Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare) Share this | Hansard source

Isaiah Bowman, who was an American geographer, said:

Citizenship comes first today in our crowded world. ... No man—

I am sure he meant no person, but he said ‘no man’—

can enjoy the privileges of education and thereafter with a clear conscience break his contract with society. To respect that contract is to be mature, to strengthen it is to be a good citizen, to do more than your share under it is noble.

He was right in placing citizenship at the centre of our responsibilities to one another as a nation.

Our views of citizenship have changed significantly over time. Many people think of the Athenian democracy as the world’s first democracy, and its greatest. We have many proud Greeks in our parliament and in our community who take a lot of pride in Athenian democracy. But the Athenian democracy, of course, did not give the vote to women or slaves. Their idea of a citizen was, of course, different from our idea of a citizen. Of course, our ideas about citizenship and about the responsibility of citizenship and the rights of citizens change over time. That is as it should be. Ideally, they change for the better.

The member for Port Adelaide reminded us that it took 17 years after the first Australian citizenship ceremony for Indigenous Australians to be recognised and counted as Australian citizens. It is shameful that it took as long as it did, but what a positive thing it was when that referendum was held and Australians so overwhelmingly supported and acknowledged the importance of Aboriginal Australians being counted and classed as full citizens—another positive change when it comes to citizenship. What we want to do with Australian citizenship is continue to improve its strength and continue to improve it as an institution—not weaken it and traduce it, as this legislation in part does.

The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 makes a number of changes that I am very concerned about and it foreshadows other changes that I am also concerned about. As usual, with this sort of nasty legislation it is like giving the worm pill to the dog, isn’t it? You wrap it in bacon to get the dog to swallow it. This citizenship bill has positive measures that Labor is conscience bound to support, like the positive measure of returning citizenship to people who themselves or whose parents have given up Australian citizenship in the past. That is most particularly important for members of the Maltese community who have made a very strong and convincing argument that some of these changes are necessary and are an improvement. In amongst it are all the nasty little surprises, like the proposal to extend the waiting period for citizenship from two to three years and the government’s suggestion subsequently that that should even be increased to four years. Some of them are even talking about five years.

Surely, if we have the proper checks on people before they come to Australia as permanent residents, extending the period for which they must wait for Australian citizenship makes us no more secure as a nation. Excluding people from citizenship or delaying when they take up the responsibilities of citizenship makes us no more secure as a nation. It is obvious that, in a period where the terrorist threat around the world is something that governments should and must take seriously, we would look for ways to strengthen our security. But no single person has yet explained to me how making people who have been checked before they come to Australia wait for three rather than two years makes us safer from terrorism. The people who flew aeroplanes into the twin towers on 11 September 2001 could have been in the United States for a week, a month or a year and it would not have made any difference. Many of the people who exploded bombs so tragically on the London Underground were born in the UK—they were British citizens. Our response to the threat of terrorism cannot be this knee-jerk exclusion that makes people feel less Australian and less committed to our body politic. It does not increase our security at all.

There has also been this sort of hint, although it does not appear in this legislation, that we are going to do something about an English language test. It is very important for people to learn to speak English when they live in Australia. The very best way of doing this is to offer them as much teaching and training as possible. Everyone knows that the government has actually cut resources to the Adult Migrant Education Program by $10.8 million and many of the courses do not meet the requirements of new migrants and in particular refugees.

When you look at the people who are most likely to have difficulties learning English, they are people who do not have literacy and numeracy skills because they have come from places that are in crisis—war-torn countries—and they have had to leave school much earlier than they should have or would have liked to, if indeed they have been able to go to school at all. The other people who are slowest learning English are women raising their families, who migrated here as part of a family unit and have young children at home. I think it is so incredibly offensive that we say to these women that, because it slows them in learning English and they are not interacting every day in the workplace, the work that they are doing at home raising their very young children is less important than the work that their husbands are doing while learning English in the workplace.

The reason I feel so strongly about this is that this is exactly the situation that my mother was in after she migrated to Australia. My father learned English much more quickly than my mother did because he was at work every day interacting in English. The first job my mother had was in a factory where nobody else spoke English either; they were all postwar migrants. I find absolutely deeply offensive the idea that we would value lower than my father’s work the work that my mother was doing in raising the three of us children—putting all of her time, all of her energy and all of her effort into it, giving up her opportunity for independence and her opportunity to learn English as quickly as my father. My mother spoke to us in Slovenian and that means I am bilingual and so are my brothers; in fact, two of us speak three languages, but that is another issue. Has the fact that we learnt Slovene as our first language, our mother tongue, disadvantaged me in any way in my life? I would say in every respect that it is an advantage and I have my mother to thank for it. We have this talk of how we are going to start putting English language tests on people before they can become Australian citizens. The idea that my father would pass an English language test and my mother would not because she was at home raising a family means we need to look at these proposals very closely.

It amazes me. I remember growing up and my parents saying to me: ‘It was terrible when we first came here. We’d be sitting quietly talking to each other in Slovene on the train and someone would walk up to us and say, “You should be speaking English when you’re here.”’ This is when they were talking to each other quietly on the train. God forbid that we should ever return to an environment where we start to speak to each other in this way. It is important for people to be able to communicate in English. The way that they learn to communicate in English is not just through adult education classes. It is by speaking to their next-door neighbours. It is by feeling welcomed in the school community. The way my mother learnt to speak English was by speaking to Mrs Watts next door and Doris Jones down the street and Mrs Fletcher around the corner, who used to come and have a cup of tea with her and help out with her very young children because she had no relatives in Australia. That is how people learn English—by being included in the English-speaking community, not by being excluded and traduced in this way.

What is this citizenship test going to include? The United Kingdom has a citizenship test and it has been fascinating to look at the details. About one-third of people are failing this test because it asks questions like: what are quangos and non-departmental public bodies? Rhetorically, Mr Deputy Speaker, I wonder if you would like to have that question asked of you. Another question is: what is proportional representation and where is it used? Another question is: how are judges appointed? I think even the people who make the appointments find that a little bit of a mystery. Another is: how many young people are there in the United Kingdom?

That is one level of extreme, where the questions are very difficult to answer for most people—for most people born in that United Kingdom, I would say. The other end is the United States, which has a test that includes questions like: ‘What are the colours of the American flag?’ What is the point of that test? I think probably the best test is the one I found on the email. It is obviously a draft. It says it comes from the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. I have not seen a final copy; I assume it must be a draft. It asks questions such as:

How many slabs can you fit in the back of a Falcon Ute while also allowing room for your cattle dog?

When packing an Esky do you put the ice, or the beer, in first?

I like this one:

Does “yeah-nah” mean

a) “Yes and no”

b) “Maybe”

c) “Yes I understand but No I don’t agree”?

There are some fantastic questions:

Which Australian Prime Minister held the world record for drinking a yardie full of beer the fastest?

That is a very important one to know, I think. It goes on:

On which Ashes tour did Warney’s hair look the best?

a) 1993

b) 1997

c) 2001

d) 2005

And:

Did you cry when Molly died on a Country Practice?

We all know it would have been un-Australian not to have cried when Molly died. It goes on:

When you were young did you prefer the Hills Hoist over any swing set?

There is another obvious answer. I guess we will reserve judgement until we see what this test is but, as for the idea that we are going to get anything sensible out of this government, many of us remember the preamble to the Constitution, which was perhaps the most poorly written piece of bilge water I have ever seen. But we are yet to see what we will get in the citizenship test.

The Australian citizenship pledge, on the other hand, something that is said at every citizenship ceremony that we go to and that I am proud to repeat again on Australia Day every year to recommit to Australian citizenship, says:

From this time forward, under God—

you can say ‘under God’ if you wish—

I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people,

Whose democratic beliefs I share,

Whose rights and liberties I respect,

And whose laws I will uphold and obey.

It tears me up every single time to see a room full of people who choose to be Australian, who have come here because they want to contribute to our community and to our nation. To hear these people repeating these words moves me every single time. When I say to them in my citizenship speech that people will tell them that they are very lucky to have become Australian citizens—and that is true—I also say to them, ‘But we are lucky to have you,’ because these people choose to come here and commit to becoming Australian citizens, and their greatest desire is to fit into our community, to work hard and to raise their families in an environment that is peaceful and safe. They say those words and they make that commitment. Why do they need to say more than that? Doesn’t that cover it?

You wonder: if we had taken this approach to citizenship over the years, who would we have missed out on coming to this country? There was a terrific piece in the Melbourne Age a couple of months ago by Dan Silkstone and Ebony Piera that went through the sort of people who arrived in Australia not speaking English. Sir Gustav Nossal arrived in Australia in 1939. The authors say:

… he did not speak a word of English. Neither did his parents. Now he is one of the country’s most decorated scientists.

The Nossals became Australian citizens two years after arriving. But they would have found it difficult to achieve citizenship under the proposed requirements, says their celebrated son.

The authors go on to quote Sir Gustav:

“My parents’ English was very poor. They became citizens quite quickly but it would have been very borderline for them if they’d had an English language test.”

The authors say:

He opposes any tests, saying it would be impossible to make it fair and non-discriminatory.

Sir Gustav is quoted again:

The migrant experience in this country has been an extraordinary success …

It is a Melbourne newspaper, so of course they also talk about Lord Mayor John So, who came to Australia from Hong Kong as a 17-year-old student and who, I believe, still has a fairly colourful way of speaking English. John So may well have missed out. He says:

Over time, migrants will develop the communication skills required to assimilate. For some people that will take a short time; for others it will be longer. But the time frame is not important.

The point he is making is that these people make a contribution to Australia. Another example is recycling billionaire Richard Pratt, who, the authors say, came to Australia from Poland as a reffo in 1939. He did not know anything about his new home when he was coming here. His parents did not know much else other than they needed a safe place to go. He is quoted as saying:

It goes to the core of who I am … I am an Australian, an immigrant, and the son of immigrants.

Businessman Sir Arvi Parbo is another one. He migrated from Estonia in 1949. He, too, knew little about Australia but went on to lead companies such as BHP and Western Mining. Professor Mary Kalantzis arrived from Greece when she was a child. Her parents spoke little English. She says:

Never could they have passed a citizenship test. They were poor, illiterate peasants from Greece. They could not even have passed a test in Greek!

Their daughter, the authors go on to say, was recently appointed Dean of Education at the University of Illinois in the US.

Who would we have missed out on with the proposals that this government has for Australian citizenship and what is the purpose of raising these issues now? Is it really to improve the security of Australians at a time of international uncertainty? How exactly does it do that? How exactly does making people wait longer to become citizens, excluding them from the community and encouraging hostility against them, actually make us more secure in the world? Frankly, terrorists could fly in tomorrow and in a week’s time be able to launch a fairly successful attack on a major Australian institution. We do our best to make sure that does not happen, we need to take all possible measures to make sure it does not happen, but I genuinely do not understand how any of these measures actually improve that.

With this government saying constantly that citizenship is so important, so valuable and so precious, it is funny that two weeks ago, in the second week of October, neither Malcolm Turnbull, the member for Wentworth, nor the state opposition leader, Peter Debnam, could be bothered turning up to the 27 September ceremony in their electorates. The person asked to give the speech about what it is like to be an Australian citizen was none other than the US Consul-General, Steve Smith. As Joe Hildebrand said, reporting in the Telegraph, ‘He is a lovely bloke but about as Australian as the Statue of Liberty.’

As I say, the bill is like the worm tablet—it has been wrapped in bacon and we will swallow it. It does have some good and important measures in it, particularly, as I say, for Maltese citizens, but we as a community really need to ask ourselves what it is that we fear and how we can include people and encourage citizenship rather than discourage it.

See this speech in context