Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I must confess that I have heard contributions from the honourable member for Gilmore in this place and often agreed with the points that she has made. However, I do not agree with her submission on the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and cognate bill.

Let me make a few points. All members of parliament attend a lot of citizenship ceremonies, and they are conducted by local councils. The person who usually conducts the citizenship ceremony is the mayor. We are being told that citizenship is a very important thing in our society. I absolutely agree. However, the first thing I would say to that is that, often in our society, we use money to measure the importance of a thing. It is an unfortunate trait; maybe it is a hedonistic trait, I do not know. But I am not aware of councils getting one dollar from the federal government for conducting these citizenship ceremonies.

I agree on the importance of Australian values: a fair go; this being a land of opportunity in which people can succeed; and that it does not matter what your colour is, what your race is or what your religion is. It is a land of opportunity where people, by dint of their own efforts, can succeed. I also hold mateship as being fundamental to Australian values.

However, when people become Australian citizens, they are not tested on their understanding of Australian values. This government will not invest in adequate courses so that people can learn English. I am a very proud member of this place and I am the son of a refugee. My mother came out here in 1938; she was 18 at the time. She is 90 now and she has the very faintest hint of an accent. But if we were trying to test my mother on English, I suspect she might have failed and never been able to become an Australian citizen. If we applied that test of speaking English to that whole wave of postwar migrants who contributed so much to this country, we know they would not get here today on the point system but under any English test they would probably fail.

I want to discuss this issue about assimilation and getting a sense of what it is to be Australian. I have seen communities wanting to preserve their culture, wanting to preserve their language and wanting to preserve their connection with their country, and I have always said I do not object to that; in fact, I commend it. But Mother Time works her magic and, if she does not do it with the generation that migrates, it is the next generation—and if it is not that one it is the second and the third generations. We can legislate as much as we like, but we will not stop Mother Time and the wonderful way she works.

We have gained so much from that massive post World War II migration. During World War II Australia had only six million people. All the strange smells and foods that we originally objected to when that mass of mostly European and southern European migrants came—the Italians and the Poles and the Yugoslavs; we called them Yugos and wogs and a whole range of things—we have quietly adapted to and adopted some of the things that they brought here.

I must admit that I admire their commitment to family; they are ferociously committed to family. They were so overwhelmed by the opportunities here—they might have come here as labourers or farmers or market gardeners or poultry farmers; I grew up in that part of Western Sydney that was called, probably in a derisive way, ‘little Malta’, but I was proud to be part of it—and they really wanted their children to succeed, really wanted them to do well at school. They wanted them to go on to university, and so many of their kids ended up with qualifications well beyond what their parents had.

I can remember getting into school buses and getting, because I grew up in ‘little Malta’, an overwhelming smell of garlic. I thought at the time it was most objectionable because in our home we did not use garlic. Like a lot of Australians—I suspect you, Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, and even the honourable member for Parramatta—I am addicted to garlic now. What Australian family would not cook spaghetti bolognaise? What Australian family would not—

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