Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the representative of the most multicultural electorate in Australia, I have been alarmed by the comments made by a number of our nation’s leaders in recent weeks. We have seen the Prime Minister and the Treasurer engaged in what can only be seen as an appeal to the most bigoted and intolerant of our citizens. They have expressed views which are not only hurtful to many of my constituents but also harmful to our unity as a nation. On 1 September, the Prime Minister told an audience on Sydney radio 2GB:

… what I want to do is to reinforce the need for everybody who comes to this country to fully integrate and fully integrating means accepting Australian values, it means learning as rapidly as you can the English language …

He went on to say:

I understand that and I think there is a section, a small section of the Islamic population, and I say a small section and I’ve said this before, which is very resistant to integration.

The Prime Minister’s comments were echoed by the Treasurer in an interview with Laurie Oakes last Sunday when the Treasurer said:

The Prime Minister has a point that migrants who come to Australia are expected to speak English and to endorse basic Australian values …

There are some Australians who might agree with those comments but, in areas like my electorate of Fowler, they are seen with disgust and alarm. On the day of the Prime Minister’s comments, I spoke with one young man of Italian origin who expressed his concern for his 80-year-old grandmother. She came to Australia more than 50 years ago and worked on the family farm. She laboured hard for most her life and provided a bright future for her children and for her grandchildren. But, because she did not mix with many English speakers, she never mastered the English language. That young man felt it was a slur on his grandmother to suggest that, in spite of her contribution to the building of our nation, she was somehow less of an Australian because of her lack of English language skills. The comments of my constituent were shared by Ms Hage-Ali in an article in the Australian. She said:

There’s a whole lot of other ethnic communities whose parents, whose grandparents don’t speak the English language, and it’s never a problem in the mainstream Australian community for them to go on living their everyday life without speaking the language.

She went on to say:

Yet as soon as it’s a person of a Arab descent or a Muslim person ... politicians feel like they need to bring it to mainstream attention as the only group, like marginalising us even more then we already feel marginalised today.

The appeal from the Prime Minister’s Muslim reference group is that society must be more inclusive in order to keep young Muslims away from radicalism. Its report to the government is expected to call for a more inclusive Australian society so that rigid thinking and possible involvement in terrorism will be less attractive to those at risk. But it is clear that statements by the Prime Minister, the Treasurer, the Attorney-General and government members like the member for Mackellar and the member for Hughes are not designed to make Australian society more inclusive of our Arab and Muslim citizens. The Vegemite, Gallipoli and Bradman version of Australian values is neither inclusive nor realistic when it comes to the shared beliefs of our immigrant nation.

By questioning the loyalty of Muslim Australians, as the Treasurer has done, or by singling out Arab and Muslim Australians, as the Prime Minister does, we are making it impossible to have an inclusive, multicultural nation based on worthwhile values of tolerance and respect for others. As this government has also destroyed adult migrant English and literacy programs, one can hardly complain about people not having English language skills. Clearly this government’s agenda is to divide our nation—to set one Australian against another. That is downright un-Australian.