When Elia Norman’s second floor Sydney unit caught fire after spreading from a neighbouring flat, he quickly grabbed his asthmatic son and his car keys and rushed down the stairs to safety.
The former information systems professional watched on as the flames charred his family’s precious belongings.
The late night emergency in Sydney last month happened after his neighbour’s faulty mobile phone charger blew up a socket, sparking a small fire that eventually set the whole block of eight units ablaze.
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Hailing from the port city of Latakia, the Normans left war-ravaged Syria in 2018 to reunite with the rest of their family in Australia.
Syria was plunged into a civil war that killed over 500,000 people after a revolution in 2011 turned violent, with several terrorist groups emerging on the scene including Islamic State, as leader Bashar al-Assad battled to remain in power.
“From 2011 the economic conditions were rubbish, and now it’s even worse — air-strikes from the rural outskirts used to fall on the city and it wasn’t safe at all,” Norman said.
“It was scary. You used to step out of your home not knowing if you’d come back alive or not,” the father of two boys said.
Norman and his wife, Noor, said the fire alarms in the two-bedroom unit in the western suburbs were recently changed but did not go off when smoke started billowing.
It capped off a tiring few years since moving to Australia, but he remains optimistic and strong in his Christian faith.
“We escaped with the clothes on our backs and thank God, I don’t know why, but I luckily grabbed my car keys so at least we can be mobile,” he said.
Norman worked as a cleaner at fast food giant McDonald’s sustaining major injuries to his leg and has had operations, but he remains disabled, walking with a crutch.
Worker’s compensation has been a long, drawn-out process as he tries to make ends meet with a meagre income from social welfare payments.
The Norman family has been staying in temporary accommodation in a motel, provided by Housing NSW, for a few weeks.
An online fundraising campaign to help the family rebuild their lives has been set up by their local church, and the children’s school has chipped in for uniforms and clothes.
Researchers from Western Sydney University estimate there are about 18,000 residential fires nationwide with over 6500 in NSW alone.
Maiy Azize, spokesperson for Everybody’s Home — a national campaign to end Australia’s housing crisis — said tragic cases like the Normans’ are more common in an increasingly tight rental market, where vacancies in NSW hover around the 1.5 per cent mark.
“Refugees have got fewer options in the rental market because fewer people want to take them on, especially if they’re not drawing an income … so they’re much more likely to accept whatever conditions they’re given,” she said.
She explained the lack of a national code for tenants and an independent oversight body as reasons behind the situation.
“There aren’t good minimum rental standards in just about any part of the country,” Azize said.
“When you compare housing to just about any other essential service that we think of, like a water utility and electricity utility or even a workplace … there’s an independent authority in every state, but there’s nothing like that for housing.”
