I think there are honest and good people in community organisations but in philanthropy, in activism, where are they? I’m deeply disillusioned by my own community and I’m in conflict with it because I’m also deeply proud of who I am.

With the boat people again occupying centre stage in another Australian election, a personal discussion about these ‘outcasts’ with Kon, or Konstandinos, Karapanagiotidis OAM, the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre, Australia’s leading asylum seeker organisation, is a necessary introduction to this subject if we are to move away from slogans and simplistic outcries.
Kon participated in the 2020 Summit Conference organised in 2008 by the then government of Kevin Rudd, a summit where representatives from all walks of life in Australia attempted to define a national agenda for 2020. During that year he was voted as one of Australia’s 20 Unsung Heroes as part of the launch of the new Portrait Gallery in Canberra. Furthermore, he was also voted as one of Melbourne 100 most influential people in The Age Melbourne Magazine.
In order to be able to view the issue of asylum seekers through the eyes of an expert, and a human rights activist who also happens to be a Greek Australian, I visited Kon a few days ago at the Asylum Seeker’s Resource Centre in West Melbourne.
Asked about his personal path, the influences that led him to work with asylum seekers, he tells me that the inspiration very much comes from his family.
“Both of my parents come from families of farmers in Greece, both came here on separate boats in the 1960s. They lived very harsh lives of poverty. My father was a Pontian, the son of refugees who escaped the Pontian genocide. He had to leave school at the age of nine because he had to raise a dowry for his sisters. My mother comes from Mesinia and she left school at the age of twelve.”
Kon grew up in the 1970s and in the first half of the 1980s in Mount Beauty, a small Victorian town 350 kilometres north east of Melbourne.
“We were one of two Greek families. My parents were abused for speaking Greek in the streets. Every second word that I could hear was wog this and wog that, I experienced a lot of bullying.”
He speaks passionately about his upbringing. “From a very young age you learn work ethic, sacrifice, and community, you look at how your parents were exploited. My father would be up at 3-4 o’clock in the morning and he would stay up until 10 o’clock at night. He worked in the tobacco fields and when we moved back to Melbourne both of my parents worked in factories. My parents raised me teaching me to care about the community, to live with honour and have integrity and principles.”
He speaks so passionately I don’t want to stop him.
“I look at refugees now and I think, they might have been my parents. My mother sees the way refugees are treated and say ‘this could be me’,” he states.
I ask him how he came to work with the boat people, while a texted message temporarily interrupting his train of thought is telling him that an ALP leadership spill is being called for 7.00 pm that night.
“At eighteen I went off to La Trobe to study for my first degree in behavioural science. I am on a scholarship now doing my sixth degree, an MBA at Melbourne Uni’s Business School. I have a degree in social science, I have a degree in law, I have a Master’s in Social Development and a Master’s in Education. For me, education was precious because my parents never had it. Education for me is power, choices, ability to give back.”
“When did it all start for you Kon?” I ask him.
“I started doing volunteer work at the Uni. Between eighteen and twenty-eight I went and volunteered in about two dozen charities, I was working with terminal kids at the children’s hospital, I was working as a crisis councillor with sex workers and others. I was with people who had HIV, I was with mentally ill people. Society has forgotten about all these people. They are excluded from the economy, from opportunity. Poverty is what they all have in common, and for me, I found a place where I belonged and where I could make a positive difference. Our first Asylum Centre started in Nicholson Street Footscray on June 8th 2001, in a small space offered by a friend. We started it with my TAFE students who could not get a placement while doing their courses in the western suburbs. We started off as food makers.”
When asked how far they have managed to go since then, his response is impressive. “It’s the largest organisation in the country. It has helped 10,000 people so far from 98 different countries. It has 872 volunteers and 45 paid staff, and in a few days we are opening up a second ASRC in Dandenong.”
The centre has an annual budget of approximately four million dollars. Almost 50 per cent of its funding comes from philanthropic foundations, 6 per cent from the state government and the rest from individual donors, from appeals and from other sources.
“We have two social enterprises for catering and for cleaning,” Kon mentions. They run 23 different programs, for health, employment, teaching of English, and the other needs of asylum seekers. “We provide a hot meal for 750 people every week at 50 cents per person, we provide 250,000 hours of free assistance every year, thanks to our volunteers and the good will of the wider community we provide food services worth 25 million dollars a year,” he tells me, and he goes on to stress the good will of the wider community.
“Dozens of lawyers, doctors, nurses, English teachers, and others come and help us. At our volunteer information night we have turnouts of 400 people.”
The centre only works with people who have applied to be refugees. From 2008 to 2012, Kon says, 94 per cent of the people who came to Australia with boats were actually accepted as refugees. In other words, as future Australian citizens.
All of their programs are designed to meet four guiding principles. To provide asylum seekers with direct aid, to provide them with services that fall within the parameters of justice, to empower them, for example through education and by building their self-esteem, and to help them build new communities.
I am curious to find out not only the professional qualifications of their volunteers but also their cultural backgrounds. Many of the volunteers, he says, are former asylum seekers. Others are of Vietnamese or Jewish background. People who were refugees themselves or whose family members, parents or grandparents were refugees.
“What about Mediterraneans?” I ask.
“They are the ones less likely to volunteer, there are so few Greeks or Italians volunteering here”, he tells me. I asked him why he thinks this is happening and he says that perhaps many are ashamed of their class and cultural background and they want to assimilate. Others think they are special and whatever they achieved they have achieved it on their own, through personal effort. Some are materialists.
“Our parents’ generation sent mixed messages. On one hand they wanted prospects and success, and on the other they also wanted to keep the values that made them so successful. Namely, community, sacrifice, honour.”
He then goes on to define the issue in broader terms. “I think there is lack of political leadership in the Greek and the Italian community. When you think about how many of us are in Melbourne, why are we not dominating? Where is our leadership? You look at the Greek Church. Apathetic, apolitical, conservative. I think the Greek Church is a lot to blame. I think Greek politicians are conservative. Where are the role models?” he asks. “I think there are honest and good people in community organisations but in philanthropy, in activism, where are they? I’m deeply disillusioned by my own community and I’m in conflict with it because I’m also deeply proud of who I am. I am often defending people and Greece when they mock us because of the crisis.”
Both of us are running out of time and as a concluding question I ask him to tell me why, in his opinion, the issue of boat people is again becoming an election issue that is defined in a narrow manner by both major parties. Why so many people in this country are against boat people. His response, especially the part of his argument where he mentions statistics, is revealing.
“Ignorance, fear, racism and lies dominate the public sphere. Politicians and media feed a mythology. Again and again research has found that Australia is one of the few countries in the world that supports immigration.
“Seventy five per cent are in favour of providing support to refugees but when you replace the word refugee with the words boat people that seventy five per cent becomes twenty five per cent, and yet boat people are refugees as well.
“Europe has some perspective of what happens worldwide; this is not the case for Australia. There are moral, legal, economic and social arguments to support a different approach to asylum seekers in Australia and yet this is not working. Even now, for example, we ignore that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says that the numbers of displaced people worldwide are the highest in eighteen years. What we’ve got in the boats in thirty-seven years, Lebanon and Turkey got in thirty-seven days from Syria.”
Australia is ranked 47th (goes up to 58th per capita) for our world ranking of refugees hosted in 2012 based on the UNHCR global trends. We drop to 77th when compared to our national wealth (GDP per capita).
He goes on to interpret this social attitude.
“The narrative that asylum seekers are illegals works negatively in the Australian psyche. The fear of border crossing, or that they are economic migrants, which they are not. The perception that they are queue jumpers when they are not, since we haven’t got processes. Or Islamophobia, when only a third of asylum seekers are Muslims, can account for these attitudes. We have committed eight billion dollars in the next three years to lock people in detention centres. This is much more than the combined money available for the Gonski reforms in education and for the implementation of the National Disability Scheme. We’ve taken away from them the right to work, to undertake work that no one wants in the cities and in regional Australia. Work in warehouses, cleaning, aged care, hospitality.
“We used to be proud before Howard’s days. We took 700,000 refugees in the last century, a sizeable proportion of all Victorians were born overseas. Twenty nine per cent of all small business owners were born overseas. We are the most successful and the most multicultural city in the world. What is happening to us?” he asks, while I shake his hand as a thank you gesture.
Talking about the boat people with Kon Karapanagiotidis, if we are to move away from slogans and simplistic outcries, the other side of the frontier, boat people or their advocates, need to be given a voice, need to be heard.