This was my first official AGM for Circle of Friends Australia. As I took the short drive from my home to the meeting venue, I mused to myself about the formal Board meetings and AGMs I had attended in the past.

Some in swish Committee Rooms in high-rise buildings around the world; some in local Church halls like tonight’s. All with chairs arranged in optimistic rows for audiences that might not materialise in the numbers hoped for.

This time I was very aware that I was a “newbie”. My physical connection to most of the people in the COFA world has been very limited — most conversations through email and online meetings so far to date. I was walking in with a plate of food to share, not knowing or recognising most people.

Even my greeter was not known to me till she said her name. People looked at me across the room as they tried to work out who I was. Quickly, I was invited into a small circle by Trish and introduced to some newly nominated committee members that would be my colleagues for the coming year’s work.

Before long, we were ushered into the main hall by Monica, the Chair of the AGM.

Some people pulled out agenda papers that arrived by email three days early as they took their seats. I went to the top table to sit next to Monica to take the minutes for the evening. Busy scribbling notes in my pad, I was reminded that there is a particular rhythm to these gatherings. Familiar. Slightly dutiful.

After attending so many formal meetings in my time, you kind of develop an affectionate tolerance for the form they follow. This one was easy to appreciate. The small, necessary business of a volunteer organisation was transacted with the quiet competence of people who show up year after year — not because anyone asked them to, but because they believe in something. Reports were tabled and accepted. Three new faces were welcomed onto the committee.

And then our guest speaker, Leila Suleiman, stood up to speak. I could put my pen down and really listen.

I learned that Leila has been in Adelaide for about ten years. She is a teacher, married to Muhammad, with two boys — five and eleven. She was born in Gaza. Her extended family still live there.

She began her talk with an image. Imagine, she said, that you have lived in your home for years. It holds your memories, your history, your identity. One day, homeless people knock on your door. Persecuted. With nowhere to go. You welcome them in. But a few years later, they demand more space. Eventually they force you out, claim they are the rightful owners, and call you the intruder.

“This is not an imagined scenario. It is the history of my people.”

What followed was unlike anything else I have witnessed at a gathering like this. No PowerPoint. No key

messages. No carefully managed reassurances. Just a heartfelt testimony — delivered with a steadiness that made it all the more devastating. Real and confronting.

Leila described growing up in Gaza as a paradox. Some days you go to university, meet your friends, walk to the beach. Then the next morning you wake to explosions and bloodshed. “Both worlds collide in one place,” she said, “that I sometimes call heaven and sometimes call hell.”

When the war erupted in October 2023, Leila was here in Adelaide. Her family was in northern Gaza. Within two days, they were forced to leave their home as their neighbourhood came under heavy bombardment. They moved. That area became a danger zone. They moved again — eventually crowding into her grandparents’ house with relatives fleeing from across Gaza. Around forty people under one roof. No electricity. No running water. Sometimes a few cans of food to share between them.

She described the nights as the worst of it. As soon as the sun went down, the bombing intensified.

Every explosion carried the same unspoken question: Is it us this time? Is our house next? Then waking — still alive — with relief immediately shadowed by grief. Somewhere, another family had not made it through the night.

She told us about a friend buried alive in the rubble of her home for days — until she took her last breath. Another friend whose two-month-old daughter was killed before her eyes. A grief she never recovered from. She did not survive either.

The room was so quiet. I looked around. Everyone was locked onto Leila as she went on with her story.

I have sat through a lot of guest addresses. Most wash over you and leave behind a vague sense of having been informed. This was different. The room went quiet the way rooms go quiet when something true is being said — not the polite quiet of people waiting for the speaker to finish, but the still, unsettled quiet of people sitting with something they cannot put down.

Eventually, we were told that Leila’s family made it to Australia. Safe, she said. But not okay.

“This is what displacement means — being uprooted from your home, your community, the life you spent years building, forced to start again somewhere you never chose to be.”

She then thanked the Circle of Friends who took them under their wing. The help with rent and bills and food mattered enormously. But, as she said, what her family needed most was simpler than any of that.

“They reminded my family that they were not alone. That even in the darkest moments, they were not forgotten.”

The meeting wound up and we quite quickly dispersed.

As I drove home afterwards, I thought about the people in that room. Every one of them has sat beside an individual or family group navigating a system not built for them. Most of us have helped someone fill in a form that will shape the rest of their life. We understand, in a small and very personal way, what it means to arrive somewhere with nothing, and to depend entirely on the goodwill of strangers.

Maybe that is why Leila’s words hit us the way they did.

COFA exists because ordinary Australians decided that knowing about suffering was not the same as doing something about it. What happened in that room on Wednesday night felt like the same impulse.

When she rose to speak, we left different.

— Bob Wilson

Some journeys — often difficult, stressful and frightening — end with a ceremony.

A certificate. A small Australian flag pressed into your hands by a local councillor in a community hall, while your children fidget beside you and your phone fills with photos you’ll share for weeks.

For the Afghan families I have been working with over the past few years, that moment — the citizenship ceremony — has become the fixed point on the horizon. The thing they have all been walking toward.

But getting there, it turns out, requires more than determination.

The Australian citizenship process asks applicants to fill out a long and detailed online form, sit a test of Australian values and history, and demonstrate that they have lived here long enough to call this place home. For most people who arrive with English as a working language and reasonable digital literacy, the process is manageable — demanding, but navigable.

For many of the Afghan families I sit alongside, it is something else entirely.

The gap between spoken and written English in their households is striking, and it runs along predictable lines. The men who are in paid work — navigating workplaces, colleagues, and the small daily negotiations of Australian life — have generally built a functional English that carries them through most of what the citizenship process demands.

Their children are another matter altogether. The kids have absorbed the language the way children always do: effortlessly, completely, and with an accent that has long since stopped sounding foreign to anyone. Their days are full of living English — formal, informal, slang, and the occasional Aussie expletive.

But it is the women — most of them home-based, many still carrying the weight of interrupted educations and limited literacy even in their own language — who find the test hardest. In most cases, their conversational English is caught in amber: smiles supporting simple yes-and-no responses.

The citizenship test is not a conversation. It is a screen, a timer, and a set of questions written in the particular dialect of bureaucratic Australian English that nobody quite speaks in daily life. For many of these women, it reveals just how much ground there is still to cover.

Research published through the University of Southern Queensland describes this as a “catch twenty-two”: the very people who most need the security that citizenship confers are the ones who find its formal requirements hardest to meet. They are not disengaged. They are not unwilling. They are, in many cases, simply navigating a system that was not designed with their particular journey in mind.

This is where the work of an online scribe becomes something more than form-filling.

Over many shared screens, I have come to understand that what we are doing together is not simply completing an application. We are translating a life — a set of experiences, documents, and memories accumulated across two countries and several years — into the precise language that a government portal will accept. Dates. Addresses. Travel histories. Declarations about matters most of us have never had reason to think about.

Between the fields, we talk. I hear about the daughter who has just been accepted into TAFE. The son who came home from school last week correcting his father’s English pronunciation — gently, carefully, in that way that children do when they love their parents and cannot quite help knowing more than them. The father who has quietly begun to think about a mortgage rather than a lease.

These are not the conversations of people passing through. These are conversations with people I have come to admire and love.

So when the long-awaited approval letter finally arrives — when the ceremony happens and the flag is pressed into their hands — I have seen what it means. It is not a formality. It is a milestone in the truest sense: a marker that says, you have come far enough to be counted as one of us. The relief in the room at those ceremonies is almost physical. People who have lived for years at the mercy of temporary visas and uncertain futures are, for the first time, simply Australian.

What follows, almost immediately, is a flood of passport applications — this time more English-intensive and bureaucratically demanding than anything that came before.

This surprises some people. It has not surprised me. Many of these families have no immediate plans to travel internationally — they are too busy putting down roots, paying off cars, getting children through school. But in the cultures they carry with them, a passport is more than a travel document. It is proof of status. Evidence, held in the hand, that you belong somewhere, and that somewhere will take you back. For people who fled a country that offered neither, the symbolism of an Australian passport goes well beyond its practical function.

I do not consider this vanity. I think it is wisdom — the hard-earned kind, that knows documents matter, and that the day may come when you need to prove you are someone the world is obliged to recognise.

Australia has granted more than a million people citizenship since the Chifley Government signed its first agreement with the International Refugee Organisation in 1947. Each one of them arrived at a ceremony carrying their particular history, and left as something new.

The families I know are simply the latest chapter in that long and unfinished story. Along the way, they will still hear the harsh and ignorant words that wound. But now they can take comfort from knowing they are recognised as fair dinkum Australians — people who belong in this vast land down under.

— Bob Wilson

This week I have been feeling very low.

It started, as so many uncomfortable thoughts do, with my news feed. Helen Haines — independent MP for Indi, former nurse, midwife, and one of the more quietly admirable figures in Australian public life — was deliberately struck by a car outside her electoral office in Wangaratta. She was rushed to hospital in a critical condition. As the days passed, we learned that both her legs had been amputated.

Sadness and disbelief have engulfed the country. It is as though we are all in the hospital waiting room with her extended family as she fights for her life. A man is in custody. Counter-terrorism police are investigating. Floral tributes engulf the pavement outside her electoral office. Her husband addressed the nation, asking people to support Helen with donations to her favourite charity, Save the Children Fund. Over one million dollars have been donated in the last seven days. The attack shocked the country. It shocked me.

Political violence is rare in Australia. Or it was. Police data shows that threats against parliamentarians doubled in the three years to 2026, with more than a thousand recorded incidents against politicians in the last financial year alone. The Australian Human Rights Commission described the attack as happening against a backdrop of increasing polarisation that could undermine democracy itself.

I avidly read the news every day. I regularly scroll through my social media feed. As usual, I find posts expressing outrage, solidarity, and grief — posts I agree with and posts I want to endorse.

But this week, after a contemplative walk with Judi around our suburb, I have decided to stop.

Because it has occurred to me, for the first time with any real clarity, that when I tap a “like” or a “thumbs-up” on a post, I am not just endorsing the post. I am endorsing its entire context — including whatever is happening in the comments thread below it.

That’s the problem.

Don’t get me wrong. I work hard to manage my social media feeds. I block accounts that trade in abuse. I mute the worst of the commentary. I try, deliberately, to curate what I see toward the constructive and the humane. I try to limit my exposure to the ugliest corners of the online world.

But for the very first time, I have noticed something that has really unsettled me. Posts I broadly agree with — posts supporting refugee families, celebrating citizenship ceremonies, pushing back on the Trump madness, against the rhetoric of One Nation and its fellow travellers — often carry comments that I would never endorse if I took the time to read them carefully. Insulting language. Personalised attacks. The casual cruelty that online anonymity makes so easy.

For the first time, I am asking myself the critical question: when I tap “like” on these posts, am I saying that the message and the sometimes crude and hurtful comments are all acceptable?

My reading and research suggests I might be doing more damage than I realised.

A 2025 study published in an economics journal found what researchers called a “misperceived legitimisation” mechanism in online communities. Approval-seeking users — those most likely to post toxic content — watch for likes and endorsements on the threads they participate in. When they see them, they interpret visible endorsements as an indication of wider community acceptance of their behaviour. The likes tell them the community is on their side. And they escalate accordingly.

Separate research found the same pattern operating in reverse: when toxic posts received an unusually high number of likes, the same users posted even more extreme content in subsequent messages. The approval is fuel.

None of this may have been the intent of the person tapping “like”. They, like me, were just endorsing an idea, not a comments thread. But the social media platforms and their algorithms don’t care about intent. They count engagement time and potential exposure to their incessant advertising stream. Every tap feeds the machine.

When I think about all this in the context of what happened to Helen Haines, I know I need to take personal action.

The man who allegedly drove his car at Helen did not emerge from nowhere. He emerged from an environment — online and off — in which political hatred has been normalised, amplified, and, yes, “liked”. Not necessarily by people who wanted to encourage violence. By ordinary people like me who agreed with a sentiment and tapped a button without reading the room.

I need to own this. I am one of those people.

Of course this realisation does not make me responsible for what happened in Wangaratta. But it does make me responsible for what I do next.

I am not sure the answer is to disengage entirely. That cedes the space to the people who have no hesitation about filling it. But it means being more deliberate. Reading the threads more carefully before I endorse them. And where a thread has gone somewhere I don’t want to be associated with, taking the time to block it rather than scrolling on.

When Prime Minister Albanese called the attack on Helen Haines “a test of our character”, he was talking about the country. But I think it is also a test of each of us individually — of how we show up in the small, daily choices we make about what we endorse, what we amplify, and what we let pass without comment.

The like button is not neutral. I knew that. This week, I finally understood it.

— Bob Wilson

There is a critical question that sits quietly beneath a lot of conversations in volunteer organisations right now. It doesn’t always get said out loud, but it is there, in the room, at every committee meeting and planning session.

“Who is going to do this work when we are all gone?”

At Circle of Friends Australia (COFA), we are not in crisis yet, but we are certainly paying attention. In our latest newsletter, we are calling for new volunteers to serve on our Management Committee. Some of our registered long-term Circles are also reducing their activity or becoming inactive due to membership disengagement.

Like many organisations built on the energy and commitment of the baby boomer generation, we are watching our most experienced volunteers move — gradually, gracefully, and sometimes not so gradually — toward the edges of active participation.

Retirement from the workforce may have been the trigger for COFA engagement for some, but as ageing issues become front and centre, “retirement from everything” eventually becomes inevitable.

The question of succession is no longer something we can leave for later. So I have been doing some reading. And what I found was both more encouraging and more challenging than I expected.

First, the good news…

It turns out the desire to volunteer has not disappeared with the younger generations. Not even close.

A national survey commissioned by St John found that 48% of Gen Z and 42% of millennials are keen to volunteer — even though they currently don’t. Research from Good2Give found that millennials are nearly twice as likely to have volunteered in the past year as baby boomers — 34% compared to 18%.

And a QUT study tracking generational volunteering patterns in Australia concluded that we may actually be entering what one researcher called a “golden decade” for volunteering, as the millennial generation reaches the life stage — settled careers, growing civic awareness, children in school — where volunteering typically peaks.

The appetite is clearly there. The question is whether organisations like ours are structured to receive it.

What younger volunteers actually want?

This is where it gets interesting — and where I suspect many established organisations, COFA included, need to do some honest reflection.

Research from QUT and Blackbaud identifies clear differences in what motivates each generation to give their time.

Gen X — those born between 1965 and 1980 — are currently the most active formal volunteers in Australia, at over 27% participation. They are motivated by meaningful experiences, feeling genuinely useful, and building connections with new people. In many ways they are the natural next cohort for organisations like ours, and probably the most immediately accessible.

Millennials — born between 1981 and 1996 — are motivated by community, skill development, and social connection. Crucially, they prefer to volunteer alongside friends rather than as individuals, and they are unlikely to commit long-term upfront. What works with this group, the research suggests, is offering short, meaningful engagements first — letting the relationship develop before asking for sustained commitment.

Gen Z — born from the late 1990s onward — are driven largely by career development and skills-based roles. They prefer episodic and flexible involvement. They respond to WhatsApp and video messages, not newsletters and formal emails. And they want to see the direct impact of what they do, quickly and clearly.

Across all three groups, the single biggest barrier is time — particularly for those managing young families and demanding jobs. Research shows that almost a third of full-time workers would consider volunteering if their employer offered volunteer leave. That is a signal worth paying attention to, both in how we pitch our work to individuals and how we might approach corporate and employer partnerships.

Are we ready for the structural challenge?

Here is the part that requires the most honest self-examination.

The research is consistent on one point: younger volunteers will not thrive in — and will simply not stay in — organisations with rigid hierarchies, fixed role descriptions, and top-down decision-making. One Australian analyst put it plainly: as baby boomers retire and leave leadership positions, their values will leave with them, and hierarchical structures will need to be flattened to attract the generations that follow.

For organisations like COFA, that means asking some uncomfortable questions.

Are our volunteer roles flexible enough? Do we offer short-term or project-based involvement, or do we only ask for ongoing open-ended commitment? Do newer volunteers have genuine agency — real input into how things are done — or do they find themselves waiting for a seat at the table that the existing cohort already occupies? Do we communicate the way younger volunteers actually receive information, or the way we have always done it?

None of this means abandoning what has made COFA effective. The relationships we build with families are long-term by nature, and some of our work simply cannot be episodic. But that does not mean we should not look for more flexibility than we have practised in the past. A volunteer who helps a newly arrived family set up their first Australian home, or assists with a citizenship application, or mentors a student through a TAFE enrolment — these are bounded, meaningful, skills-based engagements that a Gen X or millennial volunteer could commit to without signing up for the next decade.

Recently, I had the privilege of observing a new CRSA group working on tasks for the imminent arrival of a refugee family into Adelaide. The group was intergenerational — graduate students, a young couple with children, as well as boomers and Gen Xers. The energy was infectious and always supportive. The set of tasks — some small, others more complex — was enthusiastically embraced. Helping each other take a task offline between meetings to get it done felt completely natural. It gave me a clear insight into how our COFA Circles might need to be restructured.

What this means in practice

The research points to five things younger volunteers want that older organisations often struggle to offer:

• Flexibility in commitment — project-based or time-limited roles alongside open-ended ones.

• Visible impact — clear, specific feedback on what their contribution actually achieved.

• Social experience — opportunities to volunteer alongside others, not in isolation.

• Digital communication — WhatsApp, short videos, social media, not just email newsletters.

• A flat culture — genuine inclusion in decisions, not just execution of them.

None of these is beyond us. Some of them we are already doing, without having named them as recruitment strategies. Perhaps it is time to name them explicitly in our future planning.

A final thought

The families and individuals we support are themselves a powerful argument for renewal. Every time a newly arrived family finds its feet — a child enrolling in school, a parent securing their first job, a family becoming citizens — that story is available to us as an organisation. It is the kind of story that moves people to act. The kind that makes someone say, yes, I want to be part of that.

We have the stories. We have the need. We have, it turns out, a generation of potential volunteers who are looking for exactly this kind of meaningful, human, community-rooted work.

The task now is to make it easy for them to find us — and to make sure that when they do, what they find is an organisation ready to welcome them the way we welcome everyone else. With open arms and a willingness to adapt.

— Bob Wilson

Lately, I have come to the conclusion that I have been living in a bubble.

Not an unpleasant one, as bubbles go. My close circle of friends and associates are, by and large, people who openly and actively welcome new arrivals, value cultural diversity, and wince at the kind of language that has been creeping into our public conversation lately.

Seated at our outdoor table at my golf clubhouse this week, I took time to look around at the other patrons enjoying their end-of-round coffees. Mostly older Anglo-Saxon men like myself, with a sprinkling of people who clearly have had their roots in other places. The rumble of discussion, laughter and storytelling was infectious — nothing I could hear in detail, but overall the tone of friendly banter was reassuring. This was the Australia I have known all my life.

The conversation around our table moved through the usual topics — health updates, news from wider circles of acquaintances, and one or two observations from well-off “friends of friends” who spoke openly about migration and changing demographics. Nothing hostile. Just the kind of conversation that tells you something is shifting, quietly, in the background.

As I drove home, my thoughts crossed to my social media feeds. I work hard to keep what I read as positive as possible. I limit my exposure to the uglier corners of the internet and actively seek out stories of people celebrating citizenship ceremonies, sharing accounts of refugee families finding their feet, and pushing back against the meaner currents of the moment.

But even with care, I still encounter — in comments sections, in threads the algorithm drops into my line of sight like an uninvited guest — glimpses of a rather different Australia. One that is angrier. Less patient. More willing to say out loud what once would have been muttered only in private.

The rise of One Nation and the harder edges of the right are difficult to ignore. Pauline Hanson’s June address at the National Press Club, in which she declared that Australia could not be a multicultural society and called openly for a “monoculture of whiteness”, was not a fringe moment. It was delivered from one of the most prominent platforms in the country. And recent polling by the Redbridge Group found that more Australians preferred her stance on immigration than that of either major party.

I found this genuinely unsettling.

So I went looking for some research. I wanted to know whether my bubble had been protecting me from a seismic shift in opinion, or whether the noise I was hearing was louder than the numbers warranted.

The answer, it turns out, is somewhere uncomfortable in between.

The Scanlon Foundation’s Mapping Social Cohesion survey — Australia’s longest-running and most detailed study of attitudes toward diversity — found in 2025 that 84% of Australians agree multiculturalism has been good for the country. Nine in ten Australians still believe our culturally diverse population has been a positive force. That is a majority I recognise. This is the Australia I thought I knew.

But less than a year later, the 2026 Lowy Institute Poll recorded the largest ever single-year decline in support for cultural diversity — dropping from 90% in 2024 to 73% this year. Seventeen percentage points in twelve months. This is not simply noise. This is a trend.

The researchers are careful to point out what is driving it. The concern, they say, is less about multiculturalism as a value and more about the scale and pace of immigration in the context of a housing crisis and cost-of-living pressures. People are not, for the most part, rejecting diversity as an idea. They are anxious about their mortgage, their rent, their children’s prospects — and someone has handed them a convenient explanation for their discomfort. That link is asserted loudly and evidenced poorly.

That is an old and familiar story. And it is exactly the kind of environment in which the louder, angrier voices gain traction.

What worries me is not that the majority has abandoned its values. The research suggests it hasn’t — not yet. What worries me is that the majority has gone quiet while the minority has found its megaphone.

I see this playing out in small ways every day. In the work I do with newly arrived families here in Adelaide, I encounter a version of Australia that the One Nation narrative simply cannot accommodate. Families who have rebuilt their lives with extraordinary determination. Children who correct their parents’ English pronunciation without thinking twice. Parents who have found work, pay taxes, volunteer at their local school or sports club, and worry about the same things as everyone else — the grocery bill, the school report, the weekend football.

These families are not a threat to Australian identity. In many ways, they are its most vivid expression — the continuation of a story that has been unfolding since the Chifley government first signed its agreement with the International Refugee Organisation in 1947, a process that has seen more than one million refugees permanently settle here and help build the society we inhabit today.

The bubble I have been living in is real. But it is not a distortion. It is a reminder of what the majority of Australians still believe, even if they are not saying it as loudly as they should.

Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps those of us who hold these views need to be less comfortable with our silence. Less willing to assume that decency will quietly prevail on its own. Less inclined to scroll past the ugliness and assume someone else will push back.

The research tells me the Australia I thought I knew is still here. What we need to do now is find the courage to say so — respectfully, clearly, and often. To call out the misinformation and the lies that link social inequity to new arrivals. To speak up, rather than scroll on.

— Bob Wilson

It always begins the same way… An email to contacts, sent on to friends of friends and more. Then the messages and phone calls — I’ve got this; a friend has one of these; no, we don’t need any more of those. Then the pick-up arrangements to a suburb I half-know, and finally to a front hallway I will not forget in a hurry.

Jane was a new contact for me. She had reached out to COFA after hearing we were preparing to welcome a refugee family of six — parents, children, the full household — due to arrive in Adelaide within the month. I furnished her with a list from one of our Circles. Yes, she had things to pass on. Practical things, she said. Come when you’re ready. We talked and set a date.

What I found when I arrived was rather more than practical things.

The hallway was stacked waist-high with cardboard cartons, each one carefully packed and labelled. Linen. Kitchen. Children’s books. Glassware — handle with care. Jane had been at this for some time. You could tell.

She explained as we began carrying boxes to my car. Her sister was leaving the family home. Not by choice, exactly — more by the quiet accumulation of years and the gentle insistence of circumstances. A single room in aged care was waiting. The house, the furniture, the accumulated weight of a life well-lived — most of it could not come along.

So Jane had stepped in, as sisters do, to help manage the transition. To sort and decide and carry. To stand in the middle of someone else’s life and work out what could be kept, what needed to be let go, and — more importantly — what might still be of use to someone else.

We talked as we worked. She picked up items and explained them — this was from her sister’s kitchen, this was always on the sideboard, the children used to love this. Some of it was entirely practical: good saucepans, a decent set of plates, a kettle that still worked perfectly well.

Some of it carried something harder to name. Researchers call our possessions “memory anchors” — objects that help us maintain what they describe as identity continuity, the thread of self that runs through a life even as the circumstances around it change. For Jane’s sister, a lifetime of those anchors was being sorted into what would fit in one room and what would not. The room would hold some of it. The rest needed somewhere to go.

That is where I came in.

Because on the other side of this transaction — if you can call it that — a family of six is preparing to land in a city they have never seen, in a country whose systems and supermarkets and social habits are entirely new to them. They will arrive with almost nothing. They will need saucepans and plates and a kettle. They will need, in the most literal sense, a household.

Jane is helping redistribute her sister’s household to help build theirs. Psychologists have a name for this impulse. They call it generativity — a term coined by Erik Erikson to describe the human drive, particularly strong in later life, to invest in those who come after you. In older adults it often shows up not in grand gestures but in material ones: the careful redistribution of objects, the passing forward of things that still have years in them. One writer describes it simply as one of the oldest acts of love a person can perform.

But as our conversation continued, Jane shared more with me — a semi-stranger — than one might expect. It became clear that some aspects of the process felt unresolved. Family ties, she said. Questions of fairness. She didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t press. Some things belong to the cartons that don’t get passed on.

I have been doing this work long enough to know that the practical side of settlement — the furniture runs, the form-filling, the trips to Centrelink — is not glamorous. It does not make the news. But it is the connective tissue of a family restarting their life in a new country, the foundation on which everything else — employment, education, community — slowly finds its footing.

What I had not quite anticipated that morning was the emotional weight of the other end of that equation.

Standing in Jane’s hallway, I found myself thinking about the two transitions happening simultaneously — one life narrowing to a single room, another about to expand into a new country. The boxes in the hallway belonged to both stories at once. They were the end of one chapter and, without anyone having planned it that way, the beginning of another.

On our final walk to the car with the last load, Jane seemed lighter than when I had arrived. Not unburdened exactly — you do not become unburdened from something like this in a morning — but purposeful. The things were going somewhere useful. That mattered to her.

It mattered to me too.

There is something quietly hopeful about the idea that a family arriving in Adelaide next month will set their table with plates that carry, unknowingly, decades of another family’s Sunday dinners. That they will make their first Australian cup of tea in a kettle from a kitchen they will never see.

Objects move through time. They carry more than we think. And sometimes, without quite meaning to, they carry us all forward.

— Bob Wilson

Some weeks arrive with more noise than others.

This week, Australians who pay attention to such things found themselves watching a number — 20,000 — move from threatened to confirmed in the space of a single afternoon.

The Australian Financial Review reported that the refugee intake would be cut to 13,750 places from July 2027. Within hours, the Refugee Council had responded, Labor MPs had made calls, and by late afternoon the Prime Minister had confirmed the program would remain at 20,000 places.

A win, of sorts. A relieved exhale from people who do this work.

But it was an uncomfortably close call for a number that should not be controversial.

Here is some context worth holding onto. Over the last decade, humanitarian migrants have made up no more than seven per cent of Australia’s net overseas migration. Over forty years, the average is eight per cent. The people we are talking about — refugees, humanitarian entrants, the most vulnerable of the world’s displaced — represent a very small fraction of those who arrive in this country each year. The noise generated around that fraction is entirely disproportionate to its size.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the numbers are anything but small.

Since 2023, more than five million Afghans have been forcibly returned from Iran and Pakistan to a country now governed by the Taliban — returned to poverty, persecution, and an uncertain future that many of them fled at enormous cost. The scale of this displacement is difficult to absorb. It sits alongside similar crises in Sudan, Syria, Myanmar, and elsewhere, in a world where the number of forcibly displaced people has reached levels not seen since the Second World War.

During a short work assignment in Pakistan, my local staff took me to see one of the border crossings between the two countries. At the time, it was like a vast South Asian open-air market, with people from both sides of the frontier trading everything imaginable and much more. I walked the stalls. At one stage my local guide told me I was now in Afghanistan. I looked up, worried. He only laughed. Borders are flexible imaginary lines on a road until they are not.

Australia is an island, but not an island apart from all of this.

This week also marked the anniversary of the Tampa — the Norwegian freighter that, in August 2001, rescued 433 asylum seekers from a sinking vessel in the Indian Ocean and was then refused permission to land in Australia. The ABC’s documentary series marking that anniversary is worth watching. It is a reminder of how quickly political fear can override basic human instinct, and how long the consequences of those decisions last.

Judi and I were on a long-term assignment based in Southeast Asia when this incident occurred. We watched the international news channels each evening for the latest developments from home. It was one of the only times in my life when I was truly embarrassed for my country. The statements from our political leaders at the time were difficult to watch. In the office for the following few days, my local colleagues kindly said nothing — though I suspected the lunchtime conversations in their own language covered the topic thoroughly.

So to me in 2026, the confirmation of 20,000 places feels less like generosity and more like a floor — the very minimum we can reasonably claim as a wealthy, stable nation in an unstable world.

But the noisy policy debate almost always misses something important.

Numbers matter. Quotas matter. But what happens after the plane lands matters just as much. The experience of newly arrived families in their first months in Australia — whether they feel welcomed or merely processed — shapes not only their own trajectory but public attitudes toward refugee settlement more broadly.

This is something I have watched up close for over five years. Family by family, Circle by Circle, the programs that provide a personal safety net for vulnerable new arrivals — many still awaiting full documentation, all navigating systems they have never encountered before. The work is ongoing, unglamorous, and largely invisible. It rarely makes the news.

The CRISP program — no longer a pilot, now a permanent fixture — has generated some evidence worth paying attention to. An ABC Australian Story episode this month followed a group of Jewish Australians who formed an enduring friendship with a Somali Muslim mother and son through their involvement in the program. One story among hundreds. The common thread is this: when established Australians engage directly with newly arrived families, understanding shifts. Not through argument or policy, but through personal relationship.

When the Chifley Labor Government signed its first agreement with the International Refugee Organisation in 1947, it began a process that has seen more than one million refugees permanently settle in Australia. They helped build the multicultural society we now inhabit — and largely take for granted. Next July marks eighty years of that commitment. It would be a shame to spend the anniversary arguing about whether the number should be 20,000 or 13,750.

The better question — the one I keep coming back to — is how we make each of those places count. How we ensure that every family who arrives here finds not just a visa and a Centrelink number, but a community willing to sit beside them, help them through the forms, and eventually watch their children correct their English pronunciation without a second thought.

That is the work. The number just makes it possible.

— Bob Wilson

It starts, as many things do these days, with a scroll.

Somewhere between the outrage and the opinion pieces, my feed has been filling up with something different. Photos of people with family and the occasional local dignitary in community halls, holding small Australian flags, grinning in that particular way that suggests they have been waiting a long time for this moment.

Citizenship ceremonies. Dozens of them, lately, landing in my feed from all corners of my social world. I like every one. Without hesitation.

I have thought about why. Part of it is straightforward — these are joyful moments, and joy deserves acknowledgement. But there is something else at work. The online algorithm, of course, has noticed my enthusiasm and serves me up more.

Without quite intending to, I have become a one-man cheer squad for new Australians.

I suspect it is not entirely accidental. Because the other thing my feed carries, less joyfully, is a steady current of noise from voices insisting that Australia belongs to a particular kind of person. That the story of our country is — and should remain — a monoculture of whiteness. The bots and the blowhards who carry this message are loud and they are organised, and I find myself liking citizenship photos the way you might open a window in a stuffy room. A small, deliberate act of counter-pressure.

But this is only part of what I want to say. Because at my study desk in Adelaide, I have been doing something more concrete than clicking a button.

For the past couple of months, I have been sharing screens with Afghan families I have known since they arrived in this country more than three years ago. We met mostly through the local CRISP settlement program, in the bewildering early months when everything — the forms, the systems, the supermarket cereal aisle — was new and strange. We have come a long way together since then.

Now they are applying for citizenship. And the process, it turns out, demands its own particular kind of patience.

The online forms are long. Forty-plus pages of dates, addresses, travel histories, identity documents, and declarations. We work through them together, screen-shared across our devices, moving carefully from field to field. The families know their own stories intimately, of course — but the forms ask for that story in a very specific language, formatted in a very specific way, and any gap or inconsistency can stall the whole process.

Between the fields and the drop-down menus, we talk. They tell me about their children — how the youngest now corrects her parents’ English pronunciation without a second thought, how the eldest is looking at TAFE and university pathways, how some families are beginning to think about a mortgage rather than a lease.

These are not the conversations of people passing through. They are the conversations of people putting down roots.

I find myself thinking about what Australian citizenship actually means. The government’s version involves a test — an online assessment of Australian values and history, designed to confirm that applicants understand the society they are joining. It is not especially difficult, and the families I work with prepare for it carefully.

But the real test, it seems to me, happens long before anyone sits down at a computer. It happens in the years of learning a language, navigating a bureaucracy, raising children in a culture not your own, finding work, building friendships across difference, and choosing — every single day — to be here.

By that measure, the families I know passed the test some time ago.

Australia has never been a monoculture, whatever certain voices might prefer. It is a country built, generation after generation, by people who arrived from somewhere else and decided to stay. The Afghan families I work with are simply the latest chapter in a story that began long before any of us were born.

Which is why I keep liking those ceremony photos in my feed. Every grinning face in a community hall is a small, quiet argument against the noise.

Not a loud argument. Not an angry one. Just a smiling person holding a small Australian flag, having earned the right to call this place home.

That seems worth celebrating.

— Bob Wilson

This week, I found myself back in a place I hadn’t properly walked through in years — the corridors of Adelaide TAFE. As I entered the spacious atrium and passed the office and teaching suite I had called home for several years, my thoughts quickly returned to the friends and colleagues who had been with me during that time — all now retired or no longer around.

The red brick and mortar of this inner-city college are still there, but the current fitout is modern and welcoming. I approached a helpful admin staff member for directions to my training room. She smiled widely and apologised for the “rabbit warren configuration” of the campus — just as I had done, so many years ago, to hundreds of new students as they wrestled with the signage. Now all new, but still difficult to follow.

Of course, on this occasion, I wasn’t there to teach. I was there to audit a training opportunity, weighing up whether I might sign on as a volunteer tutor with AMEP, the Adult Migrant English Program — now occupying a larger section of the ground floor precinct.

I guess old habits die hard, and mine is noticing corridors. I spent a good chunk of my working life in them — first at Adelaide, later out at Tea Tree Gully TAFE — and there’s a particular sound and ambience to a TAFE building mid-morning that doesn’t seem to change over time: computer monitors, refectory coffee, the low hum of adults who’ve made a deliberate choice to be there. Real students, in other words. Not kids marking time.

And there were plenty of them. Streams of adult learners moving along, folders under arms, heading into courses — some new, some old, and some I couldn’t quite name — the curriculum has grown well beyond what I’d recognise from my day.

To be honest, it was a bit of a thrill… seeing the old place still doing what it was built to do, just at a scale and variety I hadn’t quite pictured.

The Room

When I did find my training room, the thrill took a different turn. The space was small, the furniture laid out in an open square. The new participants sat silently with empty chairs between them — as if to keep themselves safe and cocooned — while two or three small groups of other enrollees, who clearly knew each other, talked quietly among themselves. A young technical assistant was adjusting the large screen at the front of the room, while the facilitator moved around the group, checking names off a class list on her laptop.

I’ll admit I walked in with a certain amount of professional vanity intact. Back in the day — the early days of trying to *personalise* training, when the IT systems were clunky and half-built and we were still arguing about what “self-paced” learning even meant — my team and I worked hard for it.

We were enthusiastic and knew no fear. We built systems and learning resources that let students enrol whenever they were ready, rather than waiting on the academic year like it was a bus timetable. We tried hard to get systems, primitive as they were, to actually bend around the individual learner instead of the other way round. It felt, at the time, like genuinely pioneering work.

So now, walking into this refurbished training space, all clean lines and a big screen up front, I expected to feel outclassed. Technologically, I was. The enrolment system was entirely online. Data and materials were managed with a slickness we could only have dreamed of — no more chasing paper. On that front, full credit where it’s due.

But then the session started, and, to my dismay, the large screen took over — and stayed in charge for the next two hours straight.

The facilitator appeared tired, just going through the motions. Her greeting to the class was courteous, but her lack of enthusiasm was palpable. She read from the electronic screen constantly, as though we couldn’t decipher simple sentences ourselves. She posed no open-ended questions and struggled to get any engagement from her mute class.

I was stunned. Slide after slide, more or less verbatim, in the voice of someone working through a script rather than facilitating a room.

There was the occasional space — barely any, really — for the group to talk to each other, to test an idea out loud, to disagree, to bring their own experience to the table. The questions posed were uninspiring, and when we reconvened, she made little attempt to acknowledge the observations from the group. As a consequence, one or two powerful voices began to dominate the limited feedback that was offered. The rest of us looked on as she moved straight on to the next slide, the moment already gone.

All the principles of good adult learning theory and practice that were once the hallmarks of good post-secondary teaching seemed to be missing.

Two hours is a long stretch to sit while being *told at*, especially when the whole point of the exercise was training people to go and have real, responsive, human conversations with migrant learners. I kept waiting for the pivot — the moment the facilitator would put the clicker down and ask the room a genuine question. It didn’t come. The old adult learning theory I was so wedded to back in my TAFE years — Knowles and his andragogy, all that emphasis on drawing out what adults already bring into a room — felt like it had been quietly filed away somewhere, replaced by a very well-organised slideshow.

There’s an irony in it that I couldn’t quite let go of, sitting there. The technology had done exactly what we once hoped it would: it freed up the *systems* — enrolment, data, resource delivery — so the humans in the room could focus on the actual teaching. And yet here was a case of the humans handing the floor straight back to the screen anyway.

Going Home to Think

Sadly, I left with mixed feelings, which I suppose is the honest place to land. Nostalgic for a version of adult education I’d fought hard to build, and a little disappointed to see the tools finally arrive… just as the pedagogy meant to use them seemed to have gone missing.

I came home and gave it a lot of thought. I took the time to review the learning package carefully — all laid out on both screen and in hard copy, if I needed it. The technical elements of language and literacy teaching, I already had. Even some introductory adult learning theory was built into the course. But what I was really looking for were signs of the actual practice that would be modelled in the classroom program. That wasn’t obvious, and that was the thing that swayed my decision.

In the end, I decided not to sign up as an AMEP volunteer. It wasn’t the content, or the systems, or the paperwork that decided it. It was the lack of warmth, the exuberance, and the practical skill of a facilitator, genuinely at ease in the room — and that, in the end, was the thing I couldn’t find.

It’s the winter school holiday break in Adelaide. Around our area, the morning traffic is lighter now that the school drop-offs have subsided. The weather is cool and cloudy, with the occasional showery day keeping kids indoors, off the streets and out of the park.

Old codgers like me still brave the rain and cold, walking the paths alongside dogs and owners dressed in raincoats.

The other day, as I rounded a corner in a wooded area, two young lads — not more than 12 or 13 — came hurtling along the path. They were laughing, enjoying the exhilaration of the speed of their e-scooter. No helmets, just a conviction that nothing could or would go wrong on this parkland adventure.

I was immediately overcome by two conflicting emotions: danger and a sense of quiet jealousy of their youth and fearlessness. I stared at them as they drew up at the pedestrian crossing, a frown on my face, but I said nothing.

When the lights turned red, they sped across the crossing, just missing a couple of excited dogs and a young mother with a pusher, then barrelled down the road in the bicycle lane, still laughing and talking loudly as only teenage boys do.

Back in my armchair in the study, I reflected on the morning. Of course, young teenagers are born to be thrill seekers, I mused…it’s part of our life journey. Some will suffer the consequences, and others will remember close calls for the rest of their lives.

I remember riding a motorcycle too fast and living through a traffic accident where I ended up under the back tray of a truck, just inches from the back wheels and death. While I was in hospital for a few days recovering, I learned that my mother had sold the bike without my permission to ensure my biking career was at an end.

What really got me thinking was the bigger picture. E-scooters — without speed governors in place — seemed to have appeared overnight, replacing the pushbikes and even e-bikes that high school kids once used to get to and from home.

Business interests had begun importing them into the country, setting up distribution networks and online outlets to sell them to anyone with money in their hands. Suddenly, they were on our streets and footpaths, ridden by underage teenagers without safety regulations or licensing protocols in place. Local and state governments were left flat-footed, falling back on the old protocols of parliamentary reviews and subcommittees to pontificate about what regulation might be needed.

This is not the first time this kind of situation has arisen. Thinking back over the last ten years, doing an Uber has become a common business practice. Arrive unannounced, sign up thousands of drivers and riders, and let the taxi industry and the regulators discover the problem in the newspapers. By the time governments worked out whether ride-sharing was legal, it was too late to matter… half the city had the app on their phone. Airbnb ran the same play with spare bedrooms. Drones did it in the sky. And artificial intelligence is doing it right now, at a scale that makes scooters look quaint.

Adelaide’s e-scooters followed the script faithfully. The hire scooters appeared in the city in 2019, bright green and orange, propped on footpaths like they’d always been there. They were a “trial,” we were told. The trial lasted six years. Meanwhile, plenty of privately owned scooters were sold in shops and ridden around the suburbs, all of them — strictly speaking — illegal on any public road or path in South Australia.

The law finally caught up on 13 July 2025. Privately owned e-scooters became street legal: riders must be 16 or over, wear a helmet, keep to 25 km/h on roads and bike lanes, and 10 km/h on footpaths. One rider per scooter. No licence, no registration, no insurance required.

Which brings me back to my two young lads in the park. In the space of about fifteen seconds, they managed four offences: too young, no helmets, two aboard one machine, and speeding across a pedestrian crossing.

They weren’t outlaws. They were kids on school holidays doing what kids do with whatever machine is at hand. The rulebook simply lives in a different world from the one they ride in.

And here’s the part the legislation quietly skips over. Because scooters aren’t registered vehicles, there’s no compulsory third party insurance. If one of those boys had collected the young mother and her pusher, any compensation claim would have to be made against the rider personally… a 12-year-old. If the rider scoots off unidentified, there’s no claim at all. The pedestrian simply wears it.

The government, to its credit, promised to review the laws after their first 12 months. That review is now due, and there’s a public consultation open, asking South Australians what they think of the rules. It’s a familiar sequence. First the product, then the accidents, then the consultation.

I’ve thought about those two boys a few times since. If I’m honest, my frown at the crossing was never going to change anything. They wouldn’t have heard me over their own laughter anyway… and 55 years ago, neither would I. It took a truck’s back tray to slow me down, and a mother with the good sense not to wait for a parliamentary review.

That’s the thing about doing an Uber. The product always arrives at the speed of an app download, while the law arrives at the speed of a subcommittee. In between, it’s left to mothers, pedestrians and luck to fill the gap.

The consultation is open. The review is due. And somewhere out there, two young lads are barrelling down a bicycle lane, laughing as only teenage boys do.

I hope their luck holds.