When Tony Abbott said Australia would welcome 12,000 Syrian refugees this week, Australian journalist Yalda Hakim witnessed the return of the compassion she had known as an Afghan-born child growing up in a diverse, tolerant Australia.
“To be here at a time there is an announcement is fantastic,” the BBC World anchor said in Sydney on Thursday. “It’s the Australia that I know: generous.”
The former SBS Dateline presenter who relocated to the UK in late 2012 to join BBC World as an anchor and correspondent, was on a flying visit to Australia via Seoul, Tokyo and Hong Kong when the announcement was made.
“With my background I feel a strong moral responsibility to speak up beyond the stories I tell,” Hakim told Guardian Australia. “I am a product of Australia’s generosity. My family moved here when I was three years old in the 1980s and they are forever grateful.”
Hakim said she was relieved Australia had thrown open the doors because the global impact of negative stories about Australia – including the silence around boat arrivals, harsh border protection policies and the Adam Goodes saga – has been profound, and deeply distressing to her.
“The notion that Australia is very laid-back – a place where there is sunshine and people are chilled and relaxed – still exists,” said Hakim, the award-winning host of BBC World’s Impact with Yalda Hakim.
“But there can be some very negative perceptions towards Australia, and I do feel very protective of the country that I grew up in and that gave me my opportunity. So to hear this big announcement was so welcome. For it not to to be perceived as a diverse multicultural society is so sad.”
The 32-year-old, who is the youngest anchor on BBC World News presenting her own show, is that rare journalist who covers stories that she herself has lived.
“I had someone say to me recently ‘how can people take small children and cross borders and risk their lives, I don’t understand that’,” Hakim said.
“I said to them, I can understand it, it’s not something my great-grandfather did, it’s something my father did.
“I was six months old when on horseback in the dead of night with people smugglers he crossed the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan to avoid the Soviet takeover of the country. I can understand the desperation people have when they are seeking asylum, fleeing persecution and putting their lives at risk.”
As a 25-year-old, Hakim went back to Kabul to retrace her family’s steps for a remarkable, emotional Dateline story, and has made the trip several times since, recently interviewing President Hamid Karzai. Hakim has reported from Bangladesh, Libya during the Arab Spring, and was the only journalist to walk through minefields to a village near Kandahar where American soldier Robert Bales massacred 16 civilians.
Hakim also spoke of her family’s escape from Afghanistan on the ABC’s The Drum on Thursday.
A unique combination of on-the-ground reportage and an apparently effortless broadcasting style has given her an edge in the competitive world of television journalism, fronting programs in two countries in her 20s.
Now based in Britain, Hakim identifies primarily as Australian. The Hakim family eventually arrived in Australia when she was three, and after a short stay in a hostel in Villawood her architect father encouraged them to jump in to everything Australia had to offer and they all got a good education: “My parents are so protective about Australia they won’t hear a bad word about it.”
The day after the refugee announcement Hakim, comedian Magda Szubanski and film critic Margaret Pomeranz were guest speakers at Astra’s Women in Television Breakfast, at which Hakim spoke about how she too was a “product of Australia’s generosity”.
Earlier, she had given a lecture at Sydney University, where a young woman had asked her how she “made it in Australia as a woman of colour”.
Hakim said she was so taken aback by the question because she had always seen herself as an Australian journalist first who happened to have an Afghan background and that having another cultural background had never held her back.
“I saw myself as an Afghan-Australian whose family came to Australia and embraced everything. We all felt very Australian.”
