigration would deliver pre-packed food to us from another Centre. This continued for about 1.5 months, after which they fixed up the Centre.

During this time, my mental health deteriorated. I cried 5 or 6 times a day for no reason. One day I decided to give away all my belongings to others, including my money, my clothes, my phone, my ipad. I was left with one pair of shorts, one shirt and my bed.

On 23 October 2018, I locked myself into my room, and covered the windows with plastic so that it was dark inside all the time. I didn’t want to talk with anyone, or eat anything. I did this for 40 days. I ate a few dates each day and drank water. I lay on my bed. I would sometimes sleep. And when I was awake, I just tried to go back to sleep.

During this time, people visited me from immigration, and mental health nurses. They put two officers outside my room to report on what I was doing every day. On 3 December 2018, they knocked on my door. I was asleep and did not answer. So they smashed through the wall to get into the room. There were officers, nurses, and doctors.

On 4 December, they took me to the detention centre medical clinic, and I was placed in a special area for people with serious mental issues. They gave me some medicine and took me back to my room (where I had spent the 40 days). I still stayed in my room, and was in the same state as before, not eating, drinking of getting out of bed.

On about 16 December, they came to my room and took me to a special mental health centre for observation. I was kept there for one week with two officers in my room. On 22 December, two doctors came to my room and told me I would be transferred to the hospital in Port Moresby the next day.

On 23 December, I was taken to the PIH hospital in Port Moresby on an emergency small Plane. While I was in the PIH, a friend learnt that I was there and arranged for a mobile phone to be given to me, so I could talk to them, and also to some lawyers. The lawyers made an application for me to come to Australia for medical treatment.

On 8 February 2019, I was taken by plane to Brisbane. On 9 February, I was taken to Royal Brisbane Hospital for a few weeks, and then to the Brisbane Immigration Transit Accommodation (BITA) for about 4 months. I was then transferred to MITA in Melbourne for two months. I was then returned to Brisbane and released into community detention with no visa. I could go out during the day until 10.00pm but I couldn’t work, study or travel out of Brisbane.

After about six months, in early 2020, I became aware of the COVID pandemic. There were many people coming in and out of my house, and I was fearful of them bringing in the virus. I contacted a friend in Adelaide and arranged to stay with them for one week until the viruswas gone. I tried to return to Brisbane in March 2020, but the state borders were closed and I was stuck in Adelaide. I told immigration what had happened.

Soon after this, I was granted a BVE for 6 months. 2 months after receiving the BVE, I started working in a café in Adelaide. I rented accommodation, and my health was improving. In September, just before my visa expired, I had a mental health crisis. Once again, I gave away all my possessions, including my car, my clothes, and most of the money I had saved from working. I asked my friend who took my car to take me to Cape Jervis. I then walked and slept in the bush for 4 days on the way to Adelaide. I kept sleeping in the bush for about four months. I ate almonds and dates. Red Cross knew about my circumstances and gave me a small allowance which meant I could buy some food to survive.

I thought my visa would renew automatically. A friend made inquiries of the immigration department and I found out that my visa expired. I made a fresh application for a visa and was told I would have to wait for the Minister to decide. This was a terrible blow to me because I knew I needed to stay occupied for my mental health, but without a visa I was not able to work. Instead I just lived in the bush for a few months. My friend with my car gave my car back because he was worried about me. I then slept in the car for two months. And then I stayed in the house of an Australian couple for 2 months. After this, I moved to the house of another Australian family where I lived for six months. When they moved into a smaller residence, I had to find new accommodation.

Throughout 2022 and 2023, I spent some time in private rentals, and some time sleeping in my car. In early July 2021, a migration agent made an application for a further BVE, and this was granted in August 2021. I have supported myself by working as a disability worker, or as an Uber Eats driver. I have been able to work about three days a week. The Circle of Friends charity assists me with $150 a week for living expenses. While in Adelaide, I have played high level soccer for Unley Jets and Sturt Lions, and I have been a volunteer assistant coach for an u15 team at Sturt Lions. It is now over 10 years since I arrived on Manus Island. I am now 35 years old, and I am desperate to resolve the uncertainty around my status in Australia.

Early on in my stay on Manus Island, Scott Morrison visited and said that we should all go home. The alternative, he said, is you could spend 10 years on Manus. Well, that time has now passed, and I am still living as a asylum seeker with no rights in Australia. I am not able to return to Iran. I fled because of concerns for my safety. I have been informed that even if I could arrange passage home, I would immediately be placed in detention, or forced to join the army and fight on the front line in Syria.

My claim for refugee status was rejected on Manus Island, and I was advised not to appeal that decision by an Australian lawyer. As I understand it, that process is now closed, and I have no means to make a refugee claim while I am in Australia. I put myself at your mercy. I humbly request that you exercise your executive discretion to grant me a visa so I can make a life in Australia and contribute fully to this country.