Greater weight should be given to vulnerable minority groups in Australia’s humanitarian intake, particularly those displaced by conflict in Syria and the Middle East, according to the Australian Christian Lobby.
Lyle Shelton, the group’s managing director, says the re-opening of a debate about Australia’s refugee intake by the new Rudd cabinet this week was an opportunity to asses whether vulnerable ethnic and religious minorities were getting a fair go under Australia’s current system.
“There are around 1,000,000 Syrian refugees in Lebanon including those from vulnerable Syrian minority groups such as Alawites, Christians and Druze,” he said. ” Many of these have lost confidence in the UNHCR processes and were not registering because it locked them into a slow and arduous process. ACL would like to see some flexibility in our humanitarian program so that an allocation could be made for some of these people.”
Mr Shelton says the ACL believed “a greater weighting system should be applied to vulnerable persecuted minorities to ensure that they have a fair chance of being eligible for placement in Australia”. “It is important that our humanitarian program is calibrated towards people who are in the greatest need.”
The ACL has supported moves to increase Australia’s intake from 13,750 refugees per year to 20,000. The increase was announced by then Prime Minister Julia Gillard in August last year. It had been one of the key recommendations in a report on Australia’s asylum seeker policy written by a government-appointed expert panel.
