Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 rewrites the old Citizenship Act of 1948. There are some good elements to this citizenship bill. Most of the changes facilitate the taking of citizenship and follow the recommendations of the Australian Citizenship Council report released on 18 February 2000. The legislation implements measures to allow citizenship for many who lost it or did not have access due to former restrictions on dual citizenship. This includes the Maltese community, of which I have a large number in my electorate, Australian citizens who have adopted children overseas and people from a Papua New Guinean background. These are good changes and we welcome them.

However, there is one particular change in this bill that I am concerned about, and that is the increase in the number of years before citizenship can be applied for, from two to four years. When COAG originally agreed to increase the number of years from two to three, the Labor Party supported it because there was a security justification. After discussion with many people in my community, I found that even people still intending to apply for citizenship—even people still within the two years—found this a reasonable compromise to make: a change from two to three years was not a significant burden on people seeking to join us as citizens. But there has been no justification for the increase from two to four years. I am pleased, however, to see that the government will be accepting Labor’s amendment to not make this change retrospective. There was considerable concern in my community from people who had come here on one basis that the rules would be changed under their feet and they would be made to wait considerably longer than they had expected.

What I am most concerned about is the context in which the government seeks to conduct debates on citizenship. It seems that every time the issue is raised the government appeals to the most fearful people in our society, raising the notion that new arrivals might be a threat to the rest of us—a threat to us, not them—and should be treated as such. Ever since migration began in Australia, part of the population here has responded with fear. There are always some of us who are afraid. Some Indian people came out under British citizenship in the second fleet and worked as servants in the early convict years, but a proposal by the colony to bring out more Indian servants was rejected overwhelmingly by the early Australians for fear of the changes it would make in society.

The early Chinese caused fear among us. We were afraid of the Greeks and the Italians. I remember in my suburb we were particularly afraid of the Greek neighbours, because they painted their house blue and concreted their yard. We were terrified that our house prices would drop as a result. I remember the fear of the Italian Mafia, particularly in Melbourne. When they first arrived here, the Italians were a scary lot to some sections of the Australian population. It was a similar case with the Vietnamese. There were the Vietnamese gangs, the home raids and the Japanese triads. There has always been a section of the Australian population which has responded to changes within us with fear.

I remember that when I was at school, the children of Italian migrants, even though they were born here, were not allowed to go out with Aussie kids. They were not allowed to go out with Australian-born kids; they had to go out with other children of Italian extraction. It was quite clear, and I remember how shocking we found that at the time. When we look at our Italian and Greek communities now, they are completely integrated and are strong contributors to our society, but at the time even the Greeks and Italians caused fear and worry among us.

I remember when the Vietnamese boat people first started arriving. I was working at the Golden Circle factory cannery in Brisbane in my school holidays. When the Vietnamese boat people first started arriving, they turned up in numbers. They turned up as whole families and worked every hour of overtime they possibly could. They were extraordinary workers, desperate to build a life here for themselves and their families. That very work ethic was seen as a threat by the people who worked in the factory. They were afraid that these Vietnamese people worked so hard that they would take our jobs away and take our prosperity. In their eyes, they had to be stopped; they could not work that hard. They were incredibly frightening to some sections of the community at the time. I still hear comments about how children of Asian parents work too hard in school—that they work too hard and they are leaving other kids behind.

There will always be these elements of fear. What is different this time is that we have a government that exploits that fear. I remember clearly the time of the arrival of the Vietnamese boat people. The situation then illustrates the difference between the Fraser government and the Howard government. Remember that that was one boat every week and a half for about 18 months. It was not one Tampa; it was one boat every week and a half. I remember the efforts from both sides of politics to keep a lid on the fear, to make those people welcome and to assist the Australian population as a whole to deal with their fears—to come to terms with their fears and to see the situation rationally rather than from a perspective of fear.

It is not that we can afford to ignore the views of these people as silly or irrelevant. We cannot afford to ignore the fear of any Australian. In fact, if we do not deal with the fears of some of the members of our population we will be held back by them. But, since the rise of Pauline Hanson in politics in Australia, this government has started to see this group of fearful people as a political group that can be used and manipulated for political purposes. We have seen the dog whistle politics of the Howard government—and, not satisfied with increasing the fear level of that group, it is trying to move that fear through the broader community.

I am appalled sometimes now at what I hear said by people who five or six years ago would not have made these kinds of remarks. I hear people now in trains and in the shopping centres essentially having a go at Muslims—people they do not even know; people who pass them in the street. None of these people say that they were attacked or abused by a Muslim; they simply say that they have heard from somewhere that they are dangerous, and they repeat that. I mix with all kinds of groups and I hear stories from Australians about being attacked in the streets and about being afraid to go out in the daytime. But mostly those stories come from young Muslim girls who choose to wear the hijab. They are afraid to go out in the streets because they do hear words of hate, they do get assaulted and they do get their scarves pulled off. They are tending now to stay home out of fear of going out in the street.

So the effect of these dog whistle politics—the effect of legislation designed to tell the Australian people that we should be afraid of the new and that new people coming to Australia are some kind of threat—is already being felt in the fabric of our community. It is already tearing us apart and it can only do more damage. We do not make the world safer by rejecting people that we fear. We do make the world into the place we fear if we push people away in the way we are doing now.

I go to citizenship ceremonies all the time in my electorate. I have three local councils, so there is at least one a week in my area. I sit there watching these people in that symbolic act as they become citizens of Australia—to become, as I put it, ‘one of us’ permanently. I realise that I really cannot understand what it is that they are going through. I was born here, I have always been Australian and I always will be Australian. It does not ever occur to me to become a citizen of another country. To visit one is great, but to change my citizenship or to give up this country is not something that I think I could ever do. I watch these people and I realise that they have made a decision at some point in their lives to give up the country of their birth and to come to this one and make it their home.

I know from talking to many of them that they do this because they want a better life for their children. They see an opportunity in this country to build a better life. But to do so they must sell up and leave behind friends, relatives, neighbours, a land that they know and quite often a land that they love and come to this one. It is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, and it is not something that I believe anyone would do lightly. Then you realise that, in the two or more years that it has taken them to move to Australia, begin to feel comfortable here and then choose to become a citizen, they have followed an incredibly difficult path. Many of them arrive here with good English—and some not so good—but it is still not their first language. When you have to deal with others in a language which is not your own and which you have not been using for very long, you actually lose parts of your personality. The ability to show your sense of humour and the ability to communicate easily are lost for a while.

So we have people who come here to settle and, over the period they are settling, they exist without parts of their personality. They quite often lose their status—the status that they had earned in their own country. They have to start again here. They quite often come without their qualifications. When they arrive here, their children become Australian so quickly that the parents even lose that strong cultural bond with them in those early years. This is an extraordinary path that these people choose. It is incredibly difficult, and I do not think we should ever write off that experience in the way that I have heard it written off in this House in speeches by government members as something that is taken lightly or something that is done without thought or without recognising the significance of it.

You also cannot mistake at those citizenship ceremonies the joy and pride that these people feel when they make that final declaration. They are all out there trying to get their photo taken; they are all trying to get their electoral enrolment form signed. Most of them are there with their families. I find that most of those who make the decision to become a citizen very soon after that two-year period, which is the earliest time that they can do it, do so because they have families here. The decision to make Australia their home was made a long time before they arrived in Australia. Many of them have been waiting to get here for quite some time. They come here because their family is here, and this is their home from the day they arrive. They take the step of citizenship as a formal recognition of that at the first opportunity they can. I have not seen any evidence at any of the ceremonies that I have attended of people who take this lightly or do it without a considerable amount of thought.

I am also concerned about the government’s proposal—not included in this bill but out there in the public domain—to introduce English language and citizenship tests. Quite frankly, apart from such a proposal again raising the idea that some of these people do not know how to be Australians, I cannot see how it would work if the purpose of it is to protect Australia from people who become citizens without accepting the values of Australia. I do not see how an ability to pass a test, particularly a written one, would demonstrate that one way or another.

A test might demonstrate whether you can study and pass; however, if a person is coming to Australia in order to do Australia harm, they would probably wait the four years and then do the test. I just cannot see how a test prevents a person intent on doing Australia harm from becoming a citizen. Nor do I understand why not becoming a citizen would prevent them from doing harm. If you are going to do Australia harm, you can do it as a visitor. You can do it as a permanent resident. You do not need to be a citizen to do that; you only need to be here.

This test is an extra barrier to people who want to become citizens. It does nothing whatsoever to prevent people who want to do us harm from becoming citizens. It makes it harder for the good people. It does not make it harder for those we might want to catch somehow. A much better way to catch those people is by more stringent security tests in the early stages, before they even arrive here. Once they are here, it is a problem. Once they are here under any circumstances, it is a problem. If they are going to be a problem, let us make sure they do not get here in the first place.

Of course English language is important. It is very important for people trying to make their way in Australia. It is not always as easy for some as it is for others to learn. I know refugee families in my electorate who come here, particularly those from Africa, with very poor English, with no written language in some cases and with five, six or more children. They come here not knowing the basics of how to use a washing machine, how to turn on a stove or how to use a telephone. They come here highly traumatised from experiences that most of us would not want to imagine, with children who are highly traumatised following the death of their father, many of their relatives and some of their siblings.

These are incredibly traumatised people, and they may just need to rest for a while. They may just need to rest in this country in safety. Sometimes that is the best they can do emotionally when they first arrive here. We should be grateful that we can provide a place for these people—a place where a mother can go out to a park with her children, without worrying whether she will take those children home alive, which is the past experience of some of the people who arrive in this country. I desperately want those women and their children to settle well in Australia, but they need to do that in a way that they can. They need to do that at a pace that they can. Believe me, they do everything they can to settle here. They are so grateful for the opportunity to be here. They are still grieving for their homeland, for their families and for lost lives, but they are so grateful to be here that they will make their lives work in this country.

I met one recently, a young man called Ding. He does not live in my electorate; he lives just outside it. He is 24 years old and has five brothers and sisters in Australia. Both parents are dead and one sister is still in Egypt. He is studying second-year law and international finance. His two immediate younger siblings are also in university and the next three are in school—two in high school and one in primary school. He is their father at 24 years of age. He is doing absolutely everything that anyone could possibly expect to serve this country well simply by serving his family well and making sure that they can do well in the lives that they have chosen in this country.

If we are concerned that people are having difficulty settling in this country, there are two ways to look at it. We can do what the government has done and assume that the reason is some of them are just bad people and we have to force them to do the right thing. We have to force them to learn English by putting a test in their citizenship application. We have to force them to learn about Australian history. We have to make them wait longer to prove themselves. We have to treat them as though they are essentially bad people. Or we can take another approach, which I believe is more realistic, which is to assume that they are good people trying to do the right thing by themselves and by this country and provide the services that they actually need to do well.

The Howard government have cut funding to English language courses. If they think it is so important, let us see them put some money into it. Let us see them help people learn English instead of cutting the funding. But English is not the only issue for people trying to settle in Australia. One of the first areas, and probably the most important area, where people need to integrate is in the workplace. We have skilled migrants who come to this country who are kept out of the workforce for quite a considerable length of time because of the need for them to be able to transfer, for example, their accounting skills over to Australian law or their engineering skills into the framework of Australian codes of practice. They cannot get jobs here because they do not have experience working in Australia. They have difficulty getting work experience because of insurance problems. When they first arrive in Australia, they spend a lot of the time dealing with the practicalities of life in Australia, like how you find a flat when you do not have a reference, how you rent a home and different banking systems. They have a whole stack of practicalities that they need to get through, which wastes their time in the early stages of their arrival, and yet there is no assistance provided by this government for skilled migrants settling in Australia. They have considerable difficulties. There are practical things that we can do that will help people settle more quickly, feel more at home and build their lives here without beating people up and blaming them because they may not be able to move through this incredibly difficult process as quickly as others.

The integration issue is much more complex than what we hear debated in the media and in this House. When I talk to communities in my electorate, the issues of integration are quite often caused by the fact that the children integrate so fast and the parents retain their culture from another land for much longer—as they always will and as they always have. So the intergenerational conflict between parent and child, as the children reach teenage years, is a major issue of integration, but it is not a failure. It is because the children become Australian so fast. It is a sign of the success of our multicultural society that we have this intergenerational conflict. Let us support these people instead of attacking them. (Time expired)

See this speech in context