Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There has been a lot of self-congratulation in this building today. Yesterday, the Leader of the Opposition showed the leadership that this country desperately needed by moving a motion to re-affirm the parliament's commitment to a racially and religiously non-discriminatory immigration policy. It mirrored a motion moved in 1988—by the Prime Minister, on that occasion—to put back in its box a similar attempt to reinsert racial criteria into our immigration system, a motion designed to stop Australia setting a course back to an ugly part of our history. It was a past in which, in 1902, one of the first two people to fail the dictation test—there were two Indian men who failed, both of whom were fellow British subjects and soldiers in the Imperial Army, fighting in common cause with Australian servicemen—and be denied entry to our country under the White Australia policy was 'roped and dragged' back onto his ship by Australian officials. It was a past in which in 1970, under the Gorton government, Jan Allen, a British citizen who happened to be black, was denied assisted passage to Australia—under the same scheme that had brought prime ministers Gillard and Abbott's families to Australia—because of the colour of his skin. My ancestors helped shape this ugly part of our history. They were members of the anti-Chinese committees in the pre-Federation colonial parliaments. But my family—my wife and my children—are only here today because Australia saw the light and embraced a multiracial, multicultural future for our country.

When the parliament debated this motion in 1988 it was debating my family—newly arrived migrants from Asia—and whether they could be a part of our nation, whether they could be Australian. Today, as the Scanlon Foundation has tracked for over a decade now, 85 per cent of Australians support our uniquely successful multicultural society and only 13 per cent of Australians believe that where someone was born is very important to whether they are truly Australian. To reclaim a phrase, Australians are relaxed and comfortable about multiculturalism. Those MPs who opposed that motion in 1998 were wrong then, and any MPs in our parliament today who oppose it today are wrong now.

Yesterday morning's debate was all well and good, and I thank the Leader of the Opposition and those who spoke—and those MPs who turned up—for signalling that a line was crossed this week. I want particularly to pay tribute to the contributions of the members for Chifley and Cowan for the incredible grace that they showed and for their patriotism and obvious desire for our country to succeed in the face of this challenge. But yesterday's debate should not absolve us from asking why we ended up here and where we should go after it. As our outgoing Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, warned last week: 2018 is the year that race based politics returned to the mainstream political debate in Australia. In 2018, 30 years after Bob Hawke introduced his motion into our parliament, we have seen a former Country Liberal Party Chief Minister smiling and posing with a neo-Nazi for a photograph before hosting him on his television show, a former coalition Prime Minister calling for an immigration policy seemingly intended to discriminate against black African migrants to our country and a former coalition Deputy Prime Minister writing a book filled with references to 'poor whites in regional Australia being marginalised in our political debate'. And all this is occurring against a backdrop of conservative media outlets that have turned into clown cars from which a seemingly never-ending procession of washed-up US white nationalists and racist kooks are climbing out and onto the main stage of the Australian political debate. Something has gone terribly wrong in right-wing politics in this country. At this point the return of raced based politics in this country is the greatest legacy of this Prime Minister's time in office. The leadership void he has created at the heart of our government has been filled by extremists who want to sabotage and destroy Australia's multicultural success story.

So I ask members of this House to avoid feeling a warm inner glow from the media coverage of yesterday's debate. Instead, focus on the leadership challenge ahead. As Tim Soutphommasane said this morning:

If there is now political unity against racism let's start seeing that unity and leadership everyday. No more racial hysteria about "African gangs". No more false alarms about multicultural "separatism". No more assaults on racial equality and the Racial Discrimination Act.

If members could show solidarity in the name of racial equality during yesterday's debate, let us show solidarity in the future by holding ourselves to this standard. The way you take on nonentities like the senator who gave his first speech on Tuesday is not to embrace their world view but to offer a genuine alternative. Stop talking down Australian multiculturalism in the hope of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stop increasing hurdles to migrants' achieving equality in our society and our democracy by lengthening the path to citizenship. The future of the successful multicultural nation that the Prime Minister rightly brags of is at stake. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.

Federation Chamber adjourned at 12:0 4

See this speech in context