Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

Listening to the speakers on the other side of this House, you might be forgiven for thinking the Australian Citizenship Legislation Amendment (Strengthening the Requirements for Australian Citizenship and Other Measures) Bill 2017 is somehow about trying to uphold Australian values. But I tell you, when I look at my community, this bill doesn't meet my definition of Australian values. Look at this country of ours: we are one of the great multicultural nations of the world. When we federated in 1901, one in four of us were born overseas and 40 per cent of us had one parent born overseas. Now, in 2017, the proportion of people born overseas is slightly higher, at 28 per cent, but we have been a multicultural nation that has welcomed migrants since modern settlement. Everybody that has arrived in Australia since that time is a migrant or a child of a migrant.

We have been a country that has welcomed people. We've built our community. We've taken people in. We've brought people in from all around the world to help us build this great country, and we expected them to have full entitlements to enjoy the benefits of citizenship. When we did a deal with the Turkish government back in the late sixties and we brought a whole stack of Turkish migrants to Australia, the Turkish government said, 'No, we only want you to take them temporarily.' We said, 'No, that's not what we do in Australia.' We opened the doors to Turkish migration on a permanent basis in the late sixties. I have an extraordinary community in my electorate of Parramatta, in Western Sydney, that grew from the opening of those doors. That is who we are. We are not a country that asks people to come here temporarily, that brings low-paid workers in and doesn't give them the benefits of citizenship—yet. We are not that country yet. But if this bill passes, we will very quickly become that parliament.

For me, the words of the national anthem are worth repeating today:

For those who've come across the seas

We've boundless plains to share;

With courage let us all combine

To Advance Australia Fair.

Not with fear let us all combine, but with courage. You need to understand that people who choose to leave their country of birth and travel across the seas to build a life in another country are exhibiting extraordinary courage. They are making a choice that many of us wouldn't make, many of us wouldn't be game to make. They are actually transporting their lives to a new country and taking the risk that they can make that life work. And with this bill, this government is pulling the rug out from under so many people that came here in good faith, that made decisions about their lives, transplanted their families here in good faith and with an understanding of what the requirements were to become Australian citizens. However, with an announcement on 20 April, all of those plans came unstuck.

A little later, I will read out some of the circumstances that people find themselves in because of the government's plans to retrospectively apply this change, but I want to remind the House again that we are, in the OECD, a very rare country. We are No. 3 in terms of the number of people born overseas, beaten only by Luxembourg and Switzerland. And one might suspect that tax arrangements are one of the reasons why so many people who weren't born in those countries are technically residents there.

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