A former child refugee wants to make it easier for groups to sponsor families seeking asylum in Australia

Shankar Kasynathan describes himself as a “reluctant refugee”.

Just three years old when his Tamil family was forced to flee Sri Lanka as it descended into a decades-long civil war, he had little understanding of the chaos unfolding around him.

It was only later he was told the stories.

“No one flees their homeland lightly. My parents were academics, and they thought the university would be immune from the problems of the conflict, but they were wrong.

“My father had student friends, liberal friends … and he was ordered by police to the notorious fourth floor of the criminal investigation department building [in Colombo] and interrogated. Police ransacked our house, and my mother remembers hiding my older siblings in the neighbours’ attic, as Tamil homes around us were burnt.

“There were occasions when our whole family, including me, had to seek refuge in the homes of strangers. There were also times when … my sisters and I were left with Sinhalese neighbours, out of fear the end was near.”

Forced to abandon their home, Kasynathan says his family spent “every dollar we had” to board a flight to Australia.

“And a generous family was there at the airport to greet us. We slept on their floor – all six of us – for two weeks, until we found a council-managed property in the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne. That was our beginning in Australia.

“My parents later bought the house: they live there still.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shankar Kasynathan and his family, and his host family in Melbourne in 1987. Photograph: Shankar Kasynathan

Kasynathan and his family came to Australia under the community refugee settlement scheme, instituted by Malcolm Fraser’s immigration minister Michael MacKellar in 1979, to create a network of groups that would provide financial, material and social support to newly arrived refugees.

The scheme was designed to allow families and community groups the opportunity to help with Australia’s refugee resettlement, but also as a way to ease pressure on government migrant hostels, then overflowing from the exodus of refugees from the conflict in Vietnam and Cambodia.

While there were reported issues with some groups being ill-equipped to help refugees with especially acute needs, particularly around health, the scheme was widely considered a success. Over two decades, it assisted about 30,000 refugees to Australia, before being ended under John Howard in 1997.

New Zealand to raise refugee quota in 2020 Read more

In 2013, community sponsorship was reintroduced in a trial, at the recommendation of the expert panel on asylum seekers instituted by the Gillard government. In 2017, that pilot program was transformed into the Community Support Program, set at 1,000 places from within Australia’s humanitarian migration program.

But Australia’s new scheme is riven with deep systemic flaws, lawyers, refugee advocates and diplomats from across the world have said.

The Australian program is:

small, limited to just 1,000 places a year;

expensive, more than three times the cost of comparable schemes overseas, costing a community organisation about $100,000 to sponsor a family of five, with an application fee alone of $19,000;

restrictive – available only to refugees between 18 and 50 who have functional English and a job offer in Australia or skills that make them “job ready”.

As well, and most critically according to advocates for reform, any refugees sponsored by the community are not additional to the government’s resettlement commitment, currently set at 18,750 places a year.

Instead, any community resettlement efforts subtract from the government’s responsibility: for every refugee resettled by a community group, the government resettles one fewer.

Critics have argued the program is outsourcing the government’s refugee resettlement commitment to community groups and adding nothing to the sum of global protection for the world’s displaced.

Kasynathan is now Amnesty’s face of a nationwide campaign – My New Neighbour – to celebrate and support, but also to reform, community sponsorship of refugees in Australia.

“The reality is, the current program is awful,” Kasynathan tells Guardian Australia. “But it’s the one on the table, and we can mould it to be better. And there is community desire to make it better. There are communities across the country working towards this, showing love towards new neighbours.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shankar Kasynathan is the face of a campaign by Amnesty International to promote community sponsorship of refugees in Australia. Photograph: Chris Hopkins/The Guardian

Canada’s program – known as the private sponsorship of refugees (PSR) – is considered the gold standard globally. It has run uninterrupted for 40 years, and over that time has resettled more than 288,000 people in the country.

It is cheaper than Australia’s program by about two-thirds, costing on average about $30,000 to support a family of five. There is no application cost. Sponsors are required to commit to providing “emotional and financial support to the refugee for the full sponsorship period” and raise the equivalent of one year of social security.

Crucially, Canada’s scheme adds to the government’s commitment to resettle refugees.

What is Canada like for a refugee? Read more

When the Canadian government committed to resettling an additional 25,000 refugees from the conflict in Syria, Canadian community, church and family groups resettled an additional 15,000, bringing the total number of people resettled from that conflict to 40,000.

The Canadian program has even resettled refugees from within Australia’s offshore detention regime: Amir Taghinia was held by Australia on Manus Island for four years before a Canadian family and their neighbours sponsored his move to Vancouver last year. He remains there, now an active campaigner to help resettle new refugees.

Ahmed Hussen arrived in Canada alone, as a 16-year-old refugee from civil war-torn Somalia, in 1993.

He is now the country’s minister for immigration, refugees and citizenship.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Canada’s minister for immigration, Ahmed Hussen. Photograph: Fred Chartrand/AP

Visiting Australia, he tells Guardian Australia that community sponsorship is no silver bullet to the world’s refugee displacement issue, but could be a valuable tool that enables developed countries to boost their resettlement numbers and help more people who needed safety find it.

“The numbers are staggering: the need for protection for refugees is at its highest since WWII. And I don’t think resettlement in industrialised countries is the only answer: it’s one of the tools.”

And he says Canada’s sponsorship program has not only provided sanctuary for refugees seeking it, but transformed Canadian society.

“I’m not going to tell Australians what to do, but what I will say is for Canadians, the point of the private sponsorship program is to add to the capacity of Canada as a society to provide more settlement spaces for refugees, not less. The private sponsorship program is supposed to add to the efforts of the government, it is supposed to give an outlet to private people for their generosity.”

Hussen says research in Canada has consistently shown refugees brought to Canada under community sponsorship resettle more quickly and more effectively than those brought to the country under the government’s resettlement scheme.

“Privately sponsored refugees learn the language faster, find jobs faster and in greater numbers, and they form stronger bonds within their new communities,” he says.

“But those bonds work both ways; what we have found is that once a group of people sponsors a refugee or refugee family, they are transformed by the process. You become almost like family members. And so for the sponsors, refugees are not an abstract, they are real people.”

Under the Canadian program, sponsors are legally required to support refugees for a year, but most end up involved in their lives beyond that, sometimes for decades.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The town of Shelburne in Nova Scotia sponsored this Syrian refugee family, now settled in Canada. Photograph: Amos Roberts/SBS Dateline

So established is the program, it is entering its second generation: former refugees brought from Vietnam to Canada under the program in the 1970s and 80s are now sponsoring refugees displaced from Syria.

The United Kingdom had no background in private refugee resettlement before it began its own community sponsorship scheme in 2016.

Russell Rook, from the Good Faith Partnership, tells Guardian Australia “we were starting from scratch. I like the Igor Stravinsky quote ‘talent borrows, but genius steals’. Pretty much what we’ve done is stolen the Canadian model, adapted to our own purposes”.

The UK model requires community groups to raise £9,000 (about $16,000), which is kept by the community group to pay for additional expenses beyond those borne by the government: housing, benefits, medical services and education.

Community groups are usually a core of around 10 people, with a broader community of about 30 for additional support.

The first sponsor in the UK was the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby. Rook’s church in south-west London was the second.

The UK program has begun small, but Rook says, there is enthusiasm for significant expansion.

“There are three things we are seeing that is happening: the first is it changes the lives of the refugees ... it offers them an effective welcome … there is a whole community around them, the program helps children into school and adults into employment and accelerates their integration into the community.

“Secondly, it changes our lives as a community… most of the groups are already onto settling a second family, or helping other groups become sponsors.

I gave a room in my house to a refugee – now she’s like my sister Read more

“And thirdly, it changes the story about migration and resettlement in our local areas. The process of sponsoring refugees invites communities to ask, ‘what kind of community do we want to be’.”

Other countries around the world are also harnessing the power of community groups to aid refugees. In July, ministers of immigration from Canada, the UK, Argentina, NZ, Ireland and Spain co-signed a statement pledging to promote community resettlement in their own countries and elsewhere.

In Australia, boosting community sponsorship has support across political divides. In May last year, the Nationals’ Andrew Broad and Liberal MP Russell Broadbent supported a motion from Labor’s Tim Watts championing an increase in Australia’s community sponsorship program to 10,000.

Broad told parliament of the revitalisation of the community of Nhill, in his electorate in western Victoria, brought by the arrival of Karen refugees from Myanmar. The sponsored refugee program had “not only brought a labour force into the town, it’s changed the culture of the town, it’s opened the hearts of the people in the town”.

Victorian town gets $41m benefit from resettling Burmese Karen refugees Read more

Announcing the Community Sponsorship Program in May 2017, assistant minister for immigration Alex Hawke said: “The CSP will provide a sustainable model of private sponsorship for refugees that minimises costs to governments and increases the chances of successful integration and settlement outcomes.”

The program formally began in March 2018, but Guardian Australia understands only one grant of visas was made under the scheme for 2017-18.

A spokesman for the Department of Home Affairs says the government will assess demand for the new program and the level of community and business support.

“There will be future opportunities for review of the program as it matures, and a strong response to the CSP in its early days provides a sound basis for examining its effectiveness.

“While the program is still in its early days, the department has been pleased to see it has generated a strong and positive response from the Australian community.”

The spokesman says entrants to Australia under the community sponsorship program recently started arriving in Australia, “and the Australian community are actively supporting the new entrants to commence their life in Australia”.

The chief executive of the Refugee Council of Australia, Paul Power, has been advocating for a community sponsorship program in Australia since 2009. He says Australia has the potential to build a world-leading program.

“Australia has been welcoming refugees for the past 70 years, it is a really positive part of the national story. And we need to be talking up our contribution.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A 2015 demonstration in Sydney to support refugees after a now-iconic photo of a three-year-old boy drowned on a beach in Turkey broke hearts around the world. Photograph: Daniel Munoz/Getty Images

“But the problem with the current community sponsorship model is it is subsidising the government’s resettlement commitment. It’s doing, and paying for, the work that government has said it would do.”

He says the scheme, in its current configuration, only really attracts interest from people with a direct personal connection to refugees who would otherwise not be able to come to Australia “and who see this as the only path”.

“It really restricts the pool of interest to a small group.”

Power says the other serious disincentive is cost.

“For a regional community group to get together to raise $100,000 knowing the main beneficiary is the treasury and that it is not adding anything to the sum of protection globally, there is very little incentive.

“The scheme, as it’s currently structured, is not harnessing the goodwill that exists out there in the Australian community.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shankar Kasynathan with his parents at their house in Mount Waverley, Melbourne. Photograph: Christopher Hopkins/Chris Hopkins for The Guardian

Kasynathan says he has sensed a groundswell of community support for sponsorship, across the country, and particularly in rural and regional areas. Eleven councils around Australia, including Sydney City Council this month, have passed motions supporting community sponsorship.

The ACT legislative assembly also unanimously passed a motion calling for the community sponsorship to be reformed, made cheaper and more accessible.

Among those troubled by the controversies of Australia’s hardline asylum regime towards boat arrivals, Kyasnathan says there is a desire for concrete action to assist the world’s displaced.

“This alternative pathway can be a truly powerful tool for resettlement in Australia. But it’s not just the pathway, it’s also the shifting of mindsets in Australia, changing hearts and minds about what it means to be a good neighbour.”