'I have eyes, but I don't see': The community groups helping refugees settle

7am

At Sydney Airport on a muggy night in November 2022, a group of volunteers from Sydney’s northern beaches crowd inside arrivals waiting to greet a family they had never met.

Known as the ‘Manlygees’, they’re there to welcome a Kurdish family originally from Syria who had spent the past decade in a refugee camp in Iraq.

They’re part of an ambitious pilot program introduced in 2022, called the Community Refugee Integration and Settlement Pilot, or CRISP, in which a sponsoring community acts as the safety net for refugees rather than government-funded settlement services.

But two years on, the program’s successes are hitting constraints, with experts questioning whether CRISP can become a genuine pathway to settlement, or whether it’s a shortcut to positive government PR.

Today, contributor to The Saturday Paper Cheyne Anderson on whether the experiment is working.

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Guest: Contributor to The Saturday Paper, Cheyne Anderson.