Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Janet Albrechtsen has certainly started paying back the Prime Minister for her recent appointment to the ABC. In her recent column of 25 October she commented:

PAUL Keating and his admirers have long derided John Howard as a little man, a man with no vision, no passion for big, intellectual ideas.

She went on to comment:

A closer inspection of Howard’s history and a proper understanding of his contribution to the intellectual life of this country proves otherwise. Like it or loathe it, his influence on national debates through the culture wars has been deliberate, long planned and is likely to be remembered long after today’s economic statistics have been forgotten.

The Prime Minister is no Johnnie-come-lately when it comes to the culture wars.

…            …            …

As Opposition leader, Howard carefully targeted political correctness ...

She further noted:

Challenging the orthodoxy and commenting freely on heartfelt issues such as ... immigration was simply not possible without attracting absurd smears of racism and intolerance.

That is very apologetic for the Prime Minister, but this is an area where despite his forthrightness and his wish to indulge in the culture wars he has, on later occasions, admitted that he is wrong. His thinking is behind the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005. Going back to his original comments, I note his assertions on the John Laws program on 1 August 1988:

... it is legitimate for any government to worry about the capacity of the community to absorb change and there is some concern about the pace of change involved in the present level of Asian migration.

He noted further:

You’ve only got to blink the wrong way when you’re talking about people that come from other parts of the world or with a different coloured skin and you’re branded immediately.

And another comment:

I think the pace of change has probably been a little too great.

We all know that some time later he was a bit more reticent about these comments. In an article in the Australian by Mr Greg Sheridan on 9 January 1995, Mr Howard was quoted as saying:

I admit the remarks I made were clumsy. I can understand why some people legitimately took offence.

Janet Albrechtsen said that he engenders improper criticism, but there he was saying that perhaps his remarks on immigration and, more specifically, on Asians, were clumsy. Further in the Australian article Mr Howard is quoted as saying:

It was regrettable that it was couched in particular ethnic terms and you’ll be aware that the policy itself did not repeat that.

So despite the accolades from that noted columnist, the Prime Minister at least conceded that his language was clumsy. Unfortunately, he did not admit that it was totally wrong and that it was racist, but he said it was clumsy and could have been misunderstood. We all know about the narrow confines of his upbringing. He commented on one occasion about how fantastically radical and different it was to see the Italian migrant across the road using tiles on his front porch. This was, of course, very confronting for him.

The main aspect of this legislation that I am critical of is the proposed extension of citizenship specifications of permanent residents from two years. It is motivated by that same attempt to marginalise people, to put people in a corner, and to discriminate against one part of the population. Whilst it is not articulated in specific terms, the terminology that the Minister for Community Services, Mr Cobb, spoke of—international conditions et cetera—is clearly slanted at the Islamic population of this country. That is the coded, nuanced undertone that the electorate is supposed to pick up: we are going to be tough on terrorism by being tough on some people becoming citizens too early.

I am somewhat surprised that some premiers and state leaders in this country could apparently have been persuaded at some stage that there was some security premise for the suggested change in this legislation. Somehow they were given unspecified information, that none of us are aware of, that by forcing people to wait an extra year for citizenship Australians would be better protected and the terrorist threat in this country would be reduced. I do not know what that evidence was. I cannot imagine what it could be. Equally, the current government has not come out with further evidence as to why it might now be necessary to move the waiting period from three years to four years.

The situation is that, if you do security checks, it does not matter whether you do them after six months, three years or 10 years; it is the adequacy and the fullness of those security checks. That is what any fundamental protection in this country should be premised on: the adequacy of the tests, the examination, the resourcing of ASIO, the resourcing of the Federal Police, and the resourcing of any other institutions involved in this. To say that postponing the analysis of a person in Australian society is going to somehow protect us is preposterous.

I have heard and witnessed coalition members speaking in a variety of ethnic communities about how inclusive we are and that we essentially want people involved in our society. I often refer at citizenship ceremonies to how long this country has had compulsory voting and compulsory voter registration—since the 1920s. We want people to be involved, to feel that they are part of the decision-making process, that they are not outside the system or marginalised, unhappy and different. This legislation will clearly go in another direction. It will ensure that a group of people are targeted and made to feel that they are in some way different and not to be treated like others.

I found it very interesting when Patricia Karvelas, a reporter with the Australian, confronted the Prime Minister at a Greek event a few weeks ago and noted that half of those present, who were of advanced age—a pensioner group, as I recall—could not speak English. What was the Prime Minister’s response? ‘Oh, but these people helped build the country.’ That goes to my point that this is not about security. It is not about a wholesale, across-the-board approach. It is about giving coded messages to the less informed, less interested parts of this country that we are going to somehow target the Muslim community. In actual fact, it is going to have very little impact on that community. We only have to look at the nature of migration intake in this country.

It is interesting to note that it is going to have very little impact on that community. We only have to look at the nature of the intake of migration in this country. I will go through the 10 major intake countries from the last two years. I will start with the United Kingdom. Yes, there might be a few people in Leicester and there might be a few people in other industrial cities of Britain of Islamic extraction. But I think we know what the religions of the overwhelming proportion of British citizens coming to this country are, if they have got one. The second country is New Zealand. Similarly, because New Zealand took a more liberal approach on refugee intake over the last few decades, you might get a few more Fijian Muslims sneaking through the door after the coups there. From China, yes, you might get a few Uygurs, from western China—people with a Turkic background—but, once again, they are a very small part of the population.

India might have a very large number of Muslims, but not with regard to our overall intake. Sudan is admittedly a country where there might be some Islamic intake, but the majority of them are Christian and animist refugees from the south of Sudan rather than Muslims. In the Philippines, South Africa and Malaysia most particularly you might have some, and it is the same with Singapore and Vietnam.

It is very interesting to note that, whilst the government might like to give this message to the Australian electorate, in concrete, practical terms the community that will be hit by this—and I have certainly been raising it at Indian events lately—is the Indians, for instance. We all know the nature of the skilled migrant intake. There were 123,000 people this year. English, quite rightly, has been given a greater emphasis in the skilled intake. They are not going to be coming from downtown Tripoli, Blouza or Hadchit. They are going to be coming from Calcutta and Mumbai, and they are going to be coming from Britain. They are going to be coming from countries where English is much emphasised. In fact, the people who are prepared to wait four years are going to be coming from these countries in the next few years. That is the reality.

Let us look at the refugee intake. The government has, once again—and I agree with them totally—focused on the reorientation in Africa. There are 8,000 coming this year out of 13,000. They are predominantly from Sierra Leone, Sudan, Liberia and those kinds of countries. Some of these countries have significant Islamic minorities, but the refugees are predominantly not going to be Muslims. The communities that are going to be hit hard by this change are from Britain, New Zealand, India, China et cetera.

Like other members of the opposition, I am intrigued that this is so earth shattering that we have had to, in the last few months, announce an extension. Three years is not good enough for people to wait. It has to be four. In the interim, the figures show that, while this bill has been on the tables of the parliament, nearly 120,000 people became citizens of this country. There is the supposed importance of this to our national security and yet they have allowed this bill not to be moved on or acted upon in that time. What is the credibility of the government in saying that this is an urgent security measure that is actually going to protect us?

Another thing that is talked about is changing the age barrier for gaining exemption from the requirement to speak English. One again, this is another questionable change in this country. I referred to the Greeks earlier with regard to language proposals. It seems that this is actually designed to give a kind of incorrect measure to people—that they are going to somehow deal with one of these minority groups.

I was interested in Adele Horin’s article on 9 September this year in the Sydney Morning Herald. She noted that, despite the urgent need for everyone to speak English in this country, it was not too urgent when the government denied English instruction to 8,900 mainly Muslim refugees arriving in Australia from 1999 onwards. It was not too urgent for them to get English. Despite the government’s bleatings, they are virtually all permanently here now. They are all part of society. They are all people that need English, but it was not too urgent then. This is the same government that can reduce the amount of money they are devoting to English instruction by $11 million.

Adele Horin clearly points out that this situation, on the one hand, is so urgent and so important. No-one is denying that it is better for the country and better for the individuals to have English so that they can access employment in this country and so they can be absorbed into the wider society. The record of these reductions in expenditure and the 8,000-plus people at the moment who were not given English when they were in detention and are now in our society is very questionable.

While I am talking about English, I witnessed in Western Sydney the orientation to the refugee intake from Africa, which I commend very strongly. It is a very worthwhile initiative by the government. I also want to say that we will be facing massive social problems in the next few decades because of the failure of infrastructure with regard to English. We are taking people who are illiterate in their own languages: mothers and fathers who do not know their own language, let alone English. Schools in my electorate and some of the other further western schools, both private and public, are really taking the brunt of this kind of problem because of the failure to provide adequate English support.

The other issue I want to touch upon—which I am surprised the previous speaker did not because, last I heard, she had a significant population of people of Maltese extraction in her electorate—is that it seems that the campaign by Maltese residents of this country has not quite hit the electoral office of the previous speaker. One of the things that were not rectified in this piece of legislation was the ability of people of Maltese extraction to regain citizenship. I do not think that there is a convincing argument, despite the fact that the Senate committee this time agreed with the government, that a distinction should be made between these two groups of people who lost their citizenship.

People were forced, virtually with a gun at their head, to give up their Australian citizenship because of the vast array of privileges they were going to lose in Malta if they did not make that decision at 18 years of age. When we have reached the stage where we have liberalised on dual citizenship like the rest of the world, when we have allowed other people to get back privileges they lost in a different area of society and when there is a different attitude by us and the world, there is no logical reason why the Maltese population should be discriminated against in this manner just because their government at the time had those particular provisions.

In conclusion, there are some worthwhile measures in this bill. We are aware of those. I take the opportunity to commend the Southern Cross Group, which has been particularly active around the issues confronting the Australian diaspora. I think their campaign has contributed to a rethink in this country, and they have certainly highlighted these issues. Also—and I think I heard another speaker make this point earlier—one thing Australia is a bit overdue on is recognising the importance to this country of our diaspora. It is a growing number of people. Most of them are young and educated. They are out there in countries making a major contribution. We should be, like other countries—and I emphasise, as I did before, that China and India are two countries that understand this and they have understood it before we have—making sure that we can more fully utilise our diaspora for the national interest.

The main provision in this bill that I am concerned about is this attempt to require people to be here for a longer period of permanent residency before they get citizenship. That is going to be a very significant period for some people. We are talking about whether it is two or four years, or two or three years. I have people in my electorate who, because of security checks, have not been able to bring their spouses into this country for three to four years. Quite frankly, the decision should be made in those cases. Whether it is because we do not have the infrastructure, we cannot get the detail or we cannot get to the bottom of it all, we are talking about some people who, even if they eventually succeed in getting into the country, will be waiting eight or nine years to become citizens of this country. So it is more than two or three, and that goes for some business visas as well. It is not just the period that we are talking about here today; it will be quite extended periods. Otherwise, I commend other aspects of the bill.

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