Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Innovation, Technology and the Future of Work) Share this | Hansard source

I think perhaps more than at any other point in my life I'm so incredibly grateful to be living here in Australia. We have a lot of issues in our country—I don't pretend anything otherwise—but our democracy is largely peaceful. Our government works; we have actually seen that very evidently in the last couple of months. Our elections are fair and democratic. Most importantly, I think our country is capable of being proud of what we have and what we are, but also capable of talking about the areas where we need to make improvements. That is the quality of the very best democracies and the very best countries around the world.

The motion today is about racism, and I want to be really direct. We are most peaceful and successful multicultural country in the world, and I couldn't be more proud of that. I'm so lucky to represent a community and an electorate which is more representative of that than most in the country, and it is absolutely thrilling. It is a huge part of the richness of life in Hotham that this is a community of people which have come together from 150 or so countries around the world, and we all benefit from that. The multiculturalism that we celebrate in this parliament and that we celebrate in my community is not about tropes, it's not about being able to go to a different restaurant each night and it's not about talking about dancing and traditional dress. It is the great richness and the great beauty of living in a community where everyone is different. We learn from each other and we grow from that. We grow from that exposure to people having different points of view about things. I'm lucky also in my electorate to represent the largest university in the country, Monash University, and that's a community that is highly engaged with students from every country around the world. We have a vast number of international students living in my electorate, so I want to say something about the experience that they're having too.

Australia is a welcoming and safe place. I truly believe that. But I also truly believe that there has been a clear connection to rises in racism against Asian Australians during the COVID-19 period. It's absolutely clear when you look at the evidence and the reporting on this subject. If we want to be honest and true about how proud we are to live in this multicultural country, we need to be honest and true when we're not living up to Australian values. Australians of Asian background have been abused, they've been assaulted, they've been spat on, they've been targeted with racist graffiti. The ABC recently asked residents to share some of the experiences they've had during this COVID period, and the response they had was pretty overwhelming. They talked to people who were too frightened to go shopping and too frightened to walk around the block in their own neighbourhood. That's not Australia living up to its potential.

I get to engage a lot with leaders in the Chinese-Australian community, and I had a really good roundtable with them over Zoom, as we've all shifted our activities in recent months. I just want to share with the parliament a couple of the things that came out of that discussion. The first thing is that the primary concern of the Chinese-Australian leaders on that call was what they can do to contribute to what's going on in our country at the moment. Anything that they can do, they are striving to do, not because they feel guilty or embarrassed but because they're Australian and they want to make a contribution to their country. The second thing was the enormous hurt that many of them are facing when they're exposed to this type of conduct. I say that because some of the people on this phone call, some of whom have been subject to racist abuse themselves, have been living in Australia for 30 or 40 years. They've made their entire career here and raised their family here. Then to have an incident like this happen that makes them feel on the outer—it's incredible how much of a betrayal that is to them. It's important that we speak for them. We've heard of young people who've been badly affected. We see, particularly in the Chinese-Australian community, young people being teased at school and the like about these sorts of incidents.

How can we help? I think by acknowledging the reality. Racism does exist, and it's not in concert with the Australian values that we like to celebrate in this parliament. We need to be clear that we condemn it and we need to speak out against it when we see it. We want the government to tackle this head-on and to address it in a systematic way. Part of that is actually measuring and tracking how much this is happening, because one of the things this has shown is that we actually don't have a handle on that. Racism's not okay. It's never okay. I stand with my Chinese-Australian residents so say we're here for you and we want to defend you.

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