Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to again follow the member for Parramatta because she has given, as usual, a considered and sensible speech, one in which she incorporates her own experience of these things that gives a forcefulness and validity to the points that she is making. As with the member for Parramatta, I want to support the amendment that the opposition has put forward and also deal with some of the significant matters that affect my electorate of Blaxland as well as the surrounding electorates of Prospect, Reid, Banks, Lowe and Watson—because the issues that we are debating today concern more than merely citizenship per se and the measures taken within the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 to address a series of anomalies in the 1948 act.

When you compare Australia in 1948 to Australia in 2006, the enormous changes during that period of time and the history of modern migration to Australia have left some groups of people effectively pigeon-holed or in difficulty, worrying that their status is not precisely defined or is not sorted out. There is a fundamental example here. An examination of that was undertaken at great depth when the Senate committee dealt with this. It is the situation of the Maltese: if people wanted to return to Malta for a period and seek to work, they were forced to choose. If they had Australian citizenship, they were forced to renounce it. What is proposed in this bill is a resolution of the problem for those people from Malta. This bill can restore to them the Australian citizenship that they had to give up.

Let us think about the intervening period from 1948 to 2006 and the waves of migrants who came to Australia who were in a similar position, where their originating country stipulated that, having left its shores, people had made a statement that they no longer wished to be Dutch, Filipino, Maltese or whatever—that they had chosen a new land and therefore that land should be the only one available to them. The whole history of people adjusting to the notion of whether or not you can have a dual nationality has been long and deep. We know how long this parliament struggled with the idea.

We know as well that, embedded in the dealings that the High Court has had with these matters, there is still a fundamental issue of whether or not people owe their allegiance to another power if they have taken up citizenship with one country and then take it up in Australia. This very point was dealt with in two cases—Singh’s case in 2004 and Ame’s case in 2005—as explicated in the Bills Digest. How were these people treated if they were citizens of another country and also citizens of Australia? They were treated as aliens.

Embedded at the very core of the Constitution is the notion that you can have allegiance to only one sovereign power. Our legislation attempts to take into account the fact that we have people from all over the world. We had people from all over the world in the 1850s in Australia. They came here to dig for gold, find their fortune and have a better life. They came from California; they came from every land on this planet. It was an extraordinarily multicultural society. That washed out in the subsequent 50 years or so, until Federation. We fined down to an Australia which was pretty much like the one we had at the start—Anglo-Celtic.

We also made sure at the start of the 20th century that we kept out everybody that we could. Australia was impelled by the notion that we should be a white Australia. That is what the Labor Party signed up to as one of its fundamental core values at the start of its history. We had people concerned and worried about the fact that we could be flooded with foreign labour and that that could undercut our conditions and wages and dramatically affect the conditions of Australian working people. How times have changed. But times and circumstances can revisit us. We are falling back into this very situation now with 457 visas and the other things that are being done to put immense pressure on Australian workers.

I once went on a holiday to the United States and rocked up to the immigration counters to have my visa stamped. If you are an American, you go through one set of gates. If you are from somewhere else, you go through another. I looked up at the signs and the counters that I had to go through said ‘aliens’. I thought it was something from American sci-fi films of the fifties. I was an alien in that land. It came as somewhat of a surprise to me, not being a constitutional lawyer, that the very same notion is embedded in our Constitution. This is not something that is just sci-fi. The whole idea of otherness—‘alienness’—is embedded in the notion that we should have just a single identity.

For a country such as ours, built on the Anglo-Celtic tradition and on newness and an innovative approach to creating a new life in a new land, the idea of being Australian came very slowly to people. They were still embedded in the British Empire and still saw that as their reference point, but they finally came to see themselves as Australian. It would come as a great surprise to many British people who are currently here—who have the right to vote and the right to reside here permanently—that they may not be classified as a real Australian either because, in fact, they are aliens according to the Australian Constitution. They owe their allegiance to a foreign power—that is, Britain. They could, in fact, be dealt with in the way that other aliens have been dealt with in Australia.

One of the things that is not properly dealt with in this bill is the question of the definitions that the High Court has used in regard to who is and who is not properly an Australian. The fact that we have passed legislation that allows dual nationality—allows people in countries where, on the other side, they have said, ‘It’s okay for you to have two nationalities; we’ll recognise that’—provides some peace of mind and comfort to people who have come to Australia and still want to retain that link. In a lot of cases it is necessary—for instance, with Filipinos not becoming Australian citizens because they will lose the property rights they had in the Philippines for both themselves and their family. This is the case with some other jurisdictions in the world as well.

Why people do not choose to become citizens and that they continue to be aliens is answered in part because of economic losses they or their family would suffer or be deemed to suffer as a result of taking that step or, in the vast majority of cases, because those Britishers, having arrived before the operation of the 1948 act brought in by Arthur Calwell and because they were part of the British empire and Commonwealth as we were, had a right to vote and a right to permanent residence in this country.

In citizenship ceremonies in Blaxland, I generally ask people, ‘How long have you been here—four years, five years, two years?’ It is two years now, but when this bill comes into operation, I could not have actually said two years except for quite a while ago, because this government has extended the residential qualifying period from two years to three years. In this bill it has extended the qualifying period from three years to four years. Whereas previously there were negotiations with the Council of Australian Governments where it talked about these issues, it has not talked about this issue at all. The government has done it on its own as part of its agenda to put citizenship in its values campaign. The government’s willingness to drive through into these areas, to find some mechanism by which it can open the lock to the next election and run a campaign to divert from what are the fundamental problems—run on the basis of emotion and not rationality—is the reason for kicking it up to four years.

There is no intrinsic merit in an extra year of waiting. When we came to power in March 1983, there was a five-year waiting period. I do not know why the government just did not flick up to five years, which is where they were before Labor came to power. Maybe it is just a steady progression. Implicit in this idea is that, if you wait longer, you will be more ready for citizenship—and there is an associated question here—if you can speak English well and effectively. However useful it may be to work your way through society, to enrich yourself and your family or to get a better chance at a better job by being able to speak English, if that provision were placed on Sir Peter Abeles or Sir Arvi Parbo when they lobbed into this joint, I do not think they would have got very far. Yet the reality is that they built substantial careers in this country, as have the millions of other people who came here who had no grasp of English at all or a very poor one.

The reality is that most of the postwar migrants who came in the fifties and sixties simply did not have the capacity or ability to speak English. They also did not have a great grasp of their original language because particularly those from throughout the Mediterranean came from peasant based societies that had been shattered by a complete world war—a village based society in which they were quite comfortable with their own local dialect. But, as for the language with the higher level of usage in Italy, for instance, or in Greece, they simply did not have the opportunity to learn it. The literacy that they had was much lower.

As migrants out of central Europe, for instance, where they had done it extraordinarily hard both under the Nazis and also in some cases under the impress of the Soviets, when they came to this place unable to speak English what help did they get from the Menzies government? I will tell you what help they got to settle here and to learn English. Either they were shown the door to the local factory—the Fountain tomato sauce factory down at Marrickville—or they could leave their family at Chullora or Villawood or over at the detention camp at Randwick and travel to Bonegilla or up to Jindabyne or to Bathurst for two full years at least, effectively leaving their family on hold while they sought to perform that fundamental task. The help they got was from fellow migrants who could not speak English either. People on the factory floor at Dunlop’s, when it was on the corner of Canterbury Road and Chapel Road at Bankstown, taught each other.

The core thing about taking up citizenship is associated with the whole question of settlement. How do you assist people to settle better in Australia? What happened in the Menzies period? It was: ‘Look after yourself and the devil will take the hindmost’. What is the situation in the Howard period? Look after yourself and the devil takes the hindmost.

In the forward estimates, the money available for English language teaching to migrant people has been cut by $10.8 million. Does that surprise me as the member for Blaxland? Not one jot or tittle. Why? Because the Adult Migrant Education Service operating in Bankstown, just down the road from my electorate, was savagely cut in 1996. Forty per cent of the funds available to that program were ripped out of the program in the first budget that this government brought down. And, progressively, they have whittled it back and back and back. So as they withdraw the funds—and they are still doing it—they campaign on the fact that people coming to Australia cannot speak English and hit them with a ruler over the back of the knuckles, saying, ‘You should be able to if you want to participate fully in our society.’

This is political campaigning, but it is political campaigning married to a complete withdrawal of the resources that should be available to people to help them settle better. It makes a political weapon of those people at the same time that it penalises them. So, if citizenship means anything, it should mean an undertaking from the government that is talking about fixing up past problems and a government—particularly Parliamentary Secretary Robb—that is talking about the need for people to have capacity in English. For the campaign they are running with that, it is a case of: ‘Put your money where your mouth is.’ Rather than taking it back, it should be put into these programs in order to give people the capacity to learn English and settle better.

But you need a great deal more than that as well. You actually need a recognition that the society we have crafted in 2006, for all its warts and all its difficulties and all its problems, is a dramatically different one from the savagery of Australia in 1948, when the Citizenship Act was put into place. It was a society split down the centre on religious lines, between Protestant and Catholic. It was a society that was split down the centre in terms of allegiance, between allegiance to the British Empire and the British Commonwealth and allegiance to the idea of Australia or an Australian republic. It was a society in which people walked on either side of the streets when they went off to school and threw insults or stones at each other and maintained their separateness.

The one fundamental thing that postwar migration did was blast away the bitterness, nastiness, savageness, parochialism and pestilence of religious animosity of pre-1948 Australia. That has gone, thankfully, because there were other challenges to all of the people who were here. They actually had to confront newness and difference and change. In the fifties and sixties that was encompassed by integrating people and assimilating them very strongly. The kids I went to school with ended up being more Australian than I was, because they wanted to be no different to anyone else. That was being demanded of them.

But a lot was lost in that. One of the great, almost criminal, losses was in the relationship between parent and child. Those poor people who came from peasant societies had had to struggle to get a living for themselves in continents that were ripped apart by war for more than six years. They had to scrabble for a future there as they had to scrabble for a future here, with no assistance in English language training and learning off other people who were also scrabbling for assistance. They were working as hard as they could, not being accepted by people and being rejected by their children because they could not speak English. They were being rejected by their children because they were different from the parents of the Australian kids that they went to school with. Those poor people had to scrabble for a future knowing that their children actually were ashamed of the fact that their parents were different. That is the great loss of the 50s and 60s in Australia in terms of the emotional deprivation of those migrants and the gulf that was opened up between them and their children.

Those sins were atoned for with multiculturalism in allowing people to be proud of where they came from and of the fact that they could speak another language and add diversity to Australia. It also allowed their children to see their parents in a different light. The fundamental of citizenship here is not where you come from but how you settle within this community. At its core citizenship is about owing allegiance not to a foreign power but to an Australia that you feel part of. But the Australian government have to take the lead to make people feel wanted and part of that. Instead of that, what they are doing is sending out messages saying, ‘Well, you’ve come here but we don’t want you for two years; we have changed that to three. We don’t want you after three years—you are not acceptable as an Australian. We don’t want you now until you have been here for four years.’ The government will get it up to five years if they stay in long enough.

But the reality is that, from whatever part of the globe people have come from and for whatever reasons they have come here, the key question is whether they can make a commitment to Australia and a commitment to Australia’s way of life and fundamental values. Most of the people I have seen at citizenship ceremonies want to do that. There are a lot of people who do not take the next step though. We have had an electoral redistribution in New South Wales where we have lost another electorate to Queensland. Part of the problem is that, linked to the citizenship ceremonies, where we say people have rights and duties, we do not demand from and encourage people: ‘If you are going to take up citizenship, you get yourself on the electoral roll.’ In their hundreds of thousands, people coming in from overseas are not doing that, just as young Australians are not taking up their duty to get on the electoral roll either and have a complete participation in the society.

I support the second reading amendment to this bill. I am against the proposal of the extension to four years and I am against a government that will not actually support people embedding themselves in society but rather takes away from them the right to have settlement and refuses to help them. The government would rather just say, ‘You come here and then you look after yourself.’

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