During his week-long visit to Australia, Greece’s Alternate Interior Minister Theodoros Livanios met with business, political and faith leaders to discuss matters affecting the local Greek diaspora.
Along his travels, the Greek minister also connected with the local Greek communities in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra to discuss how Greeks residing abroad can now postal vote in the upcoming European elections following recent reform by the Greek government.
In a meeting in Sydney on Tuesday, March 26 with multicultural media, including The Greek Herald, Mr Livanios delved into the postal vote reform more deeply, and also responded to recent concerns around slow service and staff shortages at Greek Consulates in Melbourne and Sydney.
On the postal vote, the Minister explained the registration procedure and stressed that all valid Greek passport holders are eligible to participate. He also said he was optimistic more Greeks in Australia would register to postal vote in the European elections compared to numbers from Greece’s national elections last year.
With regards to Greek Consulates in Melbourne and Sydney, Mr Livanios responded to a question by The Greek Herald asking what the Greek government plans on doing to offer support in the face of long service delays and staff shortages.
“Hopefully we will have two answers…” he said.
“The first one is that we continue the digitisation of all procedures so we can reduce the number of people who are visiting the Consulate General, and the other is to find, on a contract basis, local people and hire them in order for them to take care of the backlog of applications.”
The Greek Community of Melbourne (GCM) first pointed out the problem of insufficient staffing at the Greek Consulate in Melbourne in a letter to Greece’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs last month, highlighting the inconvenience suffered by the Greek expatriates of Victoria for the slow processing of various cases, as there are only four employees at the Consulate.
The letter later received the backing of Kyriakos Velopoulos’ Greek Solution party, who submitted a question to Greece’s Parliament on February 16, calling on the Greek Foreign Minister Giorgos Gerapetritis to address the GCM’s concerns.
