Greek community flies flag to help homeland

Leonidas Vlahakis is just one of many Australians of Greek descent sending money to relatives facing difficulties overseas. Photo: Angela Wylie

Carolyn Webb
14/2/2012

LEADERS of Melbourne’s Greek community will meet to thrash out ways to help loved ones suffering under Greece’s worsening economic crisis.

Greek-Australians told of sending money to relatives struggling under slashed pensions and high unemployment, and also of offering shelter.
The February 28 meeting, organised by the Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne will be at the organisation’s Lonsdale Street headquarters.

The community and the Hellenic Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry are already lobbying the federal government to offer Greeks temporary working visas.

Chamber president Nick Mylonas said he was not advocating ”opening the floodgates”, but three to five-year visas for skilled workers would help people in badly affected industries such as hospitality.

Three months ago Mr Mylonas helped bring over an unemployed hotel worker cousin, 30, on an education visa. In Melbourne, the cousin is studying business and working part time in a cafeteria. But Mr Mylonas said the cousin was allowed to work a maximum 20 hours a week, which was unsustainable unless staying with family.

Carlton optometrist Leonidas Vlahakis, 39, said he had met 12 Greeks who had come to Melbourne recently on tourist or student visas who were desperately looking for a way to stay and find a job.

For want of work in Greece, Mr Vlahakis’ labourer cousin, Kosta, 43, from Kalamata, had had to live abroad for the past six years with his wife and two children, in Northern Ireland and then Cyprus.

”He did exactly what my parents did [coming to Australia] 40 years ago, you go to wherever you can find a job and support your family.”
Mr Vlahakis has been increasingly sending money to relatives in Greece. ”They’re proud people, they don’t ask,” he says. ”But that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be offered.”

Eugenia Pavlopoulou, the English language editor of Melbourne-based Greek newspaper Neos Kosmos, said the February 28 meeting was about expatriates’ desire to ”do something”.

”We all worry,” she said. Pavlopoulou’s father, Alex, 72, won’t be able to afford drug treatment for his cancer if Greece’s pharmaceutical subsidy scheme collapses as feared.

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