Now, 70-odd years on, that quotidian kindness extended to my parents has all but disappeared. If you wanted kindness extended to refugees in the Dutton era, you had to wait until that was over and then go all out and campaign (love you Biloelans!).

This week, former Victoria Police chief commissioner Christine Nixon released her long-awaited review of Australia's visa system. Depressing reading yet completely predictable if you've paid any attention to the chaos around immigration in this country. She found gaps and weaknesses - and those gaps and weaknesses have hurt so many. As Nixon put it, the visa system allows criminal groups and "unscrupulous people" to abuse temporary migrants.

Those gaps and weaknesses allowed the cruel and inhumane to benefit - and inhumanity flourished under a decade of Coalition government (also Labor wasn't much chop between 2007 and 2013 either). It's trickled down to the person on the street, to business owners, to universities and other education providers who profit from the fat fees international students pay. The example of government inhumanity always percolates all the way through. And we've all been tricked into thinking people who want to come here are grifters.

Yet the government's response to Nixon's review has been encouraging. It's mostly agreed to 24 of the 34 recommendations and disagreed with two (yes, sex work is work). And it has played out across multiple ministries: home affairs, immigration and education. While we have a pretty good idea of the painful waiting times for visa approvals, what's happening in our educational institutions may not be so clear.

Young people come to Australia to study. We are in their minds a land of opportunity. But mostly, when they arrive, they have almost no way of supporting themselves. They expect to get a job but they have strange working permissions which almost always lead to exploitation - sure, happy to pay you a living wage but only if you work double the hours of the Australian students working alongside of you. I do not know how we are going to stop this but we must.

When I taught at university, so many of these kids (and often they were kids, 18 or 19, so far from home, so lonely) would arrive for class utterly exhausted, if they arrived at all. And I will never ever forget the young woman who allowed her "boss", also enrolled in the same degree, to copy her assignment because she was terrified of him.

I don't need to imagine the threats he made. She wanted no fuss because she wanted - needed - to maintain her arrangement with him so she could finish her degree without starving. She continued. He dropped out. There are stories much worse than this all over Australia at universities and elsewhere. So it's good news that Education Minister Jason Clare has said the government will take action now that international students are returning to Australia.

"International students are back, but so are the shonks seeking to exploit them and undermine our international education system," he said.

My number one request would be to ensure that international students get social support as well as the best possible academic support we can give them. Sometimes they get neither.

When Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neil responded to the Nixon review this week, she had the good sense to lay blame where it was due - at the feet of Peter Dutton, who for years presided over the chaos and cruelty of the migration system in this country.

She said: "It was lack of care, lack of attention and lack of basic interest in what is one of the most important things that the Australian government does. The responsibility for a lot of these problems falls directly at Peter Dutton's feet."

As she put it, he made a "career out of pretending to be a tough guy on the borders, all the while he was cutting resources to the immigration function, cutting compliance resources in the immigration function, and allowing criminals to infiltrate this system".

And Dutton, who hadn't given a press conference in months (he's too busy grooming voters to say "no") sauntered out of the blocks complaining O'Neil was "negative". As my children used to say to each other: Look who's talking.

God I am so lucky my parents didn't try to get here with that lot in charge. The very last thing my parents had to do with immigration was the nice middle-aged bloke who checked us in and forced them to change their last name to Price. Basically he said a name with all those Cs right next to all those Zs was never going to fly in a country of mate, cobber, sunshine. He also apparently gave my parents advice on learning the language. They tried.

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And the very first thing my parents ever had to do with immigration in Australia? Similar to now. Getting in a queue.

My folks had been waiting in what was then called a displaced person's camp in Linz, Austria, for years for somewhere to accept them. When I discovered, as a teenager, they'd also had the choice of the US, I was shocked - but it turns out that Australia offered first. Lucky us. And that's how every single migrant should feel when they come here. It's up to us to make them feel that way.