London: Cristina Williams came to Australia as a UN war refugee from El Salvador aged 10.
But she says the country that welcomed her with open arms is unrecognisable to her now as a result of harsh border bans that have trapped citizens inside the country, locked tens of thousands out and culminated in the threat to jail and fine any Australian who tries to flee coronavirus-ravaged India. Some have dubbed it Fortress Australia.
Australian Cristina Williams is moving to Arizona.
While much of the focus of Australia’s border closure has been on the difficulties citizens have returning home, lesser-known are the stories of the growing number of Australians looking to leave permanently.
“I was a UN war refugee. Australia was a place that rescued my family when we were in need but that Australia is dead,” 41-year-old Williams says.
“Australia has now taken other families that are suffering and instead of finding a way to get them here they’ve turned their back. They’re actively shutting people out,” she says, fighting back tears.
Cristina Williams, aged 10, left, in Queensland with her brother and sister as freshly arrived refugees from El Salvador.
“I no longer feel like Australia is my home.”
For the past five years Williams has divided her time between Australia and the United States, where she has a home in Arizona with her second husband Mat and his sons.
The arrangement was working and she planned to keep it for another decade as the boys grew up.
Last week’s federal budget calculations assumed the vaccine rollout would be completed by the end of the year and that borders would reopen by mid-2022. But the government has not committed to those targets.
The indefinite border ban, first introduced in March 2020, has prompted her and her ex husband, a British-Australian, to both quit the country.
“He’s finally said to me ‘let’s get out, the UK is going to open up a lot sooner than Australia, the world will be back to a new normal and Australia will be still trying to figure out what a post-pandemic plan looks like’,” she says, speaking from hotel quarantine via Zoom after returning from a three-month visit to the US with her boys.
Cristina Williams, third from left, with her blended family in Arizona earlier this year.
The trip cost them $50,000 in cancelled and rebooked flights and quarantine. “We didn’t do the trip because we felt like a change of scenery, we did it because we’re desperate,” she said.
”When it was one month or two months, well OK, maybe it wasn’t urgent for you to see your husband, when it’s two months and your kids haven’t seen their brothers – suck it up. When it’s going on its second year, now it’s a crisis.“
She says not going would have meant a total of three years with the brothers not seeing each other and out of her marriage: “That’s a prison term.”
She says she regularly writes to Health Minister Greg Hunt asking for a plan for when the borders will reopen but receives a proforma response saying how well Australia has managed the pandemic.
“There isn’t a plan for this to end for Australia, if they actually said when everyone is vaccinated we’ll reopen the border and it will be in stages – if they actually just showed some kind of a plan then we could plan our life and we’d make an assessment about whether that year they said is manageable or not.”
Adding to the sense of alienation from her home country is the lack of empathy from many Australians for her need to travel. She likens the abuse she’s received — accusing her of being irresponsible and spreading coronavirus — to a toxic relationship. (She was fully vaccinated in the US.)
“It feels like a break-up with Australia and it feels like [Australia] is the arsehole but everybody else thinks [it’s] the hero.”
Taking flight: Molly Fleck with 14-month-old son TJ in Surry Hills on Saturday. The family will relocate to the US because of Australia’s travel ban.Credit:Sam Mooy
Williams is not alone in feeling this way. Molly Fleck and her husband came to work in Australia four years ago, she at a leading university in Sydney and he in finance for a US-based firm. They are booked on a flight to Chicago next week.
The 34-year-old gave birth to their first child — TJ — in March last year and has not been able to introduce him to his grandparents.
She is frustrated that travel during the pandemic has been “equated with holidays”, rather than the urgent need to reconnect with loved ones.
“The uncertainty of not knowing when the borders are even potentially going to reopen [has] been really challenging for us to make any sort of plan for our life,” Fleck says.
The federal budget predicts the loss of 174,000 people by mid-2022 as a result of the border bans, a dramatic increase from the 93,200 it estimated just six months ago.
Employers say the border closures are contributing to a serious labour shortage.
Fleck says the government’s ongoing bans have shown professional migrants like her that Australia is no longer “just a flight away”.
While she’ll greatly miss her job, her friends and Sydney’s beauty, she says the country “can be an unwelcoming place for migrants” — something that has been amplified by the pandemic.
“I definitely feel that it has grown in the pandemic and that it’s given people permission to voice things that they previously would have kept silent about.”
She hesitates when asked if she’d recommend Australia as a place to relocate to when she returns home to the US.
“It’s a hard question because I love Australia. I’m very sad to be leaving but the Australian government has a short-term mindset when it comes to excluding migrants,” she says.
“The damage that’s being done with particularly keeping out international students is something that’s going to haunt Australia for a decade.”
She says Australia is depriving itself of global talent in its continued pursuit of COVID-19 elimination because it is unsustainable, even if popular with the public.
“I don’t much agree with ScoMo [Prime Minister Scott Morrison] but he was right at the very beginning when he said ‘we will have to learn to live what his virus’.
“I truly don’t see a path out of this for Australia without someone being willing to tell the public some difficult truths.”
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