From running traffic lights to a walk in the park for Jacqui Simpson

South African-born photographer and mother-of-two Jacqui Simpson says it was the ‘best news I’ve ever heard’.

Jacqui Simpson with children Connor and Jade at home in Brisbane yesterday. ‘I felt like a bird in a cage’. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

South African-born photographer and mother-of-two Jacqui Simpson says it was the “best news I’ve ever heard” when her local member, Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton, declared that persecuted farmers from her homeland ­deserved “special attention” from Australia.

Before Ms Simpson and her IT professional husband Lee migrated to Australia nearly eight years ago, settling in Cashmere, in Mr Dutton’s ultra-marginal north Brisbane electorate of Dickson, she lived in fear in a gated community in Johannesburg, behind a high barbed-wire fence and protected by security guards.

Now, in her family’s Brisbane home, which doubles as a studio for her photography business, she says she doesn’t live behind bars any more and leaves her car unlocked, revelling in her new-found freedom.

“I was always stressed about driving with my daughter (Jade, now 10), and in fear (in South Africa),” Ms Simpson said. “At night time, you don’t stop at traffic lights, you just slow down and drive through, because people are worried about smash and grabs.

“In Australia, if something were to happen, it would be petty theft, your life wouldn’t be taken.

“Here we can go to the park, and leave the house. In South Africa, I felt like a bird in a cage.”

While Mr Dutton has suggested “special attention” should be given to persecuted white South African Farmers, Citizenship Minister Alan Tudge yesterday insisted Australia had a “non-discriminatory policy” and South Africans facing persecution could apply for regular humanitarian visas, along with people from elsewhere in the world. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said while he had sympathy for victims of violence, “violence doesn’t discriminate between someone’s skin colour … and nor does Australia’s immigration policy”.

In Mr Dutton’s knife-edge northern Brisbane electorate of Dickson, there are 2010 South ­African-born residents — according to the 2016 census — or about 1.4 per cent of the seat’s population. He holds the electorate by a margin of just 1.6 per cent, and at the 2016 federal election, beat Labor candidate Linda Lavarch by just 2911 votes, after preferences.

 

Ms Simpson said she believed Mr Dutton’s strong stand on helping South Africans could be a vote-winner among the tight-knit expat community in his electorate.

Ms Simpson’s mother, father and sister are still living in South Africa — her father in Hermanus, in the Western Cape Province, where riots and fiery protests have broken out recently — and she fears for their safety and wishes they could come to Australia.

However, Ms Simpson said it would cost $50,000 to secure a visa for her mother, which was too ­expensive. It took her and her husband three years to obtain their own visas, and they migrated as skilled workers, with her husband’s IT qualifications considered an area of critical skills shortage.

Though she and her immediate family are not farmers, she praised Mr Dutton’s recent declaration that South African farmers ­deserved special attention and help from Australia.

“Oh my gosh, that was the best news I’ve ever heard,” Ms Simpson said. “Those farmers, they’ve been on the land for decades and decades and what’s happening to them is awful.”

South African-born aircraft maintenance engineer Johannes Visser, 43, who also lives in Mr Dutton’s electorate, migrated to Australia for work in 2001 and ­became an Australian citizen in 2004. Mr Visser married an Australian, who — along with her daughter — is keen to visit her husband’s home country, go on a safari and see the wildlife.

“But I say I can’t guarantee their safety to go over there,” Mr Visser said. He said he lived on the outskirts of Johannesburg, near the airport, and in the last six months of his life in South Africa, slept with a 9mm gun under his pillow, in a home surrounded by a high fence topped with barbed wire. Intruders tried to break into his home while he was inside but his neighbour heard his security alarm and scared them away, Mr Visser said.

“I was a target, because I was living alone, but farmers are the most vulnerable, because they are so isolated,” he said.

Mr Visser, who has voted Liberal since arriving in Australia, said he did not think Mr Dutton’s stand on the immigration of South African farmers would necessarily help him hold on to his marginal seat. “I don’t think that’s the only purpose (for his stand), he’s doing it for the good of the other nation, for the cause,’’ he said.