Dear Minister Giles,

Dear Minister Giles,

I was delighted to learn recently that you have granted Sri Lankan asylum seeker Neil Para and his family the right to remain permanently in Australia. Your decision to exercise your ministerial powers in this situation is a positive and compassion act, which I applaud.

Yet, there are thousands of other asylum seekers like the Para family and the Biloela family before them who have been languishing on precarious visas for more than a decade. They live in a state of permanent uncertainty and fear, having fled their homelands to seek safety in Australia. They rely for the most part on the kindness and generosity of the communities that they live in. They are not in a position, like the Biloela family and Neil Para, to draw attention to their plight in order to gain your attention. Nor should they need to.

It is surely time for you to use your ministerial powers to finally take action to regularise the status of these people and to grant them permission to stay in Australia. That would be of enormous relief to all the asylum seekers caught up in this terrible situation, and would be widely welcomed by the communities who have supported them for more than a decade.

Please act as a matter of urgency to bring this sorry chapter in our history to an end.

I look forward to a positive response from you.

Yours sincerely.

Mike Griffin

 19th September 2023