Gaza visa crisis is just the tip of the iceberg as Australia braces for a wave of bogus refugee claims

Not just Palestinians but thousands of visitors, including students who simply don’t want to go home, are putting their hands up to claim refugee status.

Not without reason Australians tend to distrust politicians, regarding them with as much suspicion as call centre hucksters and off-the-plan property salesmen.

It’s not hard to see why.

Just the other day education minister Jason Clare said the following, entirely with a straight face, when asked about Gazan refugees coming to Australia.

“I don’t think anybody that’s coming has any sympathy for Hamas,” Clare told Sky News’s Kieran Gilbert, before artfully pivoting.

“We’ve condemned the actions of Hamas on October 7, I think any reasonable person would.”

Well, quite.

But while plenty of politicians have told whoppers, this one is really stretching the friendship.

Does the education minister really want us to believe that of the 749 (plus!) Palestinians to seek asylum here since October 7, every single one of them stands in condemnation of Hamas and is looking forward to hosting their new Jewish-Australian neighbours to an interfaith iftar?

Palestinians in the Gaza Strip celebrating after Hamas's deadly October 7 raids on Israel. Picture: AFP

Particularly when so many of them were originally here on tourist visas which are, for obvious reasons, granted pretty quickly after checks against criminal and other databases, rather than the far more rigorous checks that go into granting humanitarian and refugee visas.

By Clare’s own definition, the number of “reasonable people” in Gaza who like him condemn Hamas is not particularly huge.

In June, the Palestinian Centre for Policy and Survey Research found that among Palestinians, support for Hamas stood at 40 per cent — higher than it was before the war began.

Education Minister Jason Clare has claimed that no Gazan who makes it to Australia as a refugee will have sympathy for Hamas. Picture: NewsWire

Substantial majorities in both the West Bank and Gaza also supported the October 7 attacks.

And given Hamas’s total gangster-like control of Gaza and its economy, it’s not unfair to suspect that anyone with the resources to have left the territory when the border with Egypt was open would have acquired them with the terror group’s OK.

No wonder ASIO chief Mike Burgess has had to finally come out and say unequivocally that support for Hamas in word or deed would be “a problem” for would-be humanitarian visa applicants.

This comes after weeks of back and forth over the issue that saw Prime Minister Anthony Albanese accused of verballing Burgess in parliament.

And it also highlights a problem that is going to continue to grow long after the war in Gaza is over.

Not just Palestinians but thousands of visitors, including students who simply don’t want to go home, are putting their hands up to claim refugee status regardless of whether they are truly oppressed.

Thanks to various refugee conventions, anyone visiting Australia can launch a protection claim, simply by asserting that they have a reasonable fear of persecution on the basis of race, religion or nationality or because they hold membership in a social group or a particular political opinion.

Humanitarian visa applications from students are expected to surge in the wake of government efforts to cut overseas migration. Picture: Getty Images

In June, the latest month for which numbers are available, 2,329 people applied for this so-called “onshore protection” via the Subclass 866 visa program.

While 157 Palestinians filed claims, so too did hundreds of people from free and open democracies ranging from India (144 applications) to Taiwan (36).

Many of these are thought to be students looking to game the system and stay in Australia, with numbers expected to rise with international student caps.

Of course the idea that overseas students – able to get not only a passport in their home country but the resources to pay ruinous full-fee tuitions – are oppressed is laughable.

Yet again once a claim is filed they can live and work in Australia for as long as the appeals process holds out, by the end of which they have generally worked up some tie to Australia that a court or tribunal will take seriously enough to let them stay.

International students are expected to apply for refugee status in droves to stay in Australia. Image: ChatGPT

At the moment there are more than 110,000 people in the country who are either waiting for a decision or have had their claims knocked back but have not left Australia yet.

To put this in perspective, just 19 individuals were deported in June after not getting what’s called a Final Protection Visa.

This is not just happening here.

Across the Pacific in Canada, student asylum claims have reportedly been surging as even Justin Trudeau’s woke government accepts that his country’s virtually unlimited migration program has been a disaster and needs to be pulled back.

There, the hard leftist Trudeau is even talking about improving how Canada “integrates” migrants, a far cry from Australia’s recently dropped Multicultural Framework Review, which seemed to recommend only ways to keep us all in our own ethnic silos.

But here, while the government goes after the low hanging fruit of dodgy international diploma mills, no one is having the harder conversation about tightening up what it means to be a genuine refugee committed to joining the Australian family.

Originally published as Gaza visa crisis is just the tip of the iceberg as Australia braces for a wave of bogus refugee claims