Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork in progress with NGOs and volunteers providing services to asylum seekers in Melbourne, this paper explores their engagements with, negotiations of and possible resistance to increasingly restrictive asylum seeker policies.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 2013 Regional Resettlement Arrangement, public commentary has focused on the inhumane conditions of Australia's offshore processing centres. In fact, most asylum seekers (approx 29,000 out of 33,000) are precariously positioned onshore, in the Australian community. Having arrived since the 2012 policy decision that 'unauthorised' migrants would 'never be settled in Australia', they remain on temporary visas and may eventually be resettled in a third country. Living below the poverty line under controlled conditions that deny work rights and provide a stipend less than a welfare benefit, many depend on NGOs and volunteers to help make ends meet.

This paper is based on ongoing fieldwork exploring the political and moral subjectivities of such volunteers and NGOs working with asylum seekers in Melbourne. I examine the neoliberal conditions that have led to the rise of a mixed economy of welfare provision that disproportionately places NGOs and volunteers at the centre of service delivery to asylum seekers. I also grapple with the moral and political paradoxes of providing humanitarian aid to asylum seekers, paradoxes that have been explored elsewhere by anthropologists such as Didier Fassin and Miriam Ticktin and involve tensions between humanitarianism and securitisation; compassion and repression; hospitality and hostility; governance and resistance. I end by considering whether NGOs and volunteers have the potential and capacity to challenge current policy settings and advocate for progressive political and social change.