by Andrew Martin

Five Iranian women soccer players were granted asylum following their first game in Australia when they refused to sing their national anthem during the 2026 Women’s Asian Cup. A day later another team member joined them. A sense of urgency was created around their situation which was amplified by the media; we were told there was an imminent threat to their safety, that they were being threatened by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN).

According to the ABC, a presenter on Iranian state television, Mohammad Reza Shahbazi criticised the players in response to their silence.

“In times of war, traitors must be dealt with more harshly. Anyone who takes even a single step against the country during wartime must face stronger consequences. Take this issue of not singing the national anthem in our women’s football team and that photo that was published.

This is no longer some symbolic protest or demonstration. In wartime conditions, going there and refusing to sing the national anthem is the height of shamelessness and betrayal. Both the people and the authorities should treat them as traitors in a time of war, not as individuals staging some kind of symbolic protest.”

The ABC reported that the granting of asylum was a “secret operation”. Migration agent Nagmeh Danai had struggled to meet the women away from their minders. “I have never experienced something so powerful, something so humanitarian for the Iranians from the Department of Home Affairs in Australia…They couldn’t believe that the government of Australia would support them at this level. They were thrilled to find out that the government is going to support them with the visa, with settlement, with everything”, she said.

Iranian dissidents in Australia were already in contact with government agencies before the women arrived. “To be honest, before the first game, when we noticed the team is coming, a few people had connections with Home Affairs and with Tony Burke’s office,” Iranian-Australian Farhad Soheil told ABC News.

For the Iranian players, their ordeal became a political football which the government sought to gain political advantage from. For many years Iranian women struggled against oppression to play professional football; now their situation was being exploited for the sake of providing a good news story for the Labor party.

The granting of visas was supposed to be a major propaganda coup for the federal government which is facing a backlash over its support for Trump’s war in Iran. But the spectacle exposes a glaring contradiction. While the ALP celebrates its role in rescuing famous athletes, it continues to slam the door on countless others fleeing violence, war, and persecution—including people not only from Iran, but from Afghanistan, and, most recently, the people of Gaza. The message is clear: if your story draws media attention, you stand a chance. If not, you’re left to languish in offshore detention or be shuffled through an endless bureaucratic maze.

This selective “compassion” exposes the ALP’s asylum policy for what it is—a public relations exercise rather than a genuine humanitarian commitment. The desperation of families bombed out of their homes in Gaza, or refugees escaping the Taliban does not draw any attention from them. The government’s value of human rights is very much dependent on its own expediencies.

There is a pattern here: the ALP acts when cameras are rolling and when there’s a chance to court public approval, but quickly reverts to hardline policies the moment the spotlight fades and the demons of Sky News encircle them. 

When over 170 Iranian school girls were killed by a Tomahawk missile there were no tears of regret from any of the ALP’s parliamentarians, no condemnations of the full-scale bombing of Tehran; only affirmations from Penny Wong and Anthony Albanese that they trusted Trumps justification for the war. They’ve given a grey and soulless assent to yet another attempt at regime change.

We should not believe that they want to liberate Iran. We only have to look at how they’ve treated its dissidents. When Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani fled Iran in 2013, he spent 2,269 days (just over six years) in Australia’s offshore detention system. His struggle for freedom detailed in his autobiographical No Friends but the Mountains, was a Kafkaesque ordeal. The ALP never came to his assistance.

When Boochani was finally able to leave Papua New Guinea for New Zealand in 2019, Labor welcomed the news that he might be resettled elsewhere – they were happy to be rid of him. Boochani rightfully described Labor’s response as “ridiculous”, “unacceptable”, and “shameful.”

There have been thousands of Iranians held in Australia’s immigration detention regime, like Boochani, in conditions that are worse than the prison system for indefinite periods of time. In fact, it is the ALP that introduced mandatory detention in 1992. The ALP has sought to ride and bend to the waves of hysteria against refugees; it has never been motivated by humanitarian principles. It is a party of hypocrisy in its purest form. 

Even as it facilitated asylum claims from the players, the government rushed through new laws designed to stop some temporary visa holders from travelling to Australia and seeking to remain permanently because of the war in the Middle East. Under the new provisions, Iranian tourists can be prevented from entering Australia if their visas were issued before the United States and Israel attacked Tehran, and authorities believe they might overstay or lodge a protection claim once in the country.

The story of the ALP being the white knight saviour didn’t play out in the way they might’ve hoped. Six players and one staff member sought asylum, but five including the captain, Zahra Ghanbari decided to return home. There are no indications any have faced persecution.

They received a hero’s welcome in Tehran by the Iranian people. Several thousand —many waving Iranian flags—gathered on Thursday evening for a welcome ceremony in Valiasr Square in central Tehran, a site that has hosted other pro-government rallies in recent weeks, according to state TV footage.

Iran’s football governing body accused the Australian government of kidnapping their players and coercing them to stay. One of the players, Sana Sedeghi stated to a translater: “I’ve said it a hundred times; to the Persian Gulf, the entire continents of America and Australia are worth sacrificing for a single strand of my parent’s hair”. She alleges her translator told immigration authorities her application for asylum was acceptable.

The political spectacle manufactured by the government and media may also have contributed to the decision of the majority of players to return to Iran. A pro-Pahlavi monarchist rammed a ute draped in the Sun and Lion flag of the old pro-U.S regime into the players tour bus multiple times, while the police escort of the bus did nothing to intervene. The two remaining players have wasted no time in joining Brisbane Roar training sessions. For many women soccer players of the global south, to play soccer at the elite level in an imperial core country with all its material advantages would be a dream come true.

The biggest danger the young women now face in returning to Iran is that their country is being destroyed by the forces of U.S imperialism. We should not allow the situation of asylum seekers to be a justification for the war on Iran and be wary of government PR stunts that manipulate our sense of compassion, obscuring the path to anti-imperialist liberation.