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

I am very pleased to be speaking to this motion on equal rights for all Australians that was moved by the Leader of the Opposition and seconded by the Prime Minister. I want to start by saying that I was in your place, Mr Deputy Speaker, just before lunch listening to many of my colleagues speak to this motion. I particularly want to reflect on some of the comments that the member for Cowan made, clearly with a lot of emotion. She began her presentation by asking the rhetorical question: why in 2016 is it necessary that we talk about the preservation of rights and equality before the law for all Australians? I understood clearly where she was coming from. I might have asked myself that question too when I thought about speaking to this motion.

We should never take for granted the battles that we have won and the society that we have built here in Australia—a democratic society that has enshrined in law equality for all Australians regardless of their race, colour, creed or origin. We should never take for granted those hard-fought battles by generations of people before us and indeed members of parliament who were in the parliament before us. We should never take for granted that those battles have been won and we no longer need to concern ourselves about these inequalities. It is probably not a bad idea in 2016, some 20 years after the same motion was moved by Mr Howard when he was Prime Minister, to take stock and reflect on where our community is in relation to the laws of our land.

I want to reflect on a couple of things. I want to reflect on the fact that this country has been built by waves of migrants from all over the world, including me. We are often described as a modern multicultural and open society and a democratic country. There are currently some seven million Australians who were born overseas. There are lots of things that unite us, but the one thing that enshrines our rights almost in law is the Australian Citizenship Act and the fact that we become Australian citizens and as Australian citizens we enjoy the same privileges and have the same obligations.

We have a society that is based on some very strong institutions and laws that protect all of us. The Racial Discrimination Act was put in place over four decades or so ago. Laws passed by this parliament and other parliaments are aimed at ensuring everyone has equality and that we are all protected against things said by others that might be hurtful and offensive or that might degrade us. I understand that very much—and I understand where the member for Cowan was coming from—because I grew up in this country as a foreigner, I became an Australian citizen and now I am in the Australian parliament. I think I represent what the modern contemporary Australian is today, and I am very proud of that. Obviously I am very keen to ensure that nothing interferes with future generations or current generations of people who are working their way through the integration process here in Australia and are becoming Australians.

I have often said to those in particular who are critical of multiculturalism and who argue that it is a divisive thing and we should abandon it—we have sporadic outbreaks of those sorts of debates, and we are having one at the moment; we have had many before in the past, and we will overcome it in the same way that we have overcome it in the past—that multiculturalism for me and for many Australians is really underpinned by these laws. It is also a process by which people become Australians. So it is not a divisive policy; it is 4½ decades of government policy that has over the years enjoyed bipartisanship. There have been times, blips along the way, where there have been critics, but, by and large, there has been bipartisanship on this issue, and I think that that is what underpins the strength of our modern Australian multicultural society.

We have also, in that mix, pursued a non-discriminatory immigration policy. We do not select people on the basis of their race or their colour or their creed or their origin. We do not exclude them, and we do not select them on that basis. We have a non-discriminatory immigration policy.

If I look at the period when the White Australia policy was finally done away with, I see in my electorate in particular the great Turkish-speaking Australian community that was able to finally come to Australia on the abolition of the White Australia policy. I am sure that at the time there would have been people in my community who would have thought that this was not a good thing—that we would not have wanted Turkish migrants in this country, that they would not have been capable of integrating or that they would have been future problem makers. At the time I probably was a very young child, but I am sure that in my neighbourhood in Broadmeadows there were people who would not have wanted the Turks to come to Australia.

But when you reflect—and we are now nearing 50 years of Turkish migration in this country—it cannot be said that, with the abolition of the White Australia policy, which then allowed Turks and other non-Europeans or nonwhites to come to this country, there has been a detriment to the Australian community. On the contrary, my community have made a great contribution, and they are continuing to make a great contribution as Australians of Turkish descent and as Australians of the Muslim faith. So the idea that at some point in time we reflect and we say, 'We shouldn't have let those people in because there are some problems today,' really puzzles me and concerns me. I will come to that a little bit later.

The 17 per cent or so of my constituents who are of the Muslim faith do come also from Lebanon. I have many of them in my electorate who are actually very good Australian citizens and who are making, as I said, a very good contribution as Australians to this country.

In addition to that, I am also very pleased that we are to welcome a very large number of Iraqi Christians—in fact, the biggest number of Iraqi Christians to come to this country in Victoria are living in the federal seat of Calwell. They have come to live here under the refugee program. I have spent a lot of my time interacting with them in trying to assist them and teach them about the Australian community that they have come to live in. And, yes, many of them come here with preconceived ideas and views about people of the Muslim faith. I can understand that. They have come out of the Middle East. They still have family who are being persecuted.

But I have found that this is important to me as their federal member: rather than use that concern and fear that they have and stir my community, I realise it is absolutely critical that the leadership that I show in my local community is to ensure that I help them through a process of settling and integrating into Australia that helps them to have a positive experience. So I am very, very critical of anyone who chooses to hijack this debate and turn it into a political attack on other people. I am worried about the rise of a particular attitude in our Australian community and in this place because it has now found a political voice. I am very worried that succumbing to that attitude is going to be detrimental to the Australian community. The biggest threat to Australia's security or social cohesion is not where people are born; it is rather the racism that often finds expression in this country and the failure of leadership to reject it.

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