Planning to travel to Australia from Saudi Arabia?
First you’ll need to go to Dubai.
Why Dubai?
Well, because that’s where you can get an Australian visa. Once you have the visa, you can return to the Kingdom to pack your bags and prepare for the trip.
What a ridiculous state of affairs!
Australia has a large embassy in Riyadh — the capital of an important Arab country in terms of economic and political clout — and yet that embassy has no consular section.
Shall I tell you what the largest department in the embassy is?
The Commercial Section!
That is how Australians look at things and no one can really blame them. The problem is that anyone wishing to travel to Australia, for education, business or tourism, has to go to a third country in order to get an Australian visa. That is the only way.
The Australians seem concerned only with promoting their economic interests and not a bit bothered about the trouble that Saudi travelers encounter when trying to visit their country, even if the visit would be economically advantageous to both.
Why should the Australians care if the Saudi government, represented by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, does not care about facilities for its citizens? Contrary to the bizarre situation here, the Saudi Embassy in Canberra has a large consular section to facilitate the travel of all Australians wishing to visit the Kingdom.
If I were an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, I would immediately order the closure of the consular section in our embassy in Canberra and direct all Australians wishing to come to the Kingdom to get their visa from our embassy in Pakistan.
Why Pakistan?
Because the Saudi Embassy in Australia has no education attache to help Saudi students there and our students are required to report to the Saudi Embassy in Pakistan to help and process their documents.
Can you imagine anything more ridiculous?
Who dreamed this up? Australia is a distant country and Saudis wishing to study there will find themselves faced with many problems. But since we are known for our generosity and magnanimity toward Westerners, we love to facilitate their affairs while making things difficult for our own people.
The blame should not be put on the Australians but on our Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Higher Education. These are evidently convinced that the world has indeed become a small village and, for this reason, they sat down together and drew a world map of their own, using a scale that measures all distances equally.
The two ministries are obliged to provide us with answers to a few simple questions. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs should tell us what makes Dubai different from Riyadh? The Ministry of Higher Education should tell us the logic behind sending Saudi students to Australia and then asking them to travel to Pakistan to process their documents.
