Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank you for your protection, Deputy Speaker. I do not often get it and I do not probably deserve it. I do not mind debating the government minister. I will take all his interjections into the Hansard. But this bill has serious problems with it, and those opposite know it's got serious problems. The government funds English language training—if we want to talk about that—to high school level, to conversational level, but they are asking people to meet a university-level test that, frankly, a lot of people would struggle with. I could think of a few members from other states who may struggle with it rather badly. Some of them would really struggle with it. So why are we making people who come here from Afghanistan or from Sudan or from the Congo or any of these other places, who desperately just want to start a new life, who want to become Australians and who, in a very short time, will become part of the national fabric? The daughter of one of the Afghan leaders in my community is a chemical engineer. From Afghanistan they came, she's a chemical engineer and she married an Irishman. This is a good story. Our country is a strong nation because of this experience yet those opposite are messing with it.

You can go and have a look at shadow minister Burke's speech to find all of the technical problems and all the reasons why we are opposing it and all the reasons why there should be a Senate inquiry. But the best thing would be for the government to withdraw it, to sit down with the community and with the opposition and start again. That would be a greater act of statesmanship than the sorts of interjections, platitudes and history lessons we get from the other side. It is tremendously important that this bill is resisted. The national character of our nation, which the Calwell and the Chifley governments gave birth to, but was supported and implemented in large part by the Menzies government, should be continued in the same spirit and faith in which it was begun.

Debate interrupted.

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