Fourteen years ago, Kon Karapanagiotidis founded the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre (ASRC). Since then it has supported more than 10,000 refugees in many different ways, from providing food to helping them seek refugee status and employment. This year it is one of the charities chosen for the Guardian and Observer appeal.
Karapanagiotidis told us what inspires him, about the charity’s beginnings as a student project and what it is like to operate in the toxic political environment in Australia.
Tell us about yourself: what were you doing before you founded the charity?
I’m a lawyer, teacher and social worker by trade. Before starting the ASRC in 2001 at 28, I had volunteered [at] 25 charities over a decade. What drew me to refugee and asylum seeker work was my personal background. My grandparents were refugees in the early 1920s: Greeks who fled the Pontian genocide in Anatolia.
When my parents came to Australia in the 1960s they experienced racism. I grew up in a small country town, one of only two Greek families, and on a daily basis was subjected to racist abuse, from “go back to your own country” to being a “dirty wog”. Knowing what it was like to not fit in anywhere growing up and not feeling welcomed rooted in me a deep sense of social justice and empathy for other people and communities that felt marginalised.
What inspired you to set up ASRC?
To sacrifice your home and cross the perilous sea to find a safe place to call home for your family is an act of extraordinary courage. To be persecuted because you refuse to live under oppression, to speak out against tyranny knowing it could be your last breath, is truly inspiring. It is life and death that is at stake, where the difference between people caring or not is people dying. I can think of nothing more important to spend my life fighting for and to know these people – people like my grandparents – is a gift.
How did ASRC begin?
It had a kind of fairytale beginning. I was teaching students to be welfare workers and my class had to find a practical project to do and were struggling to find something. I suggested to them that we start our own charity for people seeking asylum, providing a food bank for refugees going hungry who had nowhere else to turn. They thought I was taking the piss and I told them that I was dead serious. I wanted to teach them that you could change the world at any time, you only had to have the imagination.
Eight weeks after that conversation the centre was born, founded by me with my students as a class project, in a tiny shopfront in the working-class suburb of Footscray [a suburb of Melbourne], donated rent free by my mate Pablo, with furniture from my mum, a few hundred dollars and a few boxes of food.
Running a new charity is often tough. Were there any tricky moments for ASRC?
In the early years we were going hand to mouth every week. On principle, when I started the ASRC, I decided it would never take funding from the federal government so we could keep our independence and advocate without fear or favour. This meant no funding was guaranteed, every dollar had to be hard fought for, nothing was promised to you.
I am luckily a stubborn and resilient bastard and I refused to let ASRC fail. The more people told me it was impossible the more I wanted to prove people wrong.
What makes you most proud when you think of ASRC’s work? At which moments do you think: yes, we’ve made a difference!
Humanity is in the details and there are thousands of moments of heartache in this work and luckily moments of feeling like you have made a real difference. What I am most proud of is that the ASRC is a movement of justice and community not a charity. The moments that are most precious to me are the ones where refugees tell me we are their home now, we are their family or they have found hope and a future because we believed in their potential. When someone tells you, “thank you for saving my life”, you are just overwhelmed and in tears.
The most precious moment for me is saving the life of a little 10-year-old girl who was going to die in one of [the] immigration prisons if not freed. Every year for a decade now her father calls us to say thank you; they are now Australian citizens and thriving.
How would you describe the current political environment for refugees and asylum seekers in Australia? Is it worse now than in 2001?
It’s the worst that I have ever witnessed. The official policy of the Australian government is to engage in refoulement [forcing people back to their place of origin where they are at risk of persecution] and to continue to indefinitely detain over 200 children, threaten to jail for up to two years whistleblowers who report child abuse in detention centres, including doctors and nurses. We have killed more refugees on Manus Island than we have safely resettled.
We have a code of behaviour that allows the Australian government to indefinitely re-detain a person seeking asylum for the following: gossiping at work, a parking fine, having a house party where the music is too loud, to spitting in public. The Australian government has removed the refugee convention from statute law, has cut 95% of all legal funding for people seeking asylum, and has left 30,000 people seeking asylum in limbo for three years without the right to work or any legal processing to break them. This is just a fraction of the horror being inflicted and it is getting worse as it’s a vote winner.
There is a lot of public fear, suspicion and, sometimes, plain nastiness about refugees and asylum seekers in Australia. What drives this?
The sheer hysteria, cruelty and dehumanisation of people seeking asylum happening in Australia is unprecedented. Our problem is not one of people seeking asylum by boat or crisis; it is an absolute absence of political leadership, and the politics of fear and racism has bipartisan support.
The race to the bottom as to who can be more cruel and barbaric towards refugees continues to escalate. In the absence of any leadership from the ruling Liberal party or the opposition Labor party, we have a moral vacuum where values and our humanitarian obligations are dispensable, optional and held in contempt.
The fact that we don’t see people seeking asylum who arrive by boat each night like you see in the UK news means they are out of sight, out of mind. It means that we don’t have to engage with the fact they are human beings like me and you, in distress, in need of protection and help. If we had refugees washing up on Bondi beach rather than remote waters you would see what we are witnessing in Greece – people pouring out of their homes with food and clothes ready to help.
How do you try and change the conversation about refugees and asylum seekers? Are you optimistic that you can?
We are very hopeful about changing the conversation. Our research shows that the majority of people are persuadable and with the right framing and language they can shift in how they view people seeking asylum. At the heart of this is reframing the issue as a humanitarian issue, leading with values, providing aspirational calls to create something good and seizing the moral high ground.
We need to as a movement stop talking about what people seeking asylum are not – they are not terrorists and not illegal, for example – as for as long as we do we are simply reinforcing the dominant paradigm and narrative. We need to instead talk about what they are: resilient, courageous people seeking to save their families’ lives, who share our values, who are refugees because they are fleeing terrorism, who are desperate to rebuild their lives, integrate and contribute back to our countries.
The Guardian refugee appeal has raised over £1.6m so far. Does it surprise you that the appeal has struck such a chord?
The amount raised has taken me by surprise but in the best possible way! When you work day in day out seeing what the worst of humanity creates in terms of human misery and suffering, you really need moments like this to restore your faith in humanity. This appeal strikes a chord because most Australians and British people are decent and compassionate people who are fed up and have had enough of the indifference and callousness of our governments to a humanitarian crisis. More would demand greater from our governments if that they were not held hostage by the politics of fear, xenophobia and misinformation created by the Murdoch press and political leaders with no moral compass.
I want to thank the Guardian readers for their extraordinary act of humanity and for being the voice of decency and goodness, of being humanity at its best and the Guardian for having the moral courage to help lead the way. That’s leadership!
