Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Citizenship Legislation Amendment (Strengthening the Requirements for Australian Citizenship and Other Measures) Bill 2017 and to support the proposed amendments put forward by the shadow minister for multicultural affairs, Mr Burke. In so doing, I will make a number of observations to commence with. Since the initial invasion of this country by Europeans, we have been a country of migrants. Apart from the original inhabitants of this place, our First Australians, all of us have come here as a migrant in one form or another. In my own case, some of my antecedents come as convicts, some as free settlers. They were migrants from England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany. That's where they came from. We have had periods of migration, as we well know. The Chinese migration in the late 19th century was particularly important in developing northern Australia.

Then, for whatever reason, this country became entrenched in the view the only reasonable people in the world were whites. So we had the discriminatory migration acts and we had discrimination against anyone who wasn't, effectively, Anglo-Saxon. We discriminated against Aboriginal people in the Constitution, as we know. Nevertheless, we still had this wave of people coming here, and in the post Second World War period, of course, we had people who weren't Anglo-Saxon. We had a large number of people from southern Europe. As a child of the fifties and sixties, I well recall that in the primary school that I went to—just a little Catholic school here in Narrabundah, here in Canberra—many of our kids were from migrant families. Some of them, as others have spoken about, came here to work on the great Snowy River, on the Snowy Mountains project—a great project. Some came as refugees from Hungary. We know that today there was a state funeral for one of those great Australians, who had changed his name to Les Murray.

As a result of looking at this legislation, it's become very clear that, with many of those people on whose shoulders we built our country after the Second World War, had they been asked to pass the tests which are being asked for in this legislation—the English test—many of them would have failed. They wouldn't have been allowed into this country and they wouldn't have been able to become Australian citizens, because of their lack of capacity in the English language. We take great pride in that period of our heritage. We see it as important that we recognise the role of those great post Second World War migrants. We see it as important that in the late seventies we became the home to many refugees who became migrants and became Australian citizens, from South-East Asia and particularly Vietnam. It is important. But, under the rules put in place as a result of this legislation, they would not have been able to become Australian citizens, because of lack of capacity in English. Why is it we're saying that because people—who may be otherwise competent and have great capacity to do the work which they've come here to do it—don't have level 6 English or equivalent, we don't see them as being worthy of citizenship? That to me is dog-whistle politics at its worst.

There's absolutely no reason at all that people from non-English-speaking backgrounds should not be able to come to this country. Obviously they need to acquire functional English to be able to communicate, to work with people in our community. That's readily understood. And we know that there are people who have come here as migrants who have taken some years—in fact, lifetimes—to become proficient in English. There are some migrant mums who came here in the fifties, sixties or seventies and today are still not functional in English. They rely on someone else to interpret for them. Yet they are still worthwhile members of our community, and they and their families have made a significant contribution to this great nation of ours and to fulfilling that great aspiration of ours to be recognised as a multicultural country that welcomes people of all backgrounds.

So sadly, this legislation takes us in a different direction. I'm now going to refer to a bills digest prepared by the Parliamentary Library. It refers to item 41 of the legislation amending the requirement to provide that a person must have competent English. The minister may make a legislative instrument determining both the circumstances in which the person is competent in English and a means by which this may be established. This reverses an earlier easing of the English-language proficiency requirement introduced in 1984, when the requirement was reduced to 'an adequate basis'. It comes down to what is adequate and what is competent. It's very clear under this legislation, and as a result of what Minister Dutton himself has said, that there's been a significant change in relation to the English language requirement. He talks about increasing the IELTS level 6 equivalent to 'at a competent English proficiency level' and said he thinks there would be widespread support for this as well. Well, there's not widespread support for this as well, because it's clearly discriminatory.

The increase from basic competent English is not made along a consistent scale, the bills digest tells us. Basic English is satisfied by successfully completing the citizenship test. That should be enough. Competent English would be satisfied by completing a formal English language test to a specified level. And the level they have proposed is this level 6. Minister Dutton extended this argument in his second reading speech when he said:

English language is essential for economic participation and social cohesion. The Productivity Commission in 2016 highlighted the importance of English language proficiency for integration and settlement outcomes. There is also strong public support to ensure aspiring citizens are fully able to participate in Australian life, by speaking English, our national language.

No-one denies the need to have some proficiency in English. But what we're being asked to do here is accept the proposition that the new English test for people wanting to become Australian citizens should be at a university level. The bizarreness of that proposition should be obvious to all of us. Why is it that someone who seeks to come to this country, to be a member of our society, should have an equivalent of university-level English, when this has not been the case in the past and when, as I said earlier, previous waves of migrants haven't had to confront this absurdity? It wasn't the case in the period after the Second World War. It certainly wasn't the case in the seventies. Yet now we're being asked to believe that this is an example where we need to do this because of societal cohesion. What nonsense. What absolute nonsense.

The Parliamentary Library has done us a great service by providing in the briefing documents a table that shows the mean IELTS scores for people from a number of different language backgrounds: English, Chinese, Italian, Arabic and Vietnamese. The table states that the scores do not show Australian test results and that it's important to note that approximately 80 per cent of IELTS tests relate to education admission. However, the results imply that a requirement of level 6 will likely have a considerable effect on aspiring citizens from non-English-speaking countries. In particular, the scores for the written component demonstrate that this could be a barrier to citizenship conferral for people who are Chinese speakers, Italian speakers, Arabic speakers and Vietnamese speakers. According to the work that has been done by the Parliamentary Library, all of the people from these countries would find it difficult to pass the written literacy test that is being proposed by the government. How is that fair or reasonable? I ask the Prime Minister why he sees it as being so important that migrants be asked to complete the equivalent of university-level English to come to this country.

With regard to international comparisons, our requirements are far in excess of those of anywhere else in the world. In looking at other national governments that require the equivalent to an IELTS score, we see that Europe requires an IELTS of between 4 and 5, the Netherlands and Spain require an IELTS of approximately 3 and Canada requires an IELTS of 4. Yet we are asking potential Australian citizens to pass this test at IELTS 6. It's not appropriate, it's not fair and it's not reasonable. As one observer has said, it is very likely that we have the most stringent language testing for citizenship in the world.

I'm aware that we have some guests that we need to accord to, but I will just finish my contribution by saying this: it is not reasonable for us to introduce changes to this citizenship legislation which are divisive and discriminatory and which take us back to those dark old days of White Australia. It is simply not reasonable and it should not be done.

Debate adjourned.

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