About 250 students from AMES West Hub spent a day at Werribee Open Range Zoo on March 20, courtesy of City West Water. As part of Cultural Diversity Week celebrations, students were taken by bus to the Zoo, given free…

All asylum seekers held in an Australian detention centre on Manus Island who are found to be refugees will be resettled in Papua New Guinea, the governments of both countries have agreed. The announcement comes weeks after PNG Prime Minister…

A United Nations expert on people smuggling and human trafficking says Canberra’s tough but ‘questionable’ policy on dealing with asylum seekers arriving by boat has successfully destroyed the current migrant smuggling model into Australia. Sebastian Baumeister, from the UN’s Office…

COUNCILS should set targets to make sure one third of their workers are refugees, foreign-born or from non-English-speaking backgrounds, a lobby group has suggested. The Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria wants to make it easier for migrants and refugees to…

Most Australians support multiculturalism and recent migrants are positive about life here, despite occasional pockets of community dissatisfaction, according to the latest Scanlon Foundation/Monash University social cohesion research. Two new reports, the Recent Arrivals Survey and the Local Area Survey,…

Immigration Minister Scott Morrison has defended moving asylum seekers involved in legal action against the federal government from Sydney to remote Western Australia the day before their case is due to be heard in court. A spokesperson for Mr Morrison…

A diverse group of committed and innovative organisations and individuals have been honoured in the 2014 Migration and Settlement Awards. Global hotels group ACCOR won the Business Inclusion Award, which recognises a business that has successfully delivered a community-orientated program…

In celebration of Diversity Week, the Multicultural Hub and City of Melbourne hosted the Community Cultural Fair on Saturday 15th March. Held at the Drill Hall, the fair was attended by over 1000 people throughout the day and showcased art and…

AMES asylum seeker clients are enjoying free bike tours of Melbourne’s city centre thanks to a partnership with Freddy’s Bike Tours. The first of three groups of clients took to the streets and bike paths this week in a pilot…

More than twenty service providers and twenty representatives from the new commonwealth Department of Social Services attended a settlement forum hosted this week by AMES. The forum was aimed at building connections among Humanitarian Settlement Services (HSS) and Settlement Grants Program…

Passengers on an asylum seeker boat describe the high drama of being intercepted at sea and their treatment by Australian personnel, in this first of a two-part special, with a warning that it contains strong language. Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2014/s3965617.htm

A Melbourne Baptist minister is walking from Melbourne to Canberra hauling a model of the wooden asylum seeker boat that brought him to Australia. The boat, with the words ‘Thank You’ inscribed on the side, will be delivered to Parliament…