Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Back in the year 2000, I left Australia on a plane and went to Montreal. I joined about 40 other people from the creative sectors to plan how we might lobby UNESCO to develop an instrument that protected cultural diversity. That instrument eventually came into play, but we did that and we worked on that because we, as creative industries, understood the value of thousands of years of human endeavour, of asking the big questions of life, of living your life and of living together and interacting, and the importance to the world of the language and the culture that grew out of those experiences. When you lose one, you lose something which can never be replaced. In recent years there have been times where the world has lost a language every 14 days. It really is that common that we lose languages.

I was delighted a few years later, as a member of parliament, to meet the Ekushe Academy, meaning 21 in Bangla, which was celebrating International Mother Language Day on 21 February every year. Can I acknowledge in the House today Nirmal Paul and other delegates from Mother Languages Conservation Movement International who have come to Canberra today to hear this motion put to the House by the member for Kingsford Smith and who have worked so hard to promote this incredibly important concept throughout Australia. I worked with them for quite a few years in the early days of the book fairs, when we were first trying to get a monument up in Ashfield, and they have been remarkable in their commitment to the promotion of mother languages.

International Mother Language Day was established in 2000. It's now a source of inspiration for people all around the world to establish their rights of language and culture. The date, 21 February, corresponds to the day in 1952 when students from three different universities were protesting for the recognition of Bangla as one of the two national languages of East Pakistan, essentially protesting for the survival and strength of their language. During the demonstration, four young students were shot dead by police near the Dhaka High Court in the capital of present-day Bangladesh.

There is no doubt that we are richer as a nation for the diverse range of people who call Australia home but carry in their hearts the language of another land. International Mother Language Day is a fantastic opportunity for all of us to celebrate that diversity and the riches that it brings to us as a nation. Language is incredibly special. For those of us who speak only one language, like me, we can miss the complexity of our language, because we don't look at it from the perspective of another. I have people in my community who tell me, at the ages of 17 and 18, that there are things they can say in their mother's language that they can't say in English and there are things they can say in English that they can't say in their parents' language. It means they have a capacity to hold a concept in their hands through language that those of us who are monolingual do not have. It's an incredibly special gift that people who preserve and grow the language of their grandparents in this community bring to this country. I can't imagine not being able to speak the same language as my grandson, who's now three, yet I know people, particularly from the Greek and Italian communities, who didn't teach their children enough of their first language, so we have grandparents who can't speak the same language as their grandchildren. That's a tragedy that we must never let happen again in this country.

The concepts that we miss out on when we don't speak another language are worth commenting on as well. I am going to speak about Bangla here for a moment, because my friends in the Bangla community who talk about that time of fighting talk about some of the great oratory, some of the great speeches of the time, one in particular by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman on 7 March 1971, which they tell me was one of the greatest speeches of all time—and one that I'm never really going to grasp, because I will only ever hear it in English. It was made at the Ramna Race Course Maidan in Dhaka to a gathering of over two million people during a period of increasing tension between East Pakistan and the powerful military establishment of West Pakistan. During the speech, he said this:

Our struggle, this time, is a struggle for our freedom, our struggle, this time, is a struggle for our independence. Joy Bangla.

It was in fact a struggle for a people who sought to be who they were, who sought to keep their culture and their language alive so that they could be truly who they are. We now have them in Australia and they're now part of us as well. Happy International Mother Language Day to my Bangla community.

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