Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I wish to address budget measures associated with the Attorney-General's portfolio—in particular, the measures that are designed to keep Australians safe from the threat of terrorism. I want to look at two particular programs: the $40 million allocation over a four-year period for investment in programs aimed at countering violent extremism; and the $21 million over four years for programs announced in February this year which are aimed at developing new measures to challenge terrorist propaganda online.

The federal seat of Calwell is one of those electorates that, for better or for worse, are focus of a lot of attention from the government in relation to keeping Australia safe from terrorists and extremist propaganda. That has been the case in my electorate for over the last decade or so, so we are pretty familiar with being the centre of attention for a whole series of government services. But this one is of particular concern to us.

In relation to those programs and given the nature of my electorate, I was quite concerned about an article I saw on the weekend in one of the Melbourne papers which raised the concerns of some ethnic community leaders about the allocation of deradicalisation funds, particularly those associated with counselling services and known as Living Safe Together grants. I am concerned about it because we are talking about allocating a lot of money to programs that are meant to deliver successful outcomes.

I would like to refer to some of those concerns today. Some of those concerns were raised, in particular, by Dr Berhan Ahmed, who is a very high-profile Australian of Eritrean background. He is involved with the African community in Melbourne in a very comprehensive way. He has raised concerns about the African community having missed out on receiving grants under these programs. His concerns are that some of the organisations that have received grants are not known, or there is no accountability; that there is no transparency around who is receiving grants. There is an element of secrecy, according to Dr Ahmed, about the allocation of these grants.

When we are looking at funding programs that are meant to deliver outcomes for the broader collective good, you have to be a little bit concerned when they are referred to, described as or alleged to be, perhaps, secretive—not necessarily going where they should be going or to the groups they should be going to. I am certainly concerned, and I understand the Islamic Council of Victoria has also expressed some concern in relation to the focus of the grants. I am not saying they are not rightfully focussed; they probably are rightfully focussed at countering violent extremists, but there is a group within the centre that requires some attention.

I would like to speak about some of the activities and initiatives within my electorate that come from my own community—from within the Muslim community and my own organisations—which do not draw on government funding and will not be relying on funding for these programs. Nevertheless, they are aimed at doing exactly what funding for counter-terrorism programs aims to do, and they do it in a very different way.

I had the opportunity on Friday to attend the sod turning of the Quba mosque, which is being built in my electorate. The Quba mosque is being built in Somerton on the Hume Highway. It belongs to an organisation whose prime focus is investing in the education of young people. The organisation believes that educating children and providing knowledge is at the core of helping young minds develop into positive citizens who want to do good in the community, as opposed to being destructive. We expect that the mosque will be ready and completed by the end of next year.

Also associated with the mosque is the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy of Australia, which provides an online degree course in Islamic studies in conjunction with Curtin University. It is a very novel and important way of teaching classical Islamic studies here in Australia. It will provide a Bachelor of Islamic Studies and also a Master of Islamic Studies, and in this sense, in conjunction with Curtin University, it will give people an opportunity to learn about Islam in a positive way. Its aim is to counter the narrative of the fundamentalists and the recruiters. This approach—that of teaching through education—is a very important approach.

Some of the core principles of the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy of Australia include: to help young people develop a sense of sincerity in their intentions and in their actions; to encourage positive action in every situation; to serve God and humanity; to behave in a manner of excellence in both practice and outcome; to provide for them a sense of balance in life and in the way the conduct themselves; and to give them an opportunity to learn to integrate, or to build relationships, with the broader community. The Quba Mosque and the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy of Australia are initiatives that come from within the community. They are excellent examples of how the community can take it upon itself to initiate very important relationship building that is helpful to young people today. Whether they are of Muslim or some other background, young people today need good, positive mentoring; they need guidance; and they need to be assisted in working their way through the development of their sense of self and their identity. At the core of some of these disturbances that we read about is the sense of not belonging and not understanding who they are or what their place is in the broader community. So I am very pleased that I have organisations in the federal seat of Calwell that are dedicated to providing excellence in education and are genuinely committed to mentoring and helping young people.

I also want to raise the Australia Light Foundation, which is a similar organisation in my seat of Calwell and which is committed to the same objectives of educating, helping and mentoring young people as they work their way through their education. This afternoon in my electorate one of the Muslim schools, the Ilim College, which is a very large school with about 1800 students, held a forum to which they invited participation from other schools in the electorate. Their aim is to reach out to students in neighbouring schools to try to establish communications and relationships.

It is very important that young people are not stereotyped and therefore made to feel that there is something peculiarly different about them or that they are in some way a threat to the community. There is a self-fulfilling prophecy in that sort of attitude. I am so proud of my local community because they understand the need for young people to belong, aw well as the nuances and the difficulties that young people face. They are taking it upon themselves to raise their funds and to invest not only in buildings but also in content. I am very pleased to be representing a community that is often maligned and is very much in the spotlight for the wrong reasons. It is a community that I know well, that has taken control of the stereotyping and is seeking to find a way through it in order to help young people, not just from within the Muslim community but also to reach out to the broader community and hopefully to set an example of best practice in genuinely countering extremism and countering that online narrative—a narrative which seems to lure young people away from their homes and into dangerous pursuits and which we seem to read so much about in recent times.

On the one hand, a lot of money is being allocated in the budget for this kind of work. Certainly, the previous Labor government also allocated a lot of money under the Building Resilient Communities program. We must be very careful that they are not tainted by the sorts of allegations we read about on the weekend that are coming from the African community and the Islamic Council of Victoria. The idea is not to make communities feel that they are being left out. You need to practise being inclusive, especially when you are talking about funding of that nature—$40 million over a four year period. You would want to think and believe that that money will be money well spent and that it will deliver results. I would like to think that my community can actually offer some advice and guidance—even to government generally—about how to pitch the message and how to better spend that money. I raise that in the context of an issue that is very important to my local community. Jobs and health and childcare and many other areas are also of concern to me, but I do not have enough time left this evening to go into those issues. But at the core of helping communities lies a sense of purpose, opportunity, education and being able to find work; in particular with young people, in an electorate such as mine which has a very high youth unemployment rate.

If we can address those issues comprehensively then we might find that we do not have to spend as much money on building resilient communities or countering violent extremism—because young people will have a purpose and they will have a focus. And this is the focus of the Islamic Sciences and Research Academy of Australia, of the Australia Light Foundation, of Ilim College and of many other organisations of Muslim faith in my electorate. Their focus is about reining in the commitment of young people and their focus onto things that are positive and that help develop an awareness of self and identity in a positive way, so that they can make positive contributions to the community—so that they can also then not be vulnerable to the narrative of the extremists and be lulled away from the safety of their homes and their neighbourhoods to places on the other side of the world which are, as we all know, places of violence and evil, quite frankly. The challenge is there, the money is there, and the will is there. My only concern is that the funds go to the organisations that will actually deliver the results that need to be delivered in order to keep Australia safe and to keep our young people focused on working their way through the integration process, which is very important in their understanding of self.

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