When Deepa Chaudhary’s newborn slept, she used the time to find out what support she could get as a permanent resident in Australia. The answer was: not very much.
Chaudhary moved here from India four years ago and worked until her baby was born in January last year. She describes the stress and mental health issues of being a new mother in Australia.
“You’re supposed to get a maternity payment, but I didn’t meet the residency test so I didn’t get it,” she says. She does get the Family Tax Benefit now.
In his budget reply speech, opposition leader Angus Taylor said people got welfare “as soon as they arrive” in Australia.
But refugees, international students, those on temporary visas, and permanent residents all face various waits for – and varying access to – any government help at all.
For example, there’s a four-year wait for the parenting payment, and 10 years for disability support.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia email“[Taylor’s] proposal would mean that people who are living, working and paying taxes in Australia would be excluded from accessing the very supports they help fund,” says Settlement Services International chief executive, Violet Roumeliotis.
“Permanent residents already face waiting periods of up to four years for many social security payments.”
Chaudhary says surviving the wait to get any support is hard enough, let alone the difficulties getting citizenship.
“My husband has to work two jobs, three jobs, so you don’t have support from your partner either. As much as he wants to, he has to pay the bills,” she says.
Taylor used the popular rightwing slogan “mass migration” three times in his speech, in which he pledged to slash immigration and strip non-citizens’ access to supports, including the national disability insurance scheme, jobseeker, youth allowance and the Family Tax Benefit.
The speech prompted Barnaby Joyce – the former Nationals leader who defected to Pauline Hanson’s One Nation – to thank the Coalition “for basically reading off the One Nation script”.
About one in three people living in Australia were born overseas.
To become an Australian citizen, most people must have been a permanent resident for four years. After that, the application and processing time can take more than a year.
Two of Australia’s biggest groups of immigrants are from China (732,000 people) and India (more than 970,000 people), neither of which allow dual citizenship (although Indians can get an overseas citizen registration).
That means migrants wanting to become an Australian citizen also have to give up their homeland citizenship. That could make it harder to visit friends and family, and could rob the new citizen of property, investments and pensions in their homeland. In many countries non-citizens can’t own property or assets and won’t get pensions.
Chaudhary says it would be an emotional and economic blow to give up her Indian citizenship.
“I have my roots there. I have my parents there. My husband has his parents there. We have ancestral property, houses, land. We’d have to give that up.”
Quizzed on what he would say to those permanent residents, many of whom have worked and paid taxes in Australia for years or decades, Taylor told the ABC they were “not forcing anyone to give up anything”.
“We’re saying if you want access to the privileges which we believe should be privileges of citizenship, you need to become a citizen.”
He has said Australia doesn’t control the decisions other countries make on dual citizenship, and has emphasised that the changes will not affect people who already receive support.
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre called Taylor’s speech “disgraceful” and said Taylor claiming non-citizens get welfare as soon as they arrive in Australia was a lie that demonised migrants.
Migrant scapegoating
Eric Ma came from China to study at the Australian National University in 2010. A newspaper article on the deadly 2009 bushfires prompted him to study environmental science, which led to a long career – all while a permanent resident.
Now that he’s no longer a Chinese citizen, he would have to apply for a visa to visit his parents (China has suspended this visa requirement for the moment, but the suspension is only temporary).
“It’s a tough situation, the older people begin to perish … you can’t wait 26 days for a visa to be issued,” he says.
Last year, Ma became an Australian citizen. He now works in the legal sector with people injured in the workplace, and can see the necessity of programs like the NDIS.
“Mr Taylor’s grand policy … shows how tough he is on new migrants, but it does not help anyone,” he says.
“I think politicians across the spectrum need to see migrants as people, as humans.”
He says politicians often ignore the contribution of migrant communities, who come, work, pay tax, and often bring family wealth with them.
The Chinese Community Council of Australia says the move came “amid a broader trend … of increasingly negative rhetoric surrounding migration, including narratives that unfairly blame migrants”.
The Australian Council on Social Services says permanent residents already have to wait four years for payments including jobseeker, the parenting payment and Youth Allowance, and 10 years for disability support and the aged pension.
“Meanwhile, people seeking asylum are often already cruelly denied work rights and left destitute with no access to income support at all,” says chief executive officer, Cassandra Goldie.
Anneke van Mosseveld arrived in Australia from the Netherlands in 1971. She is now 79.
She spent decades completing her doctorate in business history, working as an academic and running her own business.
“I came here originally as a backpacker, but I soon found work. I’ve been working all my life, paying tax,” she says.
The Netherlands, with some exceptions, does not allow dual citizenship.
“It means I will lose my Dutch government pension, which we get automatically in Holland.”
That pension, unlike the Australian pension, is not means tested, and she would be eligible for about 20% of it, for her life spent there up until the age of 24.
“It’s quite a lot of money,” she says.
As a permanent resident, she doesn’t have an Australian passport, which means she can’t use some of the Australian Taxation Office’s online functions.
Taylor has also faced criticism from within his own party. Senator Andrew McLachlan told ABC radio on Tuesday he had “deep concerns” that the Coalition policy would create “two types of members in the community”.
“If you’re both contributing to the wealth of the nation and one is entitled to certain entitlements, you could have almost a form of a strata-ing of our society,” he said.
“And I’m not sure that’s the Australian way.”
