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

Thank you to the member for Bruce. In fact, I'm going to take this opportunity to have a second bite at the cherry, as they say, having spoken when we tabled this report last week, and my intention was to talk about some of the recommendations—those 14 recommendations that members of the committee did find common ground on.

It's very important. I'm going to focus on the title of the report, No one teaches you how to become an Australian. As I said in the other chamber last week, this is a comment that was made by a young man, Gum Mamur, who works with the Les Twentyman Foundation in Victoria. Gum's story, I think, illustrates very much what the aspirations and focus of this inquiry were to begin with. They were to examine the current settlement services that we have in this country. It's always a good idea to audit our services and see whether they are appropriate, whether they are well targeted and whether they're actually meeting the needs of the people they are servicing. Within that, I will say and put on record that when the chair and I first spoke about this inquiry, I felt that some of the issues that the chair proposed to explore in relation to the South Sudanese gang activity in Victoria were matters that were better placed to be explored by, as my colleagues have already said, a committee such as the Joint Committee on Law Enforcement. However, I felt, and other committee members felt, that it was probably a good idea to review the settlement services but to also look at where they are found to be lacking in helping young migrants and young refugees—those who come here at a young age and, indeed, those who are born here from migrant or refugee families—because the experience of a young person as they work their way through the integration process in a country like Australia is very different to that of their parents. I know that for a fact, because in the sixties I was a young person who came to Australia—

An honourable member: Look how you turned out!

And look at me—look how I turned out! I went through that integration process. For young people a lot of that is about identity formation. It's about working out who they are and where they fit into a society that is very diverse. It is about how they manage and find some harmony between their home environment, their cultural inheritance, the expectations of their cultural inheritance and the traditions of their parents. It is about how they balance that in the playground when they go to school and how they work with that as they become adolescents in this country. Many of us felt that the settlement services were not really designed for that sort of work. There is a five-year period in which agencies, very adequately and very well, service new refugees and migrants more broadly.

When Gum Mamur came before the committee in one of our first hearings and said, 'No-one teaches you how to become an Australian,' that resonated with me profoundly, because I think he articulated exactly what a young person actually feels when they are out of kilter and cannot negotiate their way through the process of becoming an Australian. This is why we have called the report No one teaches you to become an Australian. I want to thank Les Twentyman for the incredible amount of work he does with young people who he virtually rescues from disengagement and alienation, and Gum was one of those people. Today he is a mentor for young children, especially from the various African countries. He works as a mentor in some of the local schools in Melton and elsewhere and does an amazing job helping young people develop a sense of pride and a sense of purpose. I want to thank Gum for that inspiration.

The recommendations are at the heart of what I believe this report is really about. I think the member for Blair spoke about our dissenting report, and I spoke about it last week, so I won't labour on that, because I'm very keen to look at some of the recommendations. Recommendation 1 states:

The Committee recommends that the Commonwealth provide additional funding to expand the Community Hubs Network nationally and to establish similar flexible settlement service programs.

I want to single out Dr Sonja Hood, who is the CEO of Community Hubs Australia. I have 14 community hubs in my electorate. They do an enormous amount of work with newly-arrived communities. In particular, I want to speak about the community hubs at St Dominic's in Broadmeadows and the Good Samaritan Primary School in Roxburgh Park. They are receiving a large number of the refugees that have come to Australia from Iraq and Syria over the last couple of years. I have a very close working relationship, especially with Good Samaritan. I want to thank the principal, Paul Sedunary, the vice-principle, Helen Smith, and Baan Sharmu, who is the liaison officer between the school and the community, for allowing the committee to conduct one of its hearings at the school. I want to thank them because the work they do is above and beyond that of teaching the children. School is the place where parents who have come to Australia take their children, and school is almost at the coalface of helping those families orient themselves into the community. All of the difficulties associated with that, in many ways, are first expressed and first discovered at that school level. So the Community Hubs Network is very important and it provides a very good service to the broader settlement services network. I'm hoping that the government will adopt these recommendations, especially in relation to the Community Hubs Network.

The second recommendation talks about developing a neighbourhood migrant mothers outreach program to service the most recently arrived families. The committee's trip overseas saw us go to the United Kingdom, to Sweden, to Germany and to the United States, and we saw this program implemented in Germany. They call it the district mothers program. Basically, they have trained and employed women, who are mothers with children, from the communities that they are receiving their refugees from. Those women actually go into the homes of the newly arrived, and the idea is that they are better placed to connect with the mothers in those families. They help them through and give them the confidence that they need to engage with the services in the broader community. I am particularly interested in this program, because I can see how it would work in my electorate, in amongst the women with their capacity to reach out to other women in their own language, understanding their culture. They would be able to assist them in those very critical first months and years of being in Australia.

The other area that the inquiry looked at was making the delivery of settlement services a lot more flexible. In particular, I have heard from the many refugees that have come into my electorate that the type of English language that is being delivered to them is aimed at assisting them to find employment; however, it doesn't necessarily assist them in learning conversational English so that they can actually engage with their community. So improvements to, and flexibility around the delivery of, the English language program are vital, because everyone knows that the key to engaging with your new community is to be able to communicate with it. The teaching of the English language has been one of the greatest strengths in our settlement program. The member for Bruce is absolutely correct: multiculturalism and migration in this country are not a success just by chance; they are a success because they have been underpinned by incredibly well targeted settlement services.

I have run out of time. I recommend this report to the House, and I encourage the government to adopt recommendations 1 to 14 in particular.

Debate adjourned.

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