Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I commend the previous speaker, the member for McMillan, for his comments. The Australian Citizenship Amendment (Citizenship Testing) Bill 2007 sets out to formalise the citizenship test that applies to the granting of Australian citizenship. The bill amends the Australian Citizenship Act to provide for a more formalised model. My concern with the use of a formal test is to do with what exactly is to be tested and what a formal test will achieve. The mark of any good test is that it should be a valid test—that is, it should test what it is desired to reveal. And in this case that would be the knowledge required of a person seeking to become an Australian citizen.

The requirement of this bill is for applicants for Australian citizenship to have successfully completed a citizenship test before making an application to become Australian citizens. Applicants must understand the nature of their application, possess a basic knowledge of the English language and have an adequate knowledge of Australia and of the responsibilities and privileges of Australian citizenship. Until now, the test has been in the form of an interview with an officer of the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. This form of assessment is, by its nature, subjective and could be seen to be open to a range of outcomes for similar applicants. But in formalising the test we must be sure that what is being tested is an essential requirement of an Australian citizen. That has thankfully been the result of the government changing the original test proposal. But, even given the watering down of what was originally proposed, I can see the potential for problems depending on the types of questions included in the test.

As I said earlier, to be a valid test, the questions must be relevant to the strict requirements of being an Australian citizen. I have noted that the test will contain three mandatory questions on the responsibilities and privileges of Australian citizenship and that those questions will be part of the 60 per cent pass mark. That leaves a further nine of the 20 questions which must also be correctly answered. And it is the point of these questions that causes me some concern.

In a similar type of testing that we accept as part of our lives, the testing of drivers, we expect the test to be confined to matters which can be shown to be necessary to demonstrate that the applicant has the required knowledge to be able to drive safely on our roads and obey the relevant traffic rules. We have come a long way from the time when the local police sergeant would ask an applicant to drive around the block and, if they returned in one piece, then tell them that they had passed the test. That test was certainly valid in testing some driving skills but left a lot to be desired when it came to fully testing the driver’s ability to perform under a variety of conditions. Since then, we have seen responsible authorities introduce objective testing of road rules as well as a short road-driving test. But that still leaves many critics calling for a more rigorous driving test and even the inclusion of attitude testing. We should all appreciate the need for drivers to have the knowledge and skills to ensure the safety of all road users. But the purpose of the questions in the proposed citizenship test other than the three mandatory questions on responsibilities and privileges is definitely not entirely clear.

In his second reading speech, the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship saw it this way:

One of the main reasons people come to Australia is that they see this as a land of opportunity.

And I agree with that observation. The minister went on to say:

Part of our responsibility to them is to ensure that they have the knowledge to make the most of what our country offers and to help them develop a sense of belonging. Citizenship is at the heart of our national identity, giving us a strong sense of who we are and our place in the world.

The minister then went on to express this as follows:

Becoming a citizen is a profound step requiring the individual to pledge their loyalty to Australia and its people. It involves a commitment to a shared future and core values.

But what are those values? Or should I ask whose values they are? While recognising that Australia is a multicultural society, the minister then said:

While people are not expected to leave their own traditions behind, we do expect them to embrace our values and integrate into the Australian society. In becoming a citizen, they pledge their loyalty to Australia.

It seems deliberate on the part of the minister to mention the phrase ‘embrace our values’ and the pledge of loyalty in the same paragraph. He went on to say:

For generations, Australia has successfully combined people into one community based on a common set of values.

And the minister went further and listed those values:

These values include our respect for the freedom and the dignity of the individual, support for democracy, our commitment to the rule of law, the equality of men and women, respect for all races and cultures, the spirit of a ‘fair go’, mutual respect, compassion for those in need, and promoting the interests of the community as a whole.

I would have thought that those comments would have covered the matter. Although I have to ask how you could put those values into questions as part of the proposed test. The minister takes this seriously as is evidenced by his comment:

It is important that Australian citizens understand the values that guide us and how our society works.

The minister then gave us a history lesson on the foundation of Australian values as he sees it. Like so many historians he begins as follows:

From 1788 the British settlers of Australia brought with them the Anglo-Celtic principles and traditions of Christianity, the scientific revolution and the enlightenment.

There is no mention whatsoever in his speech about our beautiful Indigenous Australians and I think I can safely assume that there will be no questions about Indigenous Australians in the citizenship test. The minister told us:

The material which will form the basis of the citizenship test will highlight the common values we share, as well as something of our history and our background.

As I said, it will not be easy to frame the questions related to the common values we share. The minister spoke about the spirit of a fair go, but how do you put that into words that someone new to Australia and with moderate English language skills can understand well enough to be able to answer test questions about it? For that matter, what is meant by ‘the dignity of the individual’? These are concepts that we can analyse, but it would be difficult to come up with a simple definition and it would be very difficult to come up with a simple statement that could be fairly included in a test. When you look at values such as ‘the equality of men and women’ we need to consider the extent to which they have been adopted in Australia. In my lifetime we have seen the principle of equal pay accepted nationally, so when we talk about established values we need to consider that values are not chiselled in stone. Australian values have evolved over time—and that time includes our prehistory—and continue to evolve.

One of the major forces shaping our changing values is the impact of immigration on the make-up of the Australian population. So when we look at those values that we seek to make a part of the citizenship test, we must look at those in the light of the changing nature of the Australian population. I will repeat my earlier quote from the minister’s speech:

For generations, Australia has successfully combined people into one community based on a common set of values.

But we need to ask just how much that ‘one community’ has changed. Even though I lived in suburban Sydney in my school years, much of what I was taught—and you might say many of the values I developed—were influenced by images of Australia as a rural nation. The school books showed farmers on tractors, sheep and fields of wheat. We recited Dorothea Mackellar’s My Countryand I am sure the member for Throsby would also remember reciting it many times—and my mother, bless her heart, listened to Blue Hills on the wireless. But those images and the cultural values that flowed from them had little significance when it came to my working life in the city of Sydney. Those common values have long since vanished from urban Australia in the 21st century.

The community that Australians identify with is more likely to be framed by their immediate surroundings, their workplace, their suburb, their generation, their entertainment and their family background. What is significant in an electorate like Fowler, which I am so privileged to represent in this parliament, is that, while it is home to 150,000 people, it is not typical of even what might be called ‘average Australia’. For a start, in the 2001 census, most Australians described their ancestry as Australian, Anglo-Celtic or European but, in Fowler, the largest group described their ancestry as Chinese. When it came to religion, 94 per cent of the population claimed to have a religious belief but only 54 per cent—slightly more than half—described themselves as Christian. The significance of this is that, while we may seek to identify common values, the values that are common for a person living in Fowler may be quite different to the values of someone living in another part of Australia. Regardless of what may be set out as common values and tested as part of the citizenship test, the evolving values of Australians will be those developed in their local communities and not necessarily those developed in the national community.

One of the best examples of the way these values are formed was shown—in what was at the time seen as being a light-hearted way—in the 1960s novel They’re a Weird Mob, which was written by John O’Grady under the pen name of Nino Culotta, and in the similarly-themed book So, You Want to be an Australian by Cyril Pearl. It was made into a film starring Walter Chiari and Chips Rafferty. The plot of the film shows the perils of assimilation faced by an Italian immigrant. Much of the film is devoted to the influence of the workplace on the values and language adopted by the Italian migrant. While knowing of the film might date me, I think it is true to say that its message is as relevant today as it was 40 years ago.

The point I wish to make is that, regardless of what the Department of Immigration and Citizenship may put together as a test of Australian values, unless it understands how those values are learnt the test will not be a valid one—that is, it will not be a reasonable test of what are real, common Australian values and it will not be relevant to the community that people seeking citizenship will be part of. The most obvious consequence of a test based on irrelevant values is that it will encourage the kind of shonky schools that we have seen in driving instruction and taxi licence testing. The applicants are given a quick rote-learning way of passing the test without really understanding what it is all about. I think that will be the inevitable result of this legislation.

It should be the case that the existing Adult Migrant English Program, which provides access to English for employment, citizenship and community participation, should be expanded to ensure that all candidates for citizenship have access to affordable programs to assist them with the knowledge required to meet the test requirements. But the experience in recent years in New South Wales does not fill me with confidence that this will be the case. Before 1998, adult migrant English programs were conducted by the Adult Migrant English Service of the New South Wales Department of Education and Training. Under this government, the program was put out to tender with a newly established private organisation, ACL, being allocated three of the five regions. As we can now see, the cost of delivery has increased, which has resulted in fewer hours of tuition being provided. By the 1999-2000 year only 11 per cent of existing students achieved a functional English certificate. Since then, ACL has also won the tender for settlement services in New South Wales and, despite what should be the regional nature of the English program, not one refugee client of the ACL settlement service has been referred to AMES. So much for the supposed choice that the tender system was to provide.

What we have in New South Wales is a race to the bottom where the leading provider is a for-profit company listed on the Stock Exchange that can set the pace in providing a minimal service to maximise its profit. The losers are those clients who will be less able to function in the workplace or in society as a result of their lack of English skills. If we were to look at where applicants for citizenship should seek the English and other test requirements, it definitely should be the Adult Migrant English Program. Instead, we find that migrants who were required to pay up to $5,000 for English language education before they come to this great country, Australia, often cannot attend at all or can attend only for a short period of time because they need to work full time to get established in their new homeland.

These migrants do not achieve the level of functional English often necessary to work in their area of skill. It is not unusual to find skilled migrants—I have found so many living in my electorate—working outside their trade or profession because they simply do not have the necessary English skills. It is a catch-22 situation: they cannot get the English skills they need because they need to work in a low-paid, unskilled job and they cannot work in their trade or profession because their English is not good enough. That is a story told by thousands of skilled migrants in this country. While we suffer from acute skill shortages in many fields, the lack of accessible and affordable English classes prevents us from taking full advantage of the skills of these wonderful people.

The second point in relation to learning English is that the amount of time it takes to attain the level needed can be greater than the allocated 510 or 610 hours. We need to take into account the fact that many refugee migrants have very poor literacy in their own language. Learning English is therefore doubly hard. When people do not have the knowledge to read and write in their own language, these skills must also be taught as part of the program. It is little wonder that only 11 per cent of students achieve a functional English certificate. It should also be obvious that a person who speaks a European language based on the same Latin alphabet as English will be able to learn English faster than a person of Chinese background who is literate in a Chinese character based system of writing.

One thing is clear: as a country, we are not doing enough to develop the English skills of our migrants and we are paying a hefty price in suffering skills shortages in trades and professions because we are failing to invest enough in these programs. This government should be condemned for that. When it comes to testing applicants for citizenship, I can see three future directions. We can invest in programs that improve the English skills of all migrants and, in the process, impart the most important of Australian values. Secondly, we can continue as we are and water down the English and citizenship tests to the lowest common denominator to ensure people get through. Or, thirdly, we can make a joke of the whole process by failing to fund English language and citizenship knowledge and leaving the process open—and I feel that we will leave this open—to rorting by shonky agents eager to make a buck out of the citizenship test.

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