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Food drive comes with a message of hope
Brunswick and Coburg residents urged to dig deep for asylum seekers
Mark Phillips
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Just days after celebrating the 25th anniversary of its opening, the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre is calling on the community of Brunswick and Coburg to demonstrate their support for refugees this weekend.
The ASRC will hold its annual food drive near Coburg Station on Sunday.
Donations are required to stock the organisation’s food banks in Footscray and Dandenong which support hundreds of people each day.
On Monday, the ASRC marked a quarter of a century since it was formed by Kon Karapanagiotidis on June 8, 2001.
It began with a modest food drive after Karapanagiotidis, then a lecturer in social work at Victoria University in Footscray, noticed increasing numbers of desperate asylum seekers in his local area.
He was not to know it at the time, but 2001 would be a momentous year in the history of Australia’s refugee program. It was the year of the Tampa standoff, John Howard’s “we will decide who comes to this country” speech, the beginning of offshore processing and the “children overboard” scandal.
Coburg resident Jana Favero, who is deputy CEO of the ASRC, says that while some things have changed for the better since 2001, the rise of One Nation and right-wing populism has generated renewed hostility towards refugees and asylum seekers from parts of the community.
“By coming along and donating food, it is an action of solidarity with people seeking asylum and refugees more broadly,” said Favero, who lives near Moreland Station with her partner and their young children.
“It also is really important at the moment to send a message of hope and welcome to people seeking asylum.
“The toxic narratives, [the] racist sentiment is only increasing. People are reporting to us that they’re witnessing and also being the target of racist abuse more and more in recent months, and a really good antidote to that is hope and action, and one way to do that is to come to the food drive.”
Favero joined the ASRC in 2010 when it was based in West Melbourne and had just 10 staff.
Today it employs about 120 people, many of them refugees, and in addition to its food banks and community kitchen, it provides a range of services including legal and housing assistance, healthcare, English language classes, and an employment and training program.
Favero is also the ASRC’s director of advocacy and campaigns. She said the organisation refuses to accept any government funding so that it can be an independent and fearless political advocate for asylum seekers.
While there is a practical purpose to the food drive, this year the ASRC is also using the event as an opportunity to campaign for asylum seekers to have basic work and study rights so they can earn an income and contribute to Australia while waiting for their refugee claims to be assessed.
Even when someone has been granted temporary protection in Australia, their employment options can be limited, Favero said. She said social supports were cut under the Turnbull government and have not been restored since Labor came to power in 2022.
“The vast majority of people seeking asylum who access our food bank have no income at all, because they also can’t access any mainstream social support,” Favero said
“They’re forced into poverty and destitution because of government choices.”
The ASRC is campaigning to convince Home Affairs and Immigration Minister Tony Burke to change the Migration Regulations to allow work and study rights to be granted to all protection visa applicants.
Favero said there were people who have spent years in limbo without work or study rights while they wait for their claims to be assessed, including one man who has spent 19 years in Australia without these rights.
“It is just extending the right to work to people seeking asylum who are in our community, and it makes a whole lot of sense, not only from a humane point of view, but also from an economic point of view, because people seeking asylum want to be working, they want to be contributing.
“Our employment program, which helps people seeking asylum when they do have the right to work, the vast majority are going to areas of skill shortage, such as construction, engineering, aged care, childcare.
“Tony Burke could solve all of this with political will. He just needs to make a decision to grant the right to work to people seeking asylum while they’re awaiting the decision on their case.”
People delivering goods for Sunday’s food drive in the Victoria Street car park next to Schoolhouse Studios will be encouraged to also sign a petition calling for the ban on asylum seekers from working to be lifted.
All food collected on Sunday will be delivered to the ASRC’s two food banks in Footscray and Dandenong for the hundreds of asylum seeker families in the organisation’s books.
This Sunday’s food drive is seeking specific items including tea, coffee, biscuits and spreads like peanut butter and honey that are highly-sought after but are rarely donated.
“We’re supporting about 1200 families seeking asylum every month across our two sites, and people come in usually every fortnight to get groceries,” Favero said.
“It’s set up as a supermarket experience, so that there’s dignity, people can walk through. We have volunteers who assist, make sure that there’s protein, make sure there’s dairy, make sure it’s really comprehensive, and it’s also culturally appropriate food.”
Asylum seekers are being squeezed by the same cost of living pressures as the rest of the population forcing them to make choices such as between feeding their families and heating their homes, Favero said.
She said international conflicts in the Middle East, Africa and eastern Europe were contributing to the global refugee crisis that was generating additional reliance on the ASRC.
The ASRC’s Coburg Food Drive will be held between 11am and 1pm on Sunday, June 14 in the Victoria Street car park, next to Schoolhouse Studios.
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