Victims of family violence are being required by the Department to contact the child’s father, placing them and their children at serious risk. 4.2.7 Lengthy delays in processing applications for visas and citizenship with no mandated timeframes or updates provided to applicants “You have to establish either through a DNA test that the father is the father of the child, or you need to provide evidence that at the time of the birth of the child there was a parent-child relationship between the father and the child. In either of those scenarios, you generally need to make contact with the father. Often, they will refuse to do a DNA test and are effectively using the migration process as a further tool of family violence and will sometimes put conditions on it and say, “I’m only going to do the DNA test if you come back to me”, etc… It’s a pretty high threshold (of evidence) to meet. “If I don’t have permanency, citizenship, I have no future. There’s just been hurdle after hurdle.” — Michaela Rhode, Australian Legal Practitioner, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre The logistics and considerable expense of obtaining DNA testing was observed to be extremely challenging for stateless mothers. “There’s a lot of paperwork that needs to be filled in and it’s quite difficult when there’s an Intervention Order in place, even arranging for all of them to attend the DNA process because there’s only a few that the Department have provided as being authorised to take these DNA tests. And so even the logistics of organising for the three of them to attend because they’ll also ask the mother to do a DNA test at the same time.” — Michaela Rhode, Australian Legal Practitioner, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Legal practitioners noted that many mothers that they had assisted in this situation did not have work rights and are required to cover the considerable costs of the DNA testing. In many cases, children were in urgent need of having their Australian citizenship confirmed so they could access essential medical care and services unavailable to them on a temporary visa. Overall, the process was observed as exacerbating the trauma experienced by the mothers a result of family violence. This was particularly the case in instances where the government sought to challenge and appeal initial decisions by lower courts to grant citizenship. “Quite a few children in the situation needed almost NDIStype assistance and weren’t able to get any support from the government, in terms of having autism or another disability. But yeah, the mothers in these cases, are generally in a very heightened state throughout the entire process. A lot of them don’t have work rights, so haven’t been able to support themselves at all, are relying on organisations completely, haven’t really had the opportunity to be able to heal or recover from the violence that they’ve suffered, the children included in that. And it’s just a very harrowing, arduous experience.” — Michaela Rhode, Australian Legal Practitioner, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre 44 Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness | Understanding Statelessness in Australia So still, I wait.” — Nasir* As discussed elsewhere in this report (5.3), stateless people experience significant anxiety over the wait periods for determinations about visas, exacerbated by a lack of clear and transparent timeframes for decision making and an absence of communication by DHA regarding the status of their application. For those able to apply for citizenship, stateless people reported experiencing anxiety over the unknown timeframe for processing and the lack of updates provided by the DHA concerning the status of their application. In the absence of mandated timeframes for decision making, Australian legal practitioners interviewed for this Report observed significant and often unexplained delays in their stateless clients’ processing times, with some children waiting up to six years for an initial determination. One Australian legal practitioner suggested that a lack of awareness on the part of government decision makers about how to process applications by stateless people might be contributing to the delay: “I feel like in the citizenship space that there’s a real reluctance to make decisions in difficult matters such as stateless applications. The Department often, when things get difficult, rather than process they tend to go on hold.” — Carina Ford, Australian Legal Practitioner, Carina Ford Immigration Lawyers Greater understanding on the part of the Department of Home Affairs of the challenges obtaining documentation that stateless people experience, and the need for some administrative flexibility was suggested as a way to overcome these barriers. “Processing applications is important. Rather than sitting on the process. Flexibility and understanding that someone may not always be able to prove their exact date of birth and name. For some reason, that’s what sometimes happens when people arrive by boat. They get allocated a name and a number and a date of birth. It all seems fine then, and then that person ends up using that identity often. But then when it comes to citizenship you’re asking them to prove something that they couldn’t prove when they arrived. So I think it’s just having flexibility so that people can understand that they won’t necessarily have the documentation that you may have, say in a western country where you’re born in a hospital and are educated.” — Carina Ford, Australian Legal Practitioner, Carina Ford Immigration Lawyers