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

I was going to speak on another matter in relation to the Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2010-2011 and Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2010-2011 but that contribution by the member for Cook has led me in a different direction.

I will start by saying first that I would be delighted if one aspect of what the member for Cook was saying was true, which is, that a country the size of Australia, through its policy on our treatment of asylum seekers, could somehow stop 46 million people from moving around the world—if we were so powerful that our policy in this one area would stop the number of refugees in the world from rising as it has in the last three or four years from 15 million to 46 million. Countries all around the world are experiencing the same surge in arrivals as we are—in fact, greater surges than we are. The US and France and Europe are receiving many more. The surge is far greater there than it is here. If the member for Cook is suggesting that those surges are actually caused by Australia’s policy, that is a very weird assertion.

The idea that Australia’s policy somehow caused the increase in violence that caused massive numbers of people to flee Sri Lanka or massive numbers to flee Afghanistan is quite absurd. If you look at the history of people arriving by boat, consider the Vietnamese, for example, where millions of people fled Vietnam, and around 800,000 are estimated to have drowned fleeing Vietnam. Every country on the way was pushing people back out to sea. They all had policies of pushing the boats back out to sea and yet the people still came because they fled circumstances of certain death. When people flee what they believe is certain death they flee to somewhere. It is really simple. As many as 1.8 million Afghanis have fled into Pakistan, 1.2 million have fled into Syria and three million have fled into Iran. Enormous numbers of people have been displaced and are fleeing what they believe is certain death. So the idea that our policy could somehow stop that is absurd. When people flee certain death they flee to somewhere. We in Australia receive by boat a very, very small number of people relative to those fleeing in the world.

When you look at the cycle of arrivals in Australia, every time there is a great outbreak of war or civil unrest around the world the numbers increase, and they increase here as well. They increased for Vietnam, they increased around the year 2000 with the Afghanistan war and they decreased significantly following the outbreak of what we thought was peace in Afghanistan, all around the world including in Australia. So to assume that somehow, as the member for Cook seems to suggest, Australia with its humane treatment of asylum seekers could actually prevent people from fleeing from certain death is quite absurd.

I want to talk too about the response we saw last week to the government’s decision to fly asylum seekers to the funerals in Sydney, because we have heard some of the comments by the member for Cook and he has not admitted at this stage that he was wrong in those statements, just that he made them on the wrong day. It was an astonishing thing for me, and it showed an extraordinary ignorance of the plight of the people that we are talking about when we are talking about asylum seekers. In Australia, we—many of us gratefully—have never experienced the kinds of life experiences that many of our migrants, particularly our refugees, have experienced. I have a lot of them in my electorate, and the stories I hear are appalling. I have a couple who were forcibly separated from their two-year-old child and do not know where she is. She is in the Congo somewhere. I have a 24-year-old boy who arrived in Australia with his six younger brothers and sisters. He has put them all through university or high school. He is now 24. He never tells me where his parents are, but I assume that somewhere along the way he lost them. They are dreadful stories.

We in Australia saw the plight of a young boy who lost his parents in that dreadful sinking on Christmas Island, and we were rightly moved. But I think what we need to understand as people is that, for every one of those stories that we are now aware of that happened on Christmas Island, there are many, many stories of circumstances and experiences that are appalling and that have occurred before the people came to Australia. That is why they fled. They fled because they had to pick up their sister’s body after she had been tortured and they had to pay for it. They fled because their entire families are dead and they are the only one left—appalling circumstances; things that we do not even want to think about. We know what happened once that young boy reached Australia and we feel for him, but surely we did not need to see him crying at a funeral in order to feel compassion for his plight. Surely we should have felt compassion before that, and surely we should feel some compassion for what people are going through around the world and play our very small part in adhering to our responsibilities under the UN convention.

We take and have been taking around 12,000 or 13,000 people a year under the humanitarian program for quite some time. This is not new. In fact, I think the first time we did it was in about 1958, when we took some refugees from Europe after the Second World War. It was about the same number, about 12,000, and we were a much, much smaller country then. We have been doing it for a long, long time and it has proven to be, I think, a very good thing for us. We have within our community through our refugee program, but also through our large migration program, contact with the world. We actually have the world in us. We have bright, shining threads that link us to cultures that are thousands of years old where people have come to the same conclusions about building better lives, becoming better people and raising families via different paths. This is a remarkable thing that we have in our country.

In my community of Parramatta, I am continually astonished at how I can be talking to a person that I have known for ages—I have not known he was of Hindu faith but have known him for ages; I have worked with him; I have ridden my bike with him—and suddenly I will say something and he will come out with something which philosophically just takes a slightly different angle to get to the same result. I said to someone the other day, ‘Oh, I was terribly weak on my bike this morning,’ and he said, ‘Failure leads to success,’ in a very typically Hindu way, and then three other people came in and said very similar things. It is this absolute delight that I have in my community when I meet people who have lived lives that have run parallel to mine.

One of the great human tragedies, in many ways, is that we can only live one life. I know that some people in my community believe that we can live more than that, but I believe we live one. Maybe, if you are lucky in that life, you can become good at one thing. Maybe you can become knowledgeable at one thing. Maybe you can learn to live within a certain cultural framework or a certain religious framework well in one lifetime. But what a great gift it is that we have in our community people who have experienced those paths from different perspectives.

We, as members of parliament, would all know that we have an opportunity that very few people in Australia have—which is to look in those windows, to be invited into the families, to the weddings, the festivals, the temples and the mosques and to share just a tiny glimpse of the wealth of the world, the philosophy, the approaches to self-improvement and the approach to life ever after. It is all here in our community and it is one of the great things that makes us strong. I wanted when I first came in here today to refer back to something I said in my first speech. I think it is quite topical here today. I said:

One of the great strengths of Parramatta is its rich cultural diversity. Our multicultural society is something to be treasured. Parramatta is home to large Chinese, Indian, Arabic, Korean and Tamil communities, among others, and these communities have added to the economic and social capital of our region. In recent years—

and this was in 2004—

I have noticed a change in the language governments use in relation to multiculturalism, a trend towards the use of the word ‘tolerance’, or ‘tolerating difference’. For me, tolerance is the bare minimum. Tolerance is the level you set for the most racist elements in our society to lift them to the barest acceptable level. For the majority of open-minded, decent Australians, a celebration of diversity is the benchmark.

That was said when I came into parliament and since that time I have had six years of this great gift of being able to celebrate with communities in a way that most people simply do not.

I know there are some people who are afraid that the world might be changing, and I suggest to them that the world that they think is coming, where we have different cultures within us, has actually been here for a long time. You can work alongside a person who might look like she is of Indian origin. She might be Hindu, she might be Buddhist or she might be Muslim, depending on which country she comes from. You probably do not know. I worked with a woman for two years before I knew she was Jewish. I worked with a man for two years before I knew he was a Muslim—he was Bosnian. I just did not know. We had good relationships, we worked well together and we socialised together, but I just did not know. Many Australians do not get to experience the way some of us do the incredible breadth and diversity of our own communities, and that is to be regretted.

I urge my community members, if they feel uncomfortable with a certain group in the community, one group or another, to walk towards them, not away from them. Around 25 per cent of Australians were born overseas. That is the same proportion we had in 1901. It has been constant for 100 years. About 45 per cent of us have one parent born overseas. That has been constant for about 100 years. It goes up and down a little bit, but essentially it is the same. We are an extraordinary example of a country that has taken people in from around the world and built a society that actually works. It has not always been easy. There were times when I was younger where I heard people say some dreadful things. For example, I heard that people in my street had become terribly worried about the Greek Australians because they painted their houses blue and concreted their yards and property prices were going to plummet as a result of those blue houses. I was working in a factory when the Vietnamese boat people first arrived and some of the people in the factory were incredibly worried that these Vietnamese refugees would take over economically because they worked too hard. We have all heard people say that our Chinese migrants’ children are getting too much tutoring. We all hear these fear things.

My Muslim community sometimes asks where the women can swim without the presence of men. In my community, it is not that much of a problem because the leagues club segregates its swimming pool. Parramatta Leagues Club takes women on one day and men on the other. I have told them all this, so a lot of the Muslim women in Parramatta go to the leagues club for their segregated swimming. Again, I suggest to anyone who is criticising the Muslim community for seeking segregation they could perhaps have a go at the Parramatta Leagues Club for doing the same thing. In fact, I know that quite a few leagues clubs do the same thing.

I would say to people who look at what is happening overseas—who look at unrest in one country or another—that we in Australia have lived through this before. We have lived through circumstances where we have had people in Australia who in their homeland might have been in conflict who live together quite peacefully here. In my African community, for example, the women in particular get together on a regular basis across national boundaries, across language groups and across religions. Even where they may have been in conflict between north and south, they are now together and learning to live together in this country in a positive way.

We in Australia will not be defined by what happens overseas. We in this country are defined by the way we treat each other—not by what happens overseas but by the way we treat each other. To pull away from a person because you fear that they might behave in a certain way is very foolish because it causes that person also to respond defensively. I think for our Muslim community the response after 2001 has caused many of them to reaffirm their approach to Islam perhaps even in a more fundamental way than they did in the homeland. I am aware of some girls who were not wearing the veil in their homeland but do now in Australia, largely as a response to that pushing away of that particular community. I again urge all my fellow Australians to have a very good and open look at some of the extraordinary wealth we have in our community and to remember when you see what is happening overseas that it does not happen here and we will be defined by our relationships with each other.

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