2025-26 Australia’s Humanitarian Program
2025-26 Australia’s Humanitarian Program
Submissions
LGBTIQA+ displaced people
This submission is made to the Department of Home Affairs in response to the Discussion Paper Australia’s Humanitarian Program 2025-26.
Summary of recommendations:
- Increase the overall size of the offshore Humanitarian Program to respond to both acute emergencies and chronic displacement, particularly in under-resourced regions.
- Introduce of dedicated percentage for LGBTIQA+ individuals across all protection visa categories and community sponsorship programs.
- Allocate a minimum of 3% of the total Humanitarian Program spaces as quarantined for LGBTIQA+ people, with a longer-term target of 6 to 10%.
- Embed community-led triage and referral mechanisms to expand safe access to protection beyond UNHCR referrals, including NGO referrals and self-referrals, in line with the 2021 Global Roundtable and UN IE SOGE recommendations.
- Ensure pathways to resettlement are inclusive by design, with reforms to visa criteria, documentation requirements, and definitions of family to reflect the realities of LGBTIQA+ relationships impacted by criminalisation and non-recognition.
- Establish partnerships with LGBTIQA+ community-led and in particular LGBTIQA+ refugee-led organisations to act as Approved Proposing Organisations (APOs) or introduce an alternative model that enables safe and trusted sponsorship.
- Ensure that financial barriers to access CSP are levelled or subsidised, particularly for systemically marginalised applicants and community sponsors.
- Implement dedicated LGBTIQA+ quotas across visa categories, including emergency and protracted streams.
- Scale up NGO- and community-led referral pathways, particularly for those unable to register safely with UNHCR or engage in national protection systems.
- Ensure coordination efforts with regional partners explicitly address the needs of LGBTIQA+ populations.
- Prevent systemic deprioritisation of marginalised groups during large-scale or crisis-driven reallocations.
- Temporarily suspend new CSP applications to allow for a full and transparent program review, informed by refugee communities and specialist organisations.
- Redesign CSP to explicitly prioritise individuals with intersectional and compounded risks, including LGBTIQA+ people, stateless persons, people with disabilities, and those facing compounded marginalisation.
- Adapt or remove job-readiness criteria which currently disadvantage people impacted by displacement, exclusion from education, or legal persecution.
- Reduce or subsidise application and administration fees through means-tested models to increase accessibility.
- Mandate that Approved Proposing Organisations demonstrate cultural safety, human rights compliance, and LGBTIQA+ inclusion as a condition of government accreditation. This must include ensuring at least one APO is recognised by and accessible to LGBTIQA+ communities.
- Authorise civil society and refugee-led organisations (RLOs) to identify and refer applicants into humanitarian and resettlement pathways.
- Ensure these referrals lead to permanent resettlement, including through CRISP and community sponsorship models.
- Prioritise applicants facing layered and compounding vulnerabilities, LGBTIQA+, HIV status, and disability.
- Embed LGBTIQA+-inclusive, trauma-informed settlement support immediately upon arrival.
- Mandate the involvement of LGBTIQA+ refugee-led organisations in the design, implementation, and review of all complementary pathway programs.
- Change eligibility frameworks to account for structural inequalities and lived barriers to access.
- Develop dedicated initiatives that create inclusive opportunities for labour mobility, education, and training in partnership with trusted civil society organisations.
2024 Australia’s Humanitarian Program (2024-25) Discussion Paper