imagining a new way to do resettlement
Kathleen Openshaw, Atem Atem and Melissa Phillips
June 2025
Australia is one of the few countries that accept refugees to be resettled on a permanent basis, with annual quotas set by the Department of Home Affairs. With resettlement places in short supply after the United States of America paused what was the largest global program, there are many elements of refugee resettlement in Australia to be celebrated. The program itself is premised on an approach focused on delivering services to refugees in their first years in the country. Service providers must bid for contracts, and accountability lies between providers and the Department of Home Affairs, rather than between clients and their service providers. In our recently published article as part of the special issue “Mobilities and Precarities” in Genealogy, we seek to re-imagine current refugee resettlement practices in Australia by suggesting there needs to be space for an alternative framework that is decentralized and embedded in the agency and self-determination of refugees themselves. Our work incorporates existing data and literature and also draws on the authors’ extensive multi-dimensional experiences of resettlement processes in Australia.
Australia’s refugee resettlement program was established in the 1970s and was an important departure from earlier policies that excluded non-white migrants and refugees. The 1901 White Australia policy and the earlier violent and lethal dispossession of First Nations Peoples, set out to ensure the dominance of white settlers. Embedded within this, is the myth that Australia is a white nation, which has largely been structurally unchallenged, with any threat to this view construed as a threat to Australia itself (see Moreton-Robinson 2015). We argue that the racialised nature of resettlement, and the expectation of integration for migrants and refugees, are the legacy of Australia’s violent dispossession of First Nations Peoples and exclusionary policies for non-white immigrants. Reconciliation and recognition for First Nations Peoples, a project that remains ongoing, is deeply inter-connected to matters of migration, most especially as they relate to non-white refugees.
The aim of Australia’s resettlement policy is formally to provide permanent safety from persecution to those most in need. Most people displaced by conflict are internally displaced (that is, in their own country) or unable to reach embassies or the offices of UNHCR, meaning resettlement is a disproportionately small durable solution for the many millions of displaced persons. Refugee resettlement sits alongside highly selective migration policies and widely criticised asylum policies that include offshore processing and immigration detention. Negatively racialised refugees are expected to come to Australia and adopt an Australian ‘way of life’. Therefore, settlement services aimed at assisting refugees to adjust socially, economically and politically, are useful mechanisms to socialise them into the myth of white Australia, a particular national imagining of what Australia is as a country.
Evidence in existing literature on resettlement outcomes for negatively racialised refugees suggest that they are struggling to adjust to the demands of settlement and integration that suits white colonial ideals and expects a grateful and compliant refugee. Many refugees originate from countries where they have (historically) experienced colonisation and dispossession from their lands. Programs that serve to ensure they “settle”, can undermine their agency and their sense of self determination to live in a way that reflect their beliefs and cultural identity. In addition, they experience everyday racism and struggle to achieve the ‘good life’ they aspired to, and expected for, themselves and their children before they came to Australia.
The dominant mode of settlement is through competitively tendered services with processes that are not always transparent, are short term and time specific. A similar approach operates for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and many services for Indigenous Australians. These are oriented towards accountability for government funds as a primary goal. Contracts are between the Federal Government and providers. Therefore, the focus of settlement service providers is on delivering government priorities to achieve the socialisation of refugees. And as such, service providers are not necessarily accountable to newly arrived refugees themselves. In this way, the power and agency of refugees is further diminished, closing off the possibility of a two-way integration. Negatively racialised refugees therefore struggle to find a sense of connection to their new home country. Based on these experiences we suggest there are ways to do things differently through our proposed framework.
This framework pays attention to what refugees themselves deem to be a good life, rather than one that serves the colonial-settler state. Our framework acknowledges resettlement as: a complex and lifelong (even generational) process; highly racialised; and it offers a critical consideration of “belonging” using a cultural diversity logic that speaks back to (mythical) white Australia.
We propose the following principles to underpin our reimagining of resettlement in Australia:
Resettlement as a whole of community, localised response.
Resettlement that is understood as a lifelong, and even generational process.
Resettlement that prioritises the lived experiences of wellbeing, self-determination, agency and dignity of refugees, over Commonwealth performance indicators.
Resettlement policy that is arrived at through consultation and negotiations.
Non-hierarchical social infrastructure and financial decision making that is shared with all stakeholders including government agencies, community groups, civil society, business/corporate actors and refugees themselves.
This framework is based on our collective reflections and conversations borne from a frustration with current models of resettlement. It is a provocation about how we can return humanity to resettlement and create a process that benefits all of the community, through investments in shared social and economic infrastructure investments. We welcome stakeholder engagement, critique and extension of this reimagining of resettlement in Australia.
Dr Kathleen Openshaw is a senior lecturer and the Diversity and Equity Coordinator in the School of Social Sciences at Western Sydney University. Kathleen’s research interests include the lived religious expressions of negatively racialised migrants and material religion. Kathleen was one of the research leads on the Australian Research Council Discovery Project, “The African Diaspora and Christianity in Australia”. She is co-editor (with Rocha and Hutchinson) of Australian Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements: Arguments from the Margins (2020). Kathleen is currently working on her forthcoming ethnography of the Brazilian megachurch, “The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG) in Australia”, to be published with Rutgers University Press.
Dr Atem Atem was born in South Sudan and came to Australia through Australia’s Humanitarian program. Dr Atem has over 10 years of experience working in the settlement sector supporting refugee and migrant settlement directly through service provision and indirectly through local social planning and advocacy. Dr Atem currently works at the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS). In addition, Dr Atem is an adjunct fellow at Western Sydney University.
Dr Melissa Phillips is a Senior Lecturer at Western Sydney University. A child of migrant parents, she is a passionate advocate for migration, multiculturalism and human rights whose research focuses on forced displacement and resettlement including in regional Australia. Her work is deeply informed by her experience as a practitioner in the field including with international organisations in South Sudan, the Horn of Africa, Libya and the Middle East, and prior to this work with asylum seekers and resettled refugees in Australia. Melissa's work features in articles and opinion pieces and she regularly delivers presentations and seminars to government bodies and community organisations.
Acknowledgement:
This piece is drawn from the following journal article:
Openshaw, K., Atem, A., & Phillips, M. (2025). Beyond the Demands of Integration: African Refugee Resettlement in Contemporary Multicultural Australia. Genealogy, 9(1), 11. https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy9010011
It can be found here.
References:
Moreton-Robinson, Aileen. 2015. White Possessive. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.