By Mariam Veiszadeh
Diversity is easy to love when it is winning. It is what we do with it the rest of the time that tells the real story.
On Sunday night, I posted something on LinkedIn and Instagram that clearly struck a chord with audiences.
That afternoon I had just watched Socceroo Nestory Irankunda, a 20-year-old born in a refugee camp in Tanzania, score Australia’s first goal of the 2026 World Cup on the opening day of Refugee Week. And I felt something I needed to name out loud. So, I wrote about it. Quickly and honestly.
I wrote about the gap. The gap between how this country feels about diversity when it is winning us something, and how it treats that same diversity the rest of the time. The gap between the Australia we celebrate on tournament nights and the Australia that many people from migrant and refugee backgrounds navigate every single day. The gap between the pride we feel watching a squad like the Socceroos and the politics we tolerate that makes life harder for the very communities those players come from. That gap is not a crack. It is a chasm. And it has been there for a long time.
What I actually said…
The Socceroos’ 26-man squad comes from at least 15 cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Six players are of African heritage. Three are former refugees. On Sunday, Australians felt uncomplicated, joyful, national pride watching that squad. My husband, my kids and I felt it too, deeply and without reservation.
But I wanted us to sit with a harder question. If we can feel that pride so easily, why does that same diversity feel so contested when it is not scoring goals? Why does it become a political problem, a dinner table argument, a reason to question someone’s belonging, the moment it steps off the pitch?
The refugee system that brought Irankunda here has been politically weaponised for two decades. The communities his teammates come from face discrimination in hiring, in housing, in how their children are treated at school. The belonging that felt so obvious on Sunday is, for many people who look like this squad, something they must prove constantly and earn repeatedly.
I wrote about that. And clearly, it landed. Shared over 160 times and counting reaching close to 20,000 views.
A squad from 15 cultural backgrounds, including three former refugees, the Socceroos are a case study in what happens when you stop seeing diversity as a compliance exercise and start seeing it as a competitive advantage.
Nestory Irankunda came to Australia as a baby from a refugee camp in Tanzania. Awer Mabil was born in Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya to South Sudanese parents. Mohamed Touré was born in Guinea to Liberian refugees before resettling in Adelaide. Three former refugees. All playing at a World Cup for Australia. They are not diversity hires. They are some of your best performers.
The question I will now start asking organisations in my DEI work is this: how many Irankundas, Mabils, and Tourés are sitting in your middle management right now, waiting for someone to back them?
The pride we feel towards the Socceroos however sits uncomfortably alongside what is happening in this country right now.
I acknowledge that political environment we are living in did not emerge from nowhere. It has been shaped by economic insecurity, cost of living pressure, housing stress, and a genuine sense among many Australians that the systems meant to support them are not working. Those are real grievances. They deserve serious policy responses. What they do not deserve is to be redirected, as they so often are, toward migrants and refugees as convenient scapegoats. That redirection has a face.
The woman who stood in parliament in 1996 and declared Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians,” who returned in 2016 to warn it was now being “swamped by Muslims,” who has twice worn a burqa into the Senate chamber as a political stunt, and who has called for a ban on Muslim immigration, is now Australia’s preferred prime minister. This week’s Resolve Political Monitor poll has Pauline Hanson leading Anthony Albanese 33% to 29%. Let that land for a moment. The rhetoric that was once condemned from the Senate floor has not just survived. It has been normalised, electorally rewarded, and given permission to feel like common sense.
That permission was on full display when, Hanson delivered her first ever address to the National Press Club after 30 years in federal politics, using the platform to call for a “monocultural” Australia and labeled multiculturalism a failed policy.
One Nation and its allies have spent years casting migrants and refugees as threats to social cohesion, to jobs, to safety. And it is working.The communities most targeted are not experiencing this abstractly.
Irankunda, the young man who lit up Australian living rooms on Sunday, comes from exactly the community that data from the Racial Profiling Data Monitoring Project found was nine times more likely to be searched by Victoria Police than Anglo Saxon people in 2024, despite racial profiling being officially banned since 2015. The same community that is celebrated when it scores goals is over-policed when it walks down the street.
Applicants with ethnic names received 57.4% fewer callbacks than those with English names for leadership roles. In schools, 40% of children from non-Anglo or European backgrounds have experienced racist bullying, at twice the rate of their Anglo peers. And this does not stop at the school gate. It follows people into universities, workplaces, boardrooms and public life, compounding at every stage. And when they speak up, the silence is enforced by the system itself. A 2025 Victorian study found that only 15.5% of people who experienced racism chose to report it, with fear of workplace retaliation among the most common reasons for staying silent. The message is clear: your belonging is conditional on your silence.
The commentary that followed Irankunda’s goal made this tension impossible to ignore. Alongside the immense pride and the celebration came comments like “Leave it about soccer, please.”’ (on my Instagram post) and others like ‘We have no issue with refugees and migrants, only migration.’ These comments reveal the terms on which belonging is offered. You are welcome here, but only in the lanes we assign you. Perform. Entertain. Win awards. Score goals. But do not ask us to extend that welcome into policy, or housing, or the job interview, or the conversation about what this country owes the people it has offered to call it home. The message underneath – your presence is tolerated, but your politics are not.
I know this intimately, and not only in the abstract. That’s why I shared my own story in that post. I came to Australia as an Afghan refugee. That part of my story has made me a target, of slurs, of racial profiling, of questions about whether I truly belong here.
I have received unprovoked messages from people using their real names and real workplace profiles. One, in 2013, read: “Wish your refugee boat had sunk at sea, B****.” (I came by plane, FYI). I also have encountered overt racial slurs about my refugee background in boardrooms. These are not outliers. They are points on a continuum, from the comment sections to the corridors, from social media to the Senate, that tells you exactly how conditional this welcome has always been.
I have spent years trying to chip away at the mountain of structural racism and corporate gaslighting, armed with only a spoon. I have known courageous people, colleagues, peers, friends, who made the calculation to stay silent because the cost of speaking was too high and the prospect of change too uncertain. I have made that calculation myself.
That is what structural racism does. It does not only harm people directly. It teaches them that naming the harm will cost them more than absorbing it even if it makes them physically sick (as it has for me). It is precisely because I understand that from the inside that I now sit with leaders across some of Australia’s most prominent organisations in my executive role at MindTribes, asking them to look honestly at the systems that produce these outcomes and to take responsibility for changing them.
The expectations and demands placed on refugees and migrants are never applied equally to all Australians. They are hardly ever directed at Anglo Saxon Australians. Not everyone has their Australianness perpetually called into question. Not everyone has their humanity reduced to a rolodex of achievements, expected to perform exceptionalism just to be granted basic dignity. Not everyone is asked to prove themselves worthy of the country they call home. The fact that some are, and some never will be, is a form of structural racism hiding in plain sight.
The word “racism” itself has become contested territory. We have perfected the celebration of difference while refusing to reckon with the structures that make that difference so costly for so many.
In Australia in 2026, you are more likely to be penalised for calling out racism than for perpetrating it. That tells you everything about where the power sits.
There is a script this country has written for refugees and migrants. Be grateful. Be exceptional. Be unthreatening. Irankunda fits that script perfectly right now. He is young, talented, joyful and winning. He is the good refugee. The model minority. The success story we can point to when someone accuses us of not welcoming people like him.
But it hurts me to point out that, that script has a shelf life. The moment Irankunda has a bad game, makes a public mistake, voices a political opinion, or simply stops being useful to the national narrative, we will see how thin that welcome always was. Because the “good refugee” and “model minority” are not permanent designations. They are conditional ones. They are withdrawn the moment the person stops reflecting well on us. We have seen it happen repeatedly in this country. The celebrated refugee who becomes a cautionary tale the moment they step outside the role we assigned them.
In my Sunday post, I referenced my 2024 engagement at the National Library of Australia’s Hopes and Fears: Australian Migration Stories panel, alongside Nyadol Nyuon, a lawyer, human rights advocate, OAM recipient and former refugee who arrived in Australia at 18 and became one of the most recognised and respected voices in this country on race and belonging.
Nyadol is also just a wonderful human. She is fiercely intelligent and deeply committed to a version of Australia that is worthy of the people it asks to call it home.
Nyadol has never been willing to play the “good refugee” role quietly. She has kept naming racism plainly, even when she is the subject of it. And that is precisely where the model minority trap snaps shut. We celebrate refugees and migrants when their success reflects well on us. But the moment they stop performing gratitude and start naming what is broken, the door quietly closes.
Irankunda did not just score a goal on Sunday. He handed us a mirror.
He showed us what this country actually looks like, what it has always looked like, when we stop pretending otherwise. And for a moment, we all felt proud of that reflection.
The harder work is holding onto that feeling beyond the final whistle. In the hiring decision. In the classroom. In the policy debate. In the moment someone is told, implicitly or explicitly, that their belonging is still conditional.
Which brings me to the heart of what I want to say. Let’s not only celebrate refugees when they are winning. Let’s afford them the basic human dignity that is extended to Australians of Anglo-Saxon backgrounds by default. Let’s individualise them, allow them to be ordinary, to be mundane, to simply be.
Because when a refugee or a migrant makes a mistake, it should be treated as exactly that. A mistake made by a person. Not evidence of a community’s character. Not ammunition for a political argument. Not a reason to revisit whether they deserved to be here in the first place.
That individualising of failure, the simple grace of being seen as a person rather than a symbol, is something Anglo Australians have always been afforded without asking for it. It should not be a privilege. It should be the baseline.
This Saturday, I will be up at 5am watching the Socceroos face the USA. I will be cheering loudly. And I will be hoping for something bigger than a winning result. I will be hoping that the joy and pride we feel for this squad, for this beautifully diverse, gloriously Australian squad, begins to extend to the diversity that exists in this country every single day. Not just on match days. Not just when we are winning. Every day.
No one should have to prove they are exceptional just to be seen as equal.
A society that reserves recognition for the extraordinary has quietly abandoned its commitment to equality.
Mariam Veiszadeh is Executive Director at MindTribes, a TEDx speaker and 2023 Most Influential Asian Australian of the Year.
This article first appeared on the Women’s Agenda website