Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Georgiou. That is a perfect example of how you can value language from other countries. I also recently attended the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hungarian Revolution, and I have to say that when I went to that particular function, the organisers were overwhelmed by the number of people who attended. In fact, they were wheeling in piles of chairs to handle the numbers and they were thrilled that so many people had turned up to the event in Civic here in Canberra. Last Saturday evening I had the pleasure of attending the wedding celebration of a Muslim family in my electorate. There were 600 people there. It was a fantastically joyous occasion and something that was a first for me. It was an evening that I enjoyed incredibly.

I also go every year to the annual celebration for the Mon people, an ethnic grouping from Burma. I have a very close relationship with the Thai and Laos communities here—and I am just naming a few. There are so many here in our town of Canberra. Given the size and the geography of this community, it is very easy to get around and get to know them all. It is not unusual to now also see new arrivals from the Sudan at the local shopping centre. I am seeing that more and more, and I am very pleased to see that they are able to choose my community as their community. It is always a great pleasure to share in the rich culture of ethnic communities. It is also a great pleasure to see these communities display their great love and loyalty to their new home, which has given them a chance to improve their life circumstances. They have offered so much to us by them coming here.

I enjoy going to the functions organised by ethnic communities and being Italian or Maltese for the day. Part of this is being immersed in their language and their culture. Some of our most loyal and hardworking migrants have not had the opportunity to learn English and, whilst this may not be ideal, it has not detracted at all from their contribution to this country. As other speakers have said, I also take every opportunity I can, when invited, to go to the citizenship ceremonies and to speak to them. On those occasions I always make a point of thanking them for choosing this country and this city—this community—as their home. I always impress upon them to please never lose their language or their culture, because while they maintain that, it adds so much to the dimension of our communities here.

The other thing I want to mention in passing is that we have the National Multicultural Festival every year in Canberra. It gets bigger and more representative, with many thousands of people attending. And—given the odd little blip we have seen in Cronulla and elsewhere—I would like to offer, without being superior about it, that it seems to me that the way the communities mix and live together within Canberra and the rest of the Australian Capital Territory is a great lesson in how you can settle communities from other backgrounds very successfully. I am very pleased to see that we have that down to a tee, I believe, in our community of Canberra.

I have great respect for the migrants who have come here. Our postwar migration program has been extremely successful, and I believe that the success is due to the fact that we accepted those migrants in good faith and we treated them with great respect. Unfortunately, I am not of the view that some of the actions of the current government are in that same spirit. These bills were first proposed following the London bombings in 2005. Some of the provisions are very welcome; others are not so welcome and raise deep concerns for both myself and my colleagues. One of the provisions of the Australian Citizenship Bill when it was first introduced was to increase the time qualification for citizenship from two years to three years. This was recommended by COAG following consideration of the best available intelligence. In that context, we on the Labor side agreed to support that change to three years. We agreed that there could be some merit in that change, although some people had reservations about it, as the member for Port Adelaide said earlier.

However, the government then sat on this bill for a year and only introduced it this week, almost one year later. It was revealed in Senate estimates earlier this week that, during that year, 117,208 people had been processed for citizenship using the old system. If it is so vital for us to increase the delay for citizenship for the security of our community and our country, why has the government sat on this for a year and allowed 117,208 people to pass successfully through the citizenship program? Now the government has introduced an amendment to the bill which will increase that change from two years to four years. I ask: on what basis has the government decided to increase this time qualification? The federal government has given no justification whatsoever for the increase. It does not make sense and it only serves to make it more difficult for people who want to become Australian citizens.

We desperately need skilled migrants to Australia to address our workforce shortage. The increase in the delay for citizenship may turn some people off coming because they have to wait longer to become a citizen. But, more importantly, it throws a blanket of suspicion over their motives for coming here. That is the issue that concerns me the most and that is why I cannot support this provision. It is not in the spirit of Australia’s extremely successful postwar migration program; it is not in the spirit of the way our citizenship program has run in the past.

Another provision in this legislation is that a citizenship application of an applicant who is considered to be a security risk by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, ASIO, can be refused. Again, while the claimed basis for the changes is security reasons, because of the one-year delay in introducing these bills we have had 117,208 people processed in the last year without ASIO necessarily having the power that this bill will give them. Even if they are known to be a security risk, one could ask—and it is a question that must be answered—where is the evidence that these changes are useful for security? The previous speaker, the member for Sydney, mentioned the tragic bombings in London. But the perpetrators of that shocking crime were not even migrants or new ethnic arrivals but British citizens, some of them born in the country. I do not understand the logic of arguing that these changes are necessary for security reasons when there is sadly no guarantee whatsoever, in the world in which we find ourselves today, of where such offenders will come from.

I would also like to comment on the provision in the bill that would prevent the minister from approving a person becoming an Australian citizen if the person has been convicted of an offence against an Australian or foreign law for which the person has been sentenced to a period of imprisonment of at least five years. I do not believe there should be a blanket rule about people who have been convicted and sentenced for at least five years under a foreign law. Unfortunately, many people around the world are unfairly convicted and imprisoned. We cannot assume that all countries around the world have fair and just legal systems. But, more importantly, what about political prisoners or those who have come to Australia from places such as Burma, the Sudan and a range of countries? Just think of Nelson Mandela, who was in jail for 20 years. Would we reject him on the basis that he was in a prison for longer than five years? He would not be welcomed, on my reading of the bill—and I stand to be corrected. If I have got this wrong, I would be very happy to hear it. This legislation would mean that a person like Nelson Mandela could not come here. We would reject him.

I lived in Burma some years ago; I served there with our foreign mission. I think of the people who have bravely stood up to the shocking, ruling military regime in that country. I think of Mugabe’s regime. I think of any number of people around the world. What this bill is saying is: ‘If you have fallen foul of those corrupt regimes, tough, but we don’t want you.’ It is the most incredible question that really deserves a better answer than I think we have been getting so far, if any, from the government.

On a positive note, there are some provisions that we do support. The bill facilitates dual citizenship and will allow many people to resume or take up Australian citizenship, which they were unable to do prior to this legislation. This will benefit Australian citizens who have adopted children from overseas, people with a Papua New Guinean background and the Maltese community. People of Maltese origin who renounced their Australian citizenship under section 18 of the Citizenship Act of 1948 have not been able to resume citizenship under section 23AA of the Citizenship Act. They were deemed to have retained their rights to Maltese citizenship rather than having acquired foreign citizenship. In March 2005, the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee stated that Australian citizenship should be more inclusive and children of people who renounce their citizenship under section 18 should also be eligible for Australian citizenship. And I am pleased to say that at the last ALP national conference we passed the following resolution:

Labor will streamline the citizenship resumption arrangements for those who lost citizenship as a result of previous provisions regarding dual citizenship in Australian and Maltese law.

I am sure this will be good news to the 200 or so people in my electorate who were born in Malta. I know that they will be very happy with this change.

The government has released a discussion paper on a number of issues relating to citizenship. One of the key issues is whether Australia should introduce a formal citizenship test, and it raises some very interesting questions. For example: what level of English is required to participate as an Australian citizen, and how important is a commitment to Australia’s way of life and values for prospective Australian citizens? While I think these are valid questions and it is important to debate these issues—I do not shy away from that and I am never frightened to have a debate about these sorts of issues—my major concern is the context in which the government has raised these issues. Why is it that the government is only now highlighting the importance of English skills for Australian citizens? Whilst anyone with commonsense would agree that it is ideal for Australian citizens to speak English, there are many first-generation Australian citizens who came to Australia as migrants, have made a great contribution here and yet even now still cannot speak English fluently. As I said earlier, I often attend functions where the main language being spoken is not English, and I refer to a wonderful function I went to at the Hellenic Club here in Canberra—a wonderful community. Where would Canberra be without the Greeks? I am not quite sure. But we would not be where we are now. Their contribution has been magnificent.

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