Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Border Protection) Share this | Hansard source

I join with the fine speeches of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and support very strongly and without hesitation the motion that's before the House. We condemn racism, whether it's within this place or outside of this place or anywhere around our country. All of us unite together to fight against the scourge of racism. We always have and we always will.

I've had a number of proud moments as the immigration minister and as the home affairs minister over the course of my time in this portfolio. One of the proudest was only a couple of months ago when I met again with the Sora family in Broadmeadows in Victoria. They were an Iraqi family. There was a mum and dad and two boys and a young daughter who had been born only a few months previously. It was an emotional catch-up, because I'd issued their travel documents to them in Oman 12 months earlier, and they were among 12,000 people from Syria and from Iraq whom we facilitated to travel to our country, to call Australia home—not to be ashamed of their heritage, not to ever forget their heritage, but to celebrate their heritage and to be a part of the Australian community, I hope forever. Their stories are replicated in the hundreds of thousands over the course of our very proud history.

There have been periods alluded to by the Prime Minister and by the Leader of the Opposition on which neither party would look back with great pride, but there are many on which we would. And there have been many moments when both parties have stood up at a time when they've needed to stand up, and it's been to the betterment of this country and has resulted in one of the greatest countries in the world, which we are very honoured to represent in this chamber. We say that because people have come from four corners of the earth. There are good and bad people who come from every race, every religion, every country, every part of the world, and we celebrate the good in our country. We make sure that we continue to be united by the values that have stood us through war, through peacetime, in drought and in other natural disasters. Those values will always be adhered to by us and by our successors, and we owe it to those people who have gone before us to make sure that we condemn that racism, as I mentioned.

Senator Anning's comments have been properly condemned, and in a number of ways they have been touched on today—particularly, in my mind, with a focus on their impact and the comments that would be deeply offensive to the Jewish community and to many people within the Islamic community within this country. It is inconceivable that reference to the 'final solution' could have any other meaning, any other intention, and it should be condemned. I was at home the other night watching late-night television before I went to bed and flicked on to Schindler's List. Watching that movie would bring a tear to any person's eye, and I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen it. The horror that people went through during that period—part of the reason we stand up for the values that we do today is that we will never see that horror revisited, and it is important that we make strong statements to that effect today.

I was interviewed recently about a Chinese family in my area who had gone on, having come here originally in the 1860s, to be a part of the Australian community for a long period of time. They created significant wealth. I worked in a butcher's shop that was a tenant within a shopping centre that they owned. During the interview I was asked about racism in Brisbane towards Chinese families when I was a kid growing up in the seventies. I am a proud Queenslander, but I'll be the first here to admit that Queensland doesn't have the multicultural past of a Melbourne or of a Sydney. Nonetheless, jumping a fence to share a Chinese meal with our neighbours was never influenced or coloured by any sense of racist suggestion or belief or view within our community. It was accepted that they were, like my family, a hardworking, middle-class family. Their kids went to our school, and it influenced me, as it did many people in this chamber, who had their own experience, and it does in electorates right across our country.

We celebrate all those stories—going into shopping centres today, into a 7-Eleven, where you might have somebody from a Middle Eastern background or an Indian Australian working in a shop. They are tomorrow's millionaires. These are people who are entrepreneurial, who share our values, people who are prepared to work the night shifts, prepared to work on the weekends, prepared to sacrifice, prepared to go without the luxuries that many of us would enjoy in order to provide an education for their children. That is the celebration of this great nation, and it has been for generations. We will always make sure that we protect and defend that story and that message, because it is what has served us, as I say, in good times and in bad.

It is a time for all Australians to recognise that we have a special responsibility. Part of the reason, I believe, that the government had strong support for last year bringing in more migrants to this country from offshore than at any time in three decades is because of the fact that we've been able to control our borders. There are aspects that are controversial and some aspects that are bipartisan. As people on both sides of this chamber know, you need to make tough decisions in this portfolio. But the reality is, you make decisions which result in providing the confidence that the Australian people can have in us continuing a strong migration program. There are people being rescued and people going to the bottom of the ocean in the Mediterranean as we speak, and we don't want that in our country. Some of the migrants who are the strongest supporters of Operation Sovereign Borders or of our migration program in this country are those people who have migrated most recently and want to see people come in an orderly, safe way to enjoy what Australia has to offer.

We wouldn't be able to bring the 12,000 Syrians—or the Sora family, who I met in Jordan—if we didn't have, in my judgement, an orderly migration program. We must continue to make sure that we say 'no' to people—regardless of their race or religion—who have come here to seek to represent values that are inconsistent with those I've just detailed. We should never apologise for that. We need to make sure that we keep our country safe. There are plenty of threats from pockets of our community, from people who would seek to distort the Islamic religion and from people who would seek to otherwise cause harm for their own twisted ideologies. They must be called out for what they are, but they don't represent the majority in any community. It's blatant. To people who say to me, 'we should stop Muslim migration', or, 'we should stop people coming into our country', I say all the time that, intellectually, it is incompatible to have a migration program where we say that every person from a particular race or religion is bad or good. As I said before, the vast majority of people who come from many communities are good people who deserve to live in our community and will make a wonderful future. Those that don't, don't belong in our country. We are very clear about that, and the government's position won't change.

Today we celebrate what is great about our country. We turn it into an opportunity to talk about the success not just of the Chinese migrants growing up in my community in the seventies but also of those people who have been here for generations before that. Regardless of their path or their means to our country, people have made a wonderful contribution. We owe them a lot for what they have contributed. We work with them shoulder to shoulder to protect our values and to protect our future. Today we call out that which is wrong, that Senator Anning has detailed as his view in the Senate. We work together and we renew our efforts to make sure that this country remains as great as it has always been. I'm very pleased to join with the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the deputy leader and subsequent speakers on this very important topic.

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