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

Indeed! Mr Barresi draws my attention to the fact that we have a number of Italian members on both sides of the House. I was always very fond of the former member for Bowman, Mr Sciacca, when he was a member. But that is how successful they have been as migrants, and I say congratulations to them. I am not threatened by what they have brought to Australia. It has not affected my Australianness, but the magic about being Australian is that we have not only kept our core values but also absorbed some of the very worthwhile values that the migrants have brought to us.

I was talking about citizenship ceremonies. If this federal government and I believe that citizenship is so important, why aren’t we assisting councils in those important citizenship ceremonies? Speakers, including the member for Gilmore, have referred to those people at a citizenship ceremony who have been here for 20 or 30 years and have stepped forward. All too often, I must say, they are from the UK. In fact, the one group in our society which has been very backward in accepting Australian citizenship is migrants from the UK. They are the biggest group of migrants who have not become Australian citizens. They are permanent residents. Once, if you came from the UK, you did not have to take Australian citizenship. I am sure every member in the House has had an experience where someone has been on the rolls without being a citizen, moved, dropped off the roll and then they cannot get back on because they actually have to take citizenship when they fall off the rolls.

I can relate the case of a delightful lady who was a permanent resident but who has sadly passed on now: Mary Woods. Did she give me some when she came to the office! She was a little pocket battleship—a lovely person though, I want to say. She was outraged about it, absolutely defiant: there was no way she was going to take Australian citizenship. I am pleased that I persevered and talked to her, and I had the great pleasure of seeing Mary and Tom become Australian citizens. I think we should put more into our citizenship, not less.

The other thing that really grates on me is that the only thing I can do to establish my citizenship is to actually produce my birth certificate or a copy of my birth certificate. That is what determines the fact that I am an Australian citizen. The former minister for immigration, Mr Ruddock, said people can affirm their citizenship. Often the practice is now that those Australian citizens at a citizenship ceremony affirm it. Well, I do not like that. I think we should be even more flexible and allow Australian citizens who actually do not have a certificate of citizenship to undergo a ceremony and take an oath, as I would, to affirm—I cannot say renew, because they were born with it—their Australian citizenship and have one of those lovely citizenship certificates. I would proudly display mine. But under these proposals I am not allowed to.

The other thing is that people come here under different circumstances. I refer to my mother, when she came here. They paid to get out of Vienna, got forged documents and were able to bribe their way through the border guards. We would say in today’s language that they used people smugglers to get out of the country. But what about those people who are imprisoned by oppressive regimes? We have too many of them. In this new millennium, sadly we still have too many of them.

Other speakers have made the point that, under these proposed changes, if Nelson Mandela wanted to come to this country, he could never become an Australian citizen because he spent more than five years behind bars. In my view, he was improperly imprisoned, but you can run an argument it was by the law of the land, by a legal process. He was imprisoned for 26 years. But Nelson Mandela, should he wish to come into this country, would never be eligible for citizenship under this legislation. I think that that is an outrage because, as prominent as Nelson Mandela is, I am sure there are a whole host of citizens who have been victims of maladministration or poor government. We would not really call it a government; we would probably say a dictatorship, an oligarchy or whatever. But still today they are falsely imprisoning citizens or improperly, in my view, not giving them human rights. I think it is something that we need to look to.

The government announced that it intended to have citizens wait three years as permanent residents before they could take citizenship. It was done under the auspices of COAG and it was done for security reasons. The Labor Party supported it. We supported that policy as initially announced by Mr Hardgrave and then, I think, by the Prime Minister for a three-year wait. But this legislation has increased it to four years and we are offered no particular reason as to why it should be four years. It has not been referred to COAG, so we know it is not the state governments that have urged this upon the government. There is no security reason stated for it going from three to four years. If there is, please state it. It should be in the second reading speech, but it is not. I have some difficulty with it.

Initially in my electorate of Chifley, the highest NESB group was Maltese. I am delighted to say that it is actually Filipino—Filipinos now constitute the largest non-English-speaking group or migrant group in my electorate. They are just fabulous people. I have quite a variety of migrants in my electorate. When the Filipinos come here, they are so proud and grateful to be here. They wait their two years, as is the law at the moment, and then they are in there wanting to become Australian citizens. The Filipinos in particular are in there and they want to be Australian citizens. They make great citizens of Blacktown and they make great Australian citizens. They certainly recognise that this is a country of great opportunity, and their rate of homeownership is high. It is such a triumph for them when they buy that first home rather than renting it. Are they adopting Australian values? I think so. I cannot detect amongst them, or amongst any group for that matter, any reluctance. Ironically, for the electorate with the highest level of unemployment in New South Wales, I have a lot of Sudanese refugees—some might say a disproportionately high number of Sudanese refugees. They are terrific people.

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