Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

My feelings are very mixed, standing to speak on this motion today. It is a motion which was first moved in the parliament 20 years ago. It was moved at the time that One Nation first entered the House of Representatives; moved by the then Prime Minister, John Howard and supported by the then Leader of the Opposition, Kim Beazley.

On the first day of the new parliament, Bill Shorten, the Leader of the Opposition, put to the Prime Minister that it was time to carry this motion again. The intention was that carrying the motion would be an affirmation of principles that would be unanimously held across parliament. And the Prime Minister, in good faith, took that offer on and made the motion his own. By the time we vote on this—either later today or tomorrow—it is hard to believe that this motion is still supported by every member of the House of Representatives. The second paragraph of the motion—of a 20-year-old motion—says that the House:

reaffirms its commitment to maintaining an immigration policy wholly non-discriminatory on grounds of race, colour, creed or origin.

It simply cannot be the case that every member of the parliament still believes that. I have no doubt that this motion reflects the majority view of our parliament. But I cannot reconcile that second paragraph with the words that we have heard in recent days from Australia's Minister for Immigration, when he put the argument not that the Fraser government let the wrong people in but that the people who were let in had children and grandchildren who have behaved in an unacceptable way—and therefore used the phrase that the government had 'made a mistake'. The only point of continuity with those people was that they, being the grandchildren of the people who came through under the Fraser government, were of the same race, were of the same ethnicity and adhered to the same creed. There is no way of reconciling the words of the minister for immigration with the words of this motion. I wish there were.

I want this resolution, which is about who we are as a country, to be something that both sides of politics can unanimously agree on. When the Leader of the Opposition put this motion forward and said it is time to move it again, it was not intended to be a wedge through the government. It was not intended to be a point of division; it was intended to be a statement of unity. I cannot, for the life of me, see how that second paragraph of this resolution can in any way be reconciled with the views that the minister for immigration has now put forward.

In those views that the minister for immigration has put forward, he has connected issues of race, ethnicity and religion with crime. This part of the language is not new. Back when we had a debate in the 1980s about whether Asian immigration should be held back, the language at the time was about triad gangs, Asian gangs and gangs in Cabramatta. In the sixties and seventies, when people were arguing about whether or not Italian immigration was appropriate, the language then was about the links to the Mafia and about crime. I do not accept for one minute that the serious issues of national security that we are dealing with are an excuse to legitimise the racial profiling of a community based on its children and grandchildren.

I support this motion because I support its principles and the way they define our nation. I genuinely believe that there is a majority of members in the government who believe and support every clause of this motion. I have no doubt whatsoever that what has been put forward by the minister for immigration is damaging and no better than those arguments that were put forward 20 years ago opposing Asian immigration or those arguments that were put forward in the sixties and seventies opposing migration of Greeks and Italians.

I have no doubt that the comments from the minister for immigration will win him votes. I do not care! There has to be a time when we are willing to provide a level of leadership to bring a country together. I expect the comments from the minister for immigration will not result in any change of immigration policy. He will hint at it and he will tempt at it, but I suspect the policy will not in fact change. I suspect also that it will not add a single job to Australia nor a dollar to our GDP. But I know some things that it will do. It will make the work of our security agencies harder. It will cause people to feel marginalised when we want them to feel 100 per cent part of our community. It will cause some people, a small minority, to have a sense of licence and permission to belittle and abuse some of their fellow citizens, and that has already commenced.

There are two sorts of Australian stories: an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander story that goes all the way back to the first sunrise, and a story of immigration. Every Australian either has one or both of those stories. Modern Australia is about bringing those 24 million stories together. That is what it is. Part of the role of the minister for immigration is making sure that we are as cohesive as possible in making sure that people who might feel marginalised in fact feel every word that is in our citizenship oath.

I do not want there to be partisanship in a motion like this. The reason it was brought forward was that we believed at the time that we would have a unanimous statement from the parliament that would ostracise some of the voices that have come into the other place and make clear that, while they have been given a really loud microphone, they do not represent the majority of this parliament, they do not represent the story of bipartisan support for modern, multicultural Australia.

I want it to be true. The Prime Minister backed the general work of the Minister for Immigration but he did not back those particular words. While ministers for immigration have at different times dealt with challenges in immigration policies and settlement policies for different communities in Australia, you have to go all the way back to the days of the White Australia policy to find a minister for immigration referring to communities that should be excluded based on race or religion. You have to go that far back.

We should not underestimate the choices that are being made by this parliament right now. While we might be concerned at the extent to which some racist voices have been handed a big megaphone, there is no megaphone louder in this country than the voice of the parliament itself—and it is at its loudest when we stand together. You cannot equivocate on this stuff: you either support and believe in modern multicultural Australia or you do not—and I have no doubt that the vast majority in this House and the other place do. I implore the Minister for Immigration not to go down the path he has started to step down. There is a way through for him to simply talk about settlement policies, about integration policies, about bringing people into the centre and not link it back to whether a mistake was made by letting people in the door at all based on their race or religion. There is a way forward and I want him to take it. We will define what sort of country we are, and no country has ever grown to prosperity by excluding a minority.

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