Key Points
- Om Dhungel bought a house in Australia with a loan from Bhutanese friends.
- He says it's common for people in the community to loan each other money.
- Humanitarian migrants can face many barriers to buying houses in Australia.
Om Dhungel says he'd probably still be struggling to buy a house in Australia now, 25 years after he first arrived, if it wasn't for the help of his friends.
He was born in Bhutan and several years after he moved to Australia in 1998 he was granted asylum as a humanitarian migrant, because of ethnic violence against Nepalese people like him in his hometown.
"My wife and I were both working and trying to save for a deposit, and one of our friends said they would lend us $20,000 towards buying a house, so we could have a smaller mortgage. So that's what we did, in 2004," he told SBS News.
"We were living in Marrickville (in Sydney) but we wouldn't be able to afford there even if we saved until now, so we moved out west to Blacktown."
They paid all the money back within months and were inspired to help other refugees get a foot in the door in Australia.
"When more Bhutanese refugees came to Australia in 2008, we thought we would pass on our learning and help people settle here and buy houses. But they were coming from refugee camps so they didn't have the skills to get high-paying jobs here, so I wanted to help people learn English and learn trades, to achieve that vision of buying a house."
Dhungel started the Australian Bhutanese Association and his own consulting business to help refugees get employment.
He said even though lending money to friends can be risky, it is relatively common among Bhutanese Australians who want to help each other build a life.
"If you have a close-knit community, you can do so much. We don't leave each other behind and often we will have many people living in a house because they are saving to move out and buy."
Source: SBS News
There are around 300,000 permanent humanitarian migrants in Australia, according to the datasets that also incorporated census data from 2021.
In 2021, the proportion of humanitarian migrants who owned their home with a mortgage or outright was 38 per cent compared with 69 per cent for the total population of Australia.
The numbers trended up dramatically the longer people had been in Australia, with 51 per cent of humanitarian migrants buying a house if they had been here for more than 10 years.
Sandra Elhelw is the CEO of the Settlement Council of Australia, which represents agencies that help migrants and refugees settle in Australia.
She told SBS News migrants face challenges coming to Australia but they have many strengths.
"Migrants are far more likely to be entrepreneurial and start their own businesses," she said.
Many humanitarian migrants face a tough reality in Australia and are more likely to struggle with rental affordability and crowded housing than other Australians. Source: AAP / Lukas Coch
"But mainstream employment services aren't really set up to address challenges such as language barriers, skills, recognition, and the other elements of their experience.
"For a long time, we have been calling for a lot more specialist employment services to support refugees, specifically, the majority of refugees want to work but our system has failed them and often places them in jobs that don't leverage their full potential when they do find employment."
In 2021, 26 per cent of humanitarian migrants who lived in Australia for less than five years were earning personal income, increasing to 57 per cent of those in Australia for more than 10 years, the ABS figures showed.
The proportion of migrants who owned their home with a mortgage or outright was 62 per cent, compared with 69 per cent for the total population of Australia.
For humanitarian migrants, this figure was much lower at only 38 per cent.
Similarly, the proportion of humanitarian migrants that pay above 30 per cent of their income on rent was 46 per cent, compared with only 30 per cent of all renters in Australia.
Humanitarian refugees are people who have been recognised as refugees and therefore enjoy special protections of the international law, head of migration at Red Cross Australia Nicole Batch told SBS News.
For these people to succeed in Australia it's important to have the support of the community and having other people understand where they've come from and what's happened to them, she said.
"It takes some time, for people to settle, because there is a lack of familiarity of systems that work in Australia and the kinds of things that people in Australia are entitled to, or how services can help you.
"So they need support for people to really understand how to make the most of the supports available to them and know where to go for help, because often, people have come from places where this, you know, things work in a different way."
While the likelihood of living in crowded housing decreased the longer migrants lived in Australia, the proportion of humanitarian migrants living in crowded dwellings, at 34 per cent, was much higher than the rest of the Australian population at 7 per cent.
Some may be doing it on purpose to save money, as Dhungel points out.
This group are more likely than other migrants to become Australian citizens.
Source: SBS News
Humanitarian migrants had the lowest percentage of proficiency in English, at 71 per cent, compared to 89 per cent of migrants overall.
But this figure rose the longer people lived in Australia, with 66 per cent of humanitarian migrants being proficient in English within five years in the country and 77 per cent of people who had been there for over ten years reporting proficiency.
