Australia accused of discriminating against disabled migrants
When Luca was born in a Perth hospital two years ago, it flipped his parents’ world in ways they never expected.
With the joy came a shocking diagnosis: Luca had cystic fibrosis. Then Australia - Laura Currie and her husband Dante’s home for eight years - said they couldn’t stay permanently. Luca, his parents were told, could be a financial burden on the country.
“I think I cried for like a week - I just feel really, really sorry for Luca,” Ms Currie says. “He’s just a defenceless two-and-a-half-year-old and doesn’t deserve to be discriminated against in that way.”
With a third of its population born abroad, Australia has long seen itself as a “migration nation” - a multicultural home for immigrants that promises them a fair go and a fresh start. The idea is baked into its identity. But the reality is often different, especially for those who have a disability or a serious medical condition.
There’s the reputational damage for sure, plus people who live here can see what a shitty government we have, and the more this kind of shit happens, the more people start to want to smash things.
Like, back when the right wing Liberal government last got back into power, they sent the federal police on an illegal raid of our national broadcaster’s journalism offices, and they stole a bunch of evidence of things they were investigating. You know, straight fascist shit. Turns out that raid revealed the identity of David McBride who blew the whistle on Australian special forces’ war crimes in Afghanistan. Now we’ve got a “Labor” government, and guess who just went to prison for that whistleblowing? David McBride. Guess how many people doing actual war crimes went to prison. It was none. Our supposedly for the people left wing government did nothing to intervene, even though they could.
Also the conservative government did a robodebt scheme that coldly calculated debts and slapped the most vulnerable welfare recipients with thousands of dollars of debt based on technicalities. A lot of people committed suicide as a result. The debts were pretty much all bullshit, and there was illegal information sharing between departments to make this scheme happen. Guess who’s being prosecuted for this scheme now under our “Labor” government? If you guessed the whistleblower that exposed the illegal behaviour, you’d be right. His name is Richard Boyle.
At a certain point people start to realise that the state just isn’t on our side and we need to do something about it, and that something isn’t elections, because nobody is coming to help us regardless of who we elect.