Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased today to speak on the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005. It has been my privilege since I have been in this parliament to be the Chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Migration and also the chair of the government members’ committee on migration, multicultural and Indigenous affairs, so I have a good deal of interest in this area of government policy.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

As I said, I am very pleased to speak on this citizenship bill because it gives me the opportunity to talk about Australian citizenship. Given my strong interest in migration, I certainly want to put a number of things on the record.

As we know, Australia is a country that has been built on migration—orderly migration. I go, as many members and senators do, to lots of citizenship ceremonies in my electorate. We hear many and varied stories of why people migrate to Australia and how they migrate to Australia and about all the nuances that come with migration. We hear many people wax lyrical at the beginning of their speeches about the first migrants to Australia, not forgetting, of course, the initial migration waves of Aboriginals many years ago. However, in the debate that has ensued in this country in recent times about people arriving by boat, it is always quite humorous at citizenship ceremonies to reflect on the fact that people who arrived by boat in the first instance were very unwilling participants as they arrived in convict ships et cetera.

However, since then Australia’s migration has been built largely on orderly migration, but it was quite unregulated in the first instance. As we know, largely the big migration pulls to this country after the initial free settlement were due to gold rushes. We know that this happened in Victoria, in Ballarat and regions like that. Of course, in Kalgoorlie there were enormous ramifications to the population of the Western Australian state due to the migration to the goldfields, and it had a very large influence on the federation. Most Western Australians at the turn of the century did not want to be part of the rest of Australia. However, the goldfields miners—who in some respects outnumbered the rest of the population of Western Australia—were ‘t’othersiders’, as they were called. They had come from the eastern states, even though they were probably new migrants themselves, and saw great benefits in Australia being one nation and one country and they voted eventually, largely from the goldfields, for Australia to join the federation.

I digress to point out that there have been many migration waves to this country, as there have been many migration waves throughout the rest of the world. I was privileged to be in New York some years ago and visited Ellis Island, which is an absolute eye-opener when you realise that five million postwar migrants went through that transitional facility on Ellis Island and have built the America that we know today, largely on what you would generally call unregulated migration. The only real check that I saw as I went through the museum there was that, if you had palsy or very obvious body defects, they put you on a ship and sent you home. Other than that, if your teeth were sound and you looked pretty healthy, you were allowed in. Migrants then dispersed throughout the United States. So the world has been made up of migration flows all over the place.

However, Australia is seen as a prime destination for migration—and why not? Albeit that we have suffered extremes of flood, drought, fire and famine in our history, Australia is still the land of plenty and still the land of opportunity. There is an enormous number of people who wish to come and take the benefits of this country, as they do. They want a place to bring their families up. Australia is still an opportunity. As I said, when you go to the citizenship ceremonies in the local councils, you see people from places like Zimbabwe, where people, both black and white, are oppressed. They want to come to Australia because they see Australia as an opportunity of bringing their children up and giving them a way of life that you can rarely get in any other part of the world. You do not have to be rich; you do not have to be privileged; you just have to be motivated enough to work in this country, and there is a good chance you will make it if you do that.

On the basis of those few observations, I would like to mention that the purpose of this citizenship bill is to replace the Australian Citizenship Act 1948. The related bill puts into place the transitional and consequential amendments necessary for the introduction of this citizenship bill. The legislation does a number of things. In referring to the 1948 act, it needs to be pointed out that in 57 years this 1948 act has been amended 36 times. Some of them have been minor amendments and some have been quite major amendments. For example, there have been amendments about referring to husbands and wives, about requirements for residents who might be deemed aliens and about residency requirements in time parameters of two years for aliens. There have also been amendments about the fact that we deemed that, if you became an Australian citizen, you were not really a British citizen. We know that that is a hangover from our settlement as a British colony; the residency requirements were such that you ceased to be a British subject.

One of the more significant amendments in recent times concerned section 44 of the Constitution. On my first foray through this parliament in 1996, as the member for Swan, I was pleased to sit on the Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs. I was surprised to be on the committee given that I had no legal background, but the chair at that time, one Kevin Andrews, told me that it was probably a benefit not to have any preconceived legal ability. I found some of the inquiries quite interesting. One of the inquiries we did was into section 44 of the Constitution. We know that people in this country who had not renounced their citizenship were forbidden to do several things. One example concerned the member for Lindsay, Jackie Kelly. She had not renounced her New Zealand citizenship; as a result, she was required to go to another election, which she duly won—and we are very proud of the fact she did.

One of the amendments that came in in 2002 was that you could retain dual citizenship. Dual citizenship has been quite a benefit to many people because it allows you to retain the citizenship of the country of your origin as well as gaining Australian citizenship. This has not been popular with everyone. I have had people in my electorate say to me, ‘Look, you are either one thing or another.’ In recent times it caused a fair bit of public comment when the war in Lebanon revealed that 60,000-odd people who have Australian citizenship live in Lebanon. When the war between Hezbollah and Israel blew up in recent months, many Lebanese with Australian citizenship demanded that the Australian government remove them from Lebanon, which the government did to the best of its ability. I suppose one of the benefits of having dual citizenship is that you can go back and live in a country of your choice while still retaining all the benefits of Australian citizenship. As I said, it is a benefit to some, but it is an area of contention for others.

It does make it easier for many people. When I go to citizenship ceremonies, I find that there are many and varied reasons why people have decided to become Australian citizens. With some people, particularly refugees or asylum seekers who are seeking Australian citizenship, as soon as the two-year permanent residency requirement is up and they can apply for Australian citizenship, they do. With people of Asian or East Asian origin in particular, as soon as they qualify to be able to apply for Australian citizenship, quite often they do; they cherish the fact that they can become a citizen of this country.

However, on the other side of the coin, I personally get annoyed with people who decide that they do not ever want to become an Australian citizen. That is their choice. I do not criticise their choice, but from a personal point of view I would like to think that people who find Australia home and gain an economic benefit for themselves and their families might make a commitment.

As an aside, I was quite cross the other day when I was given a lift in a car to the airport. The lady who was driving me had retained her New Zealand citizenship; she said that she had no intention of ever becoming an Australian citizen because she did not see any benefit in it. I explained to her that I have had people come to my electorate office about this. In one case this involved a lady of New Zealand origin whose spouse had died. I explained that, unless she hurried up and became an Australian citizen, some entitlements—like pensions and the ability for people who might want to look after her to receive carer payments—might not flow to her. She duly went out and sought Australian citizenship.

So it is not just the fact that it is something nice to have; there are some benefits that come with it. People always snigger when they are told they cannot run for the Australian parliament unless they become a citizen of Australia, but that is the ultimate aspiration in many respects. Why not represent the people of the country in which you choose to live? I am very proud to be a member of this House, and I am sure that the people and their children who come here would be of a similar view.

This bill takes into account a number of things, and one of them is that people applying for Australian citizenship—not those who are already in the queue for permanent residency; they are quarantined or ‘grandfathered’, which is probably one of the better terms—will now have to wait for four years. I do not see a problem with that, because it gives a number of opportunities for people waiting in the queue. It gives them an opportunity to get their affairs in order.

In a four- to five-year period people come and go from the country, and they may stay overseas for long periods, up to 12 months, but we are saying now that in the last 12 months before you become an Australian citizen you cannot be out of the country for more than three months. I think this is only fair. To give an example as to why, I have been helping some people from the Ukraine to come to Australia. The wife is here with her two children, and that is fine, but the husband has found that it is easier to make money elsewhere in the world. As a result, he is finding it difficult to spend much time in Australia. You cannot have it both ways—you have to commit yourself to Australia, and that requires you to stay here for some time rather than just warehousing your family here. This is one of the things that this bill addresses. You cannot just warehouse your family in a safe haven like Australia and then decide that you are going to be an international businessman and not invest or spend any time in Australia. I think that requirement is very good.

The other requirement is that you have a proficient level of English. Some people see this as contentious; I do not. I will give you an example I was confronted with as a councillor for the city of Belmont. At a citizenship ceremony, the mayor was to confer citizenship on a lady, and he asked her to repeat the citizenship pledge. Firstly, she did not even know what the mayor was talking about; and, secondly, she could not even repeat it. The mayor was pretty determined not to give her citizenship, but the person from the Australian Electoral Office and other officers came up to him and said: ‘You can’t do that. You have to bestow citizenship on this lady whether she can speak English or not.’

That is confronting for many Australians, because a number of people came to Australia under the family reunion program. In fact, the previous government had a far greater focus on family reunion than does this government. But we know that our priorities are to bring a greater skills demographic to this country to enable a greater contribution. The family reunion system was rorted somewhat in that, if you bought somebody from an ageing demographic into the country, the chances of their speaking English was pretty remote and their chances of getting a job without any English were almost next to nothing.

The report of a recent inquiry into skilled migration by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration clearly pointed out that those who come to Australia without sufficient English proficiency were multiples of disadvantage behind those who speak English. Inasmuch as the Australian government provides somewhere around 500 hours of free tuition to learn English, many people do not take this up.

We can understand the refugee and humanitarian components. We bring something like 12,000 to 14,000 people to Australia under the refugee program. Many of them use the opportunity to learn English because they know how important it is to get a job, but for somebody who wishes to come to Australia, to make a contribution and to use the benefits of being an Australian citizen, having proficiency in English is something that I think is quite understandable. We are not saying that they have to arrive here speaking fluent English, but they must make an effort within that two-year period—now the four-year period—to learn English to demonstrate their bona fides and commitment to this country.

One of the other important aspects of this bill is that it strengthens the ability to secure personal identifiers. Very seldom do we deport anybody—and it is obviously very difficult to deport anybody who has gained Australian citizenship—but one of things that this bill does allow is some discretion with the fact that if people have gained citizenship by fraud—and I do not think anybody could question this—then the chance of you staying here should be reduced. I had a case of this recently through my electorate office where the person concerned, without giving any more details other than saying that they were of Indian origin, had actually borrowed the qualifications of a cousin to come to Australia under a certain subclass of visa. Borrowing the qualifications and then touting them as their own as a skilled migrant in order to stay here is obviously fraudulent and should not be tolerated. You are setting the agenda of the sort of person you are in that you came here by dishonest means and, if that is your modus operandi, who is to say you are not going to continue in that vein of life in trying to attract the rest of your family here on that basis? Personal identifiers are obviously something that we want to use to maintain and protect the integrity of the Australian citizenship process.

This bill explicitly provides that the minister must be satisfied of the applicant’s identity before an application can be approved. Personal identifiers—namely photographs and signatures—are already collected, stored and used. The new personal identifier division provides a legislative framework for the management of those identifiers which can be responded to for future decisions. Obviously technological developments are being used for proof of identity. One of the great things about the Australian migration system is its integrity. Unlike the British, for example, we know who comes into this country and when they leave. The Brits would give their right arm to be able to tell who comes and goes out of their country. They do not have the same strong database and the ability to check that Australia has, which has ramifications in places like Britain, France and many other European countries.

I will finish by saying that this citizenship bill addresses a number of anomalies that have been amended over a number of years. I maintain the fact that Australian citizenship is a privilege bestowed on those who want to make a better life for themselves and their families and should be enshrined and protected as we are doing today in the Main Committee.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005. We are speaking in the Main Committee under a false assumption. The opposition had agreed to the extension of the residential qualifying period from two to three years and, suddenly, at the last minute we have an extension from two to four years. The agreement to extend this period to three years was on the basis of security concerns originally brought to us in 2005 as the key component for this change and to have greater scrutiny and checks. We have had no reason offered as to why the three-year period has suddenly been extended to four years. The Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs have offered no evidence for the rationale. If there is a security rationale, perhaps it should be brought forward, but that has not been the case.

In Senate estimates last night, it was revealed that 117,208 people have been processed for citizenship using the old system since the government came to the ALP and said that, as a matter of security, we needed to increase the period from two to three years so there could be greater security checks and so that people could be excluded if they were deemed to be inappropriate. This was an agreement made not only by the opposition but also by COAG under a 10-point plan.

A year on, miraculously, those people have been allowed in. Obviously the security concern may have waned, but we have now gone from three to four years without a rationale except that we are now whipping up a frenzy. We are now going into election mode and we are finding the next dog whistle issue with which to lash out at the public to make them scared.

When I was running for parliament for the first time eight years ago, in 1998—taking from the Liberals a seat they held near and dear, which I have managed to hold on to for three terms—the term the government were using was that they were going ‘to govern for all of us’. This bill clearly indicates that they have given up that mantra and they do not want to govern for all of us. They just want to govern for a select few, for the few they deem worthy of becoming Australian citizens.

The other thing the Prime Minister was good at saying at that time was that he wanted us all to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’, that somehow under a Liberal government we would all be relaxed and comfortable, and then we progressed to being ‘alert but not alarmed’. Now we are all to be alarmed. We are all to be alarmist, we are all to be concerned and we are all to be fearful of the ‘other’—people who are not quite like us, who are somehow just a little different from us.

The latest hoo-ha has been over Sheikh Hilali’s comments, which I abhor and denounce. Somehow we did not abhor and denounce such comments when they were made by judges in our courts over rape trials. We did not abhor and denounce them as ‘other’. We said: ‘That’s just generational. Men of that generation see it like that.’ Now it is religious ideology to see it like that. Yes, those comments are abhorrent, but somehow we can wave them off with men, probably of the Prime Minister’s generation, by saying that that is generational. We did not abhor those comments. We did not demean the people who made them. When judges in courts were making the same sorts of comments about rape, we said, ‘Maybe they just need a bit of re-education.’ But things have progressed; things have changed. Instead, we now demonise and say that these people are ‘other’, that their religion is different, that it is not a faith, that it is not a belief and that it is not a system.

The only good faith and belief system nowadays is obviously Christianity! Coming from a Christian background, I find that really quite ridiculous. Nowadays I am told that the only true faith, the only faith which has a rationale and a moral basis is Christianity. Generally when I am sitting next to my Buddhist mayor or opposite my Hindu friend, I find it outrageous that people do not see that as demeaning to all these people who have come to our country, have embraced our country and have taken on the rights and responsibilities of our nation. I do not see how people cannot see through the rhetoric of all this and see how demeaning it is to those people and to those faiths that somehow the Sikhs in the temple down the road from me do not have values or morals. I find that really quite abhorrent, as do I find some of this bill abhorrent, although we will be supporting it in this place because it has beneficial parts that finally make up for some issues where people have been treated badly. I put on the record my reservation about the increase from two to four years.

I go to a lot of citizenship ceremonies within my electorate in the two municipalities of Monash and Whitehorse. They conduct fantastic ceremonies. They are always joyous occasions. In my electorate, anywhere between 30 and 36 per cent of the residents were born overseas. They come from a variety of backgrounds. We have traditional Greeks and Italians in fairly large numbers. We have a very large and growing Chinese community and Indochinese community who see themselves as Chinese but predominantly are from Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam. And we have a very large Sri Lankan community made up of two groups of Sri Lankans, which is always entertaining. This means I get to go to a lot of multicultural events, I get to eat a lot of good food and I get to do a lot of dancing, which is always fun. This is what has made our country great and vibrant.

So I was a little taken aback earlier this year, around Australia Day, when Peter Costello, the Treasurer, came out and slammed ‘mushy’ multiculturalism. He had a go at Johan Scheffer, one of our upper house state members. I read Johan’s speech and thought at the time that it sounded like 900 per cent of immigration speeches I have heard most people make. Why is the Treasurer suddenly finding this abhorrent? I am sure that if the Treasurer had turned up once or twice to the Boroondara citizenship ceremony prior to his comments on Australia Day he might have made similar comments to those of Johan Scheffer. I am damned sure that if we went through records we would find that he has.

To claim that current multiculturalism puts too much emphasis on telling migrants not to give up their culture rather than emphasising the Australian way of life is abhorrent. Every time I begin a citizenship ceremony speech I say, ‘Thank you for honouring us by becoming Australian citizens.’ What a thing to say to oneself: ‘I’m going to leave my country of birth. I’m going to travel to this foreign land, where I do not know anybody, where I do not know the language, where I do not know the culture, and I’m going to set up there and call it home. I am going to embrace and accept it so much that I’m going to become a citizen.’ I sit there thinking, ‘Could I leave my country of birth, go somewhere else and do that?’ The answer I always come up with is no. I think they are incredibly brave individuals.

At the end of a citizenship ceremony you give out your tree and you say, ‘Well done. Where have you come from? How long have you been here?’ The majority of new arrivals have been here for the two years. They are signing up, straightaway. They are not waiting. These people are from places like Afghanistan, Iran and the various Sudanese countries or they are Chinese people. When you ask people how long they have been here and they say, ‘Thirty-two years’—the best I had was 64—you will find they are Anglo-Saxons, predominantly from the UK. I said to one guy who had been here for 64 years, ‘Why now? Why after all this time?’ and he said, ‘Why not?’ They have not seen the urgency, because most of them can vote. Most of them have had all the rights conferred upon them because they were previously British citizens. It is our new arrivals who say: ‘Yes, this is my country. This is the country I am now adopting.’ Why are they all here? Universally it is the same answer: ‘A better life for our children.’

I recently held a skilled migrants forum. These were not people on 457 visas; they came in under the skilled migrant category because their qualifications are recognised and needed in this country. They came with up to $250,000 to demonstrate that they will be able to support themselves while here. The majority of these highly educated individuals, who have given up good lives in their country of birth to come here, predominantly to gain better opportunities for their children, have not been able to find work. In this land we are saying that we have a skills crisis and that we need people. We are embracing these people. So why can’t they find work?

The first reason given is, ‘You don’t have relevant experience.’ The accountants and the engineers in the room, who had all worked for global companies, say, ‘What is relevant experience? I’m applying again to work in a global company. The international accounting standards I have been using are used here.’ It gets down to inherent racism. A lot of these people are very dark. A lot of them are African. Their first language is English and, although they have an accent, it is not one that is difficult to understand. They put in their CVs. Half of these people have been to university in England and the US and have better qualifications than the people who are reviewing their CVs but who will not give them jobs. They struggle and end up downgrading their skills by taking lower jobs to get back into the sector.

The notion of ‘other’—that somehow we need to be wary of ‘other’—is whipping up anti-Muslim hysteria and sentiment. I concur with the comments of the former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser last night when he said that that is the card the Prime Minister is going to play at the next election: ‘We have had the asylum seeker issue, we have had the interest rate issue; now we have to find a scare campaign. Instead of going with decent policies to take us into the 22nd century, we are going to whip up hysteria. We are going to whip up the notion of other.’ I am surprised that in this debate the parliamentary secretary did not slide in that now we are going to have an English language test. That is coming. That will be the debate next year.

I go to a lot of these citizenship ceremonies as I say, and the majority of the people are struggling with English. A lot are not; a lot are proficient in English—it is their first language, even though they have come from fairly diverse backgrounds. But, if we are to encourage people to ensure that they have English when they take up their citizenship, surely we must be putting in the resources so they can actually do it. This government has in fact slashed money from English classes by $11 million. It has underfunded programs. It does not ensure that there are sufficient hours. It does not ensure that the classes are at flexible times and it does not provide child care.

A lot of people in my electorate would dearly love to go to the classes and be involved, but they cannot find adequate child care to go there. I have a four-year-old. He often comes into my office, and the work productivity of my office diminishes greatly, I can tell you. I do not know how a mum going to an English class with a child, or a lot of the grandparents who are here babysitting children, would actually learn anything in an English class if they are not provided with sufficient resources for child care. We find this over and over again.

The AMES in my area at Box Hill run a fantastic program. They run on an absolute shoestring and they provide classes that they are not even funded for, because a lot of volunteers give of their time graciously. If we want people to be proficient in English then we have to provide the resources so they can be.

The ALP first introduced English literacy classes way back when as an equity issue so that people would have greater access to work. My sister-in-law’s mother, who sadly left this world some time ago, lived and died in this country, raised her five children and worked here, and never spoke a word of English. Well, she had two or three words of English. I remember at my brother’s wedding, my nanna—who is of very old Irish background—said, ‘I can’t understand what she is saying.’ I said, ‘It’s not surprising; it’s all in Italian, Nanna.’ It is not really surprising. She lived, worked and raised her five children here, all in Italian, quite sufficiently, without any need of the English language because she went to a workplace where the lead hand could tell them everything. If they needed translation, one of her five girls did it.

That is not the best system to be involved in, but people manage. They still manage. In my electorate, as I say, I have a very large Chinese contingent. I go to many functions where I am dealing with individuals who have scant English, but they are still contributing valuably to this society. They are all struggling with English—they are all trying—but they are still contributing. There is somehow a false notion that you cannot get by without English. I think this is wrong, and generations of migrants have demonstrated it.

The other anomaly with this is the government saying, ‘We are eventually going to introduce this English language test to gain citizenship, but at the same time you can apply for a 457 visa to come here as a skilled migrant and there is no English requirement.’ Sorry? You can come here and work straightaway in a job and you do not have to have English but, at the same time, we are saying that, if you want to be a contributor to our society and become a citizen, you have to have English. Isn’t there just a little anomaly here? Isn’t there something fundamentally wrong?

Under the new bill, the period of residence qualification went from two to three years, but with the amendment at the last hour it has gone to four. We agreed to have this debate in the Main Committee because we were accepting of the three years, but somehow, under the radar, it has become four. And the rationale by the former speaker is that it is to allow residents a greater period of time to better understand Australian ways of life and values. I think, if you have determined you are going to come here, it is not about the period of time that you are here; it is the experience you have in this environment. Be it two years, be it three or be it four, it is what type of experience you have here. Most of these people do find a very good experience here. Some do not.

But what the government has not considered is what extending this period cuts people off from. It cuts people off from the ability to get a HECS place in university. It cuts people off from access to other services that they would be entitled to if they were a citizen. It cuts them off from the right to vote, the right to get an Australian passport, the right to serve on a jury, the right to enter the Public Service and the right to enter the armed forces. At a time when we are saying we need more people in the armed forces, we are going to make it more difficult. I do not understand the rationale behind it. I could understand if there were a genuine security concern and a need to have a greater check on individuals. Perhaps that is a good rationale, but I cannot see it.

One of the things that will be of concern is that this security check will look into convictions overseas. In my electorate of Chisholm I have a small Chilean community. Most of them have convictions from overseas under the previous regime of Pinochet. These people have now been recognised as heroes by the current government in Chile. They have actually been given a grant of money from this government. Would these people now be denied citizenship because they had a previous criminal record under a previous, harsh regime?

I have some Cambodians in my electorate and it is the same thing. Some of them have been held in detention. Whether it was legal or not is another thing of concern. So there are grey areas around that. Would someone now be told, ‘No, you did some time in jail’? ‘Well, I did because the dictator at the time didn’t like my political stance and they locked me up.’ Would that cut them off? This is a bit of a grey area and some of my constituents are concerned about it.

The other alarming fact is the bit of retrospectivity. People who are currently here and have been on permanent residency for two years will now have this waiting period extended. Who has gone out and advised them of that? I think this is fundamentally wrong and unfair. These are residents who have followed the rules as set out to them and who will now find, through no fault of their own, they will have to wait this extra period. Many permanent residents do put their plans on hold for things like getting married and for undergoing education. These will now be extended. There has been no great education campaign to ensure that these people will not be caught up in something that they do not know about and do not understand. When they go to lodge their citizenship forms they will discover that they somehow are now caught up in this mess.

Citizenship is a thing that most people do not take lightly. They go to the ceremony and they think about it. At a ceremony just last week there were some fantastic individuals. I asked the father in one family who was becoming a citizen, ‘How long?’ He said, ‘Oh, 32 years.’ I said, ‘Why after 32 years?’ and he said: ‘Well, I figure I’m staying now. The wife and the kids won’t let me go.’ He was given a beautiful certificate. His girls looked at it and said: ‘We don’t have anything like that. We’re Australians born and bred and we do not have a beautiful certificate.’ He was so proud and the girls thought: ‘Oh, we have sort of been dudded here. We haven’t got anything except our birth certificates.’ He had been here a long time, obviously married, had had his girls, been part of the community and was there accepting it.

There was another family who had been here 2½ years. They were from Malaysia. He had had come out and had subsequently brought out his wife and child. Again, they were just besotted by this experience and were full of joy and excitement. His wife had come in the full traditional dress and they were there making sure that they had the photo with the mayor and all the rest of it. People take this seriously. It is not an act taken lightly. It is not an act that these people just embark upon.

One of my staff, who is English and had been here for many years, prior to getting married a couple of years ago said: ‘Well, right, that’s it. I really should become an Australian citizen now. I intend on getting married and having children and they will all be Australian citizens.’ She agonised over that for quite some time. There was a great deal of correspondence going on with her parents back in England that somehow she was not renouncing them. I do not think people do this lightly. I do not think people enter into it as somehow this great thing that will now enable them to rip off the Australian tax system and get all these benefits. It is a significant step that people take. We should be honouring these people who choose to stay here, who choose to take these rights. This bill in some respects is demeaning some of these people and saying, ‘Somehow you are now other,’ and we are flagging the race card for the next election.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 rewrites the old Citizenship Act of 1948. There are some good elements to this citizenship bill. Most of the changes facilitate the taking of citizenship and follow the recommendations of the Australian Citizenship Council report released on 18 February 2000. The legislation implements measures to allow citizenship for many who lost it or did not have access due to former restrictions on dual citizenship. This includes the Maltese community, of which I have a large number in my electorate, Australian citizens who have adopted children overseas and people from a Papua New Guinean background. These are good changes and we welcome them.

However, there is one particular change in this bill that I am concerned about, and that is the increase in the number of years before citizenship can be applied for, from two to four years. When COAG originally agreed to increase the number of years from two to three, the Labor Party supported it because there was a security justification. After discussion with many people in my community, I found that even people still intending to apply for citizenship—even people still within the two years—found this a reasonable compromise to make: a change from two to three years was not a significant burden on people seeking to join us as citizens. But there has been no justification for the increase from two to four years. I am pleased, however, to see that the government will be accepting Labor’s amendment to not make this change retrospective. There was considerable concern in my community from people who had come here on one basis that the rules would be changed under their feet and they would be made to wait considerably longer than they had expected.

What I am most concerned about is the context in which the government seeks to conduct debates on citizenship. It seems that every time the issue is raised the government appeals to the most fearful people in our society, raising the notion that new arrivals might be a threat to the rest of us—a threat to us, not them—and should be treated as such. Ever since migration began in Australia, part of the population here has responded with fear. There are always some of us who are afraid. Some Indian people came out under British citizenship in the second fleet and worked as servants in the early convict years, but a proposal by the colony to bring out more Indian servants was rejected overwhelmingly by the early Australians for fear of the changes it would make in society.

The early Chinese caused fear among us. We were afraid of the Greeks and the Italians. I remember in my suburb we were particularly afraid of the Greek neighbours, because they painted their house blue and concreted their yard. We were terrified that our house prices would drop as a result. I remember the fear of the Italian Mafia, particularly in Melbourne. When they first arrived here, the Italians were a scary lot to some sections of the Australian population. It was a similar case with the Vietnamese. There were the Vietnamese gangs, the home raids and the Japanese triads. There has always been a section of the Australian population which has responded to changes within us with fear.

I remember that when I was at school, the children of Italian migrants, even though they were born here, were not allowed to go out with Aussie kids. They were not allowed to go out with Australian-born kids; they had to go out with other children of Italian extraction. It was quite clear, and I remember how shocking we found that at the time. When we look at our Italian and Greek communities now, they are completely integrated and are strong contributors to our society, but at the time even the Greeks and Italians caused fear and worry among us.

I remember when the Vietnamese boat people first started arriving. I was working at the Golden Circle factory cannery in Brisbane in my school holidays. When the Vietnamese boat people first started arriving, they turned up in numbers. They turned up as whole families and worked every hour of overtime they possibly could. They were extraordinary workers, desperate to build a life here for themselves and their families. That very work ethic was seen as a threat by the people who worked in the factory. They were afraid that these Vietnamese people worked so hard that they would take our jobs away and take our prosperity. In their eyes, they had to be stopped; they could not work that hard. They were incredibly frightening to some sections of the community at the time. I still hear comments about how children of Asian parents work too hard in school—that they work too hard and they are leaving other kids behind.

There will always be these elements of fear. What is different this time is that we have a government that exploits that fear. I remember clearly the time of the arrival of the Vietnamese boat people. The situation then illustrates the difference between the Fraser government and the Howard government. Remember that that was one boat every week and a half for about 18 months. It was not one Tampa; it was one boat every week and a half. I remember the efforts from both sides of politics to keep a lid on the fear, to make those people welcome and to assist the Australian population as a whole to deal with their fears—to come to terms with their fears and to see the situation rationally rather than from a perspective of fear.

It is not that we can afford to ignore the views of these people as silly or irrelevant. We cannot afford to ignore the fear of any Australian. In fact, if we do not deal with the fears of some of the members of our population we will be held back by them. But, since the rise of Pauline Hanson in politics in Australia, this government has started to see this group of fearful people as a political group that can be used and manipulated for political purposes. We have seen the dog whistle politics of the Howard government—and, not satisfied with increasing the fear level of that group, it is trying to move that fear through the broader community.

I am appalled sometimes now at what I hear said by people who five or six years ago would not have made these kinds of remarks. I hear people now in trains and in the shopping centres essentially having a go at Muslims—people they do not even know; people who pass them in the street. None of these people say that they were attacked or abused by a Muslim; they simply say that they have heard from somewhere that they are dangerous, and they repeat that. I mix with all kinds of groups and I hear stories from Australians about being attacked in the streets and about being afraid to go out in the daytime. But mostly those stories come from young Muslim girls who choose to wear the hijab. They are afraid to go out in the streets because they do hear words of hate, they do get assaulted and they do get their scarves pulled off. They are tending now to stay home out of fear of going out in the street.

So the effect of these dog whistle politics—the effect of legislation designed to tell the Australian people that we should be afraid of the new and that new people coming to Australia are some kind of threat—is already being felt in the fabric of our community. It is already tearing us apart and it can only do more damage. We do not make the world safer by rejecting people that we fear. We do make the world into the place we fear if we push people away in the way we are doing now.

I go to citizenship ceremonies all the time in my electorate. I have three local councils, so there is at least one a week in my area. I sit there watching these people in that symbolic act as they become citizens of Australia—to become, as I put it, ‘one of us’ permanently. I realise that I really cannot understand what it is that they are going through. I was born here, I have always been Australian and I always will be Australian. It does not ever occur to me to become a citizen of another country. To visit one is great, but to change my citizenship or to give up this country is not something that I think I could ever do. I watch these people and I realise that they have made a decision at some point in their lives to give up the country of their birth and to come to this one and make it their home.

I know from talking to many of them that they do this because they want a better life for their children. They see an opportunity in this country to build a better life. But to do so they must sell up and leave behind friends, relatives, neighbours, a land that they know and quite often a land that they love and come to this one. It is an extraordinarily difficult thing to do, and it is not something that I believe anyone would do lightly. Then you realise that, in the two or more years that it has taken them to move to Australia, begin to feel comfortable here and then choose to become a citizen, they have followed an incredibly difficult path. Many of them arrive here with good English—and some not so good—but it is still not their first language. When you have to deal with others in a language which is not your own and which you have not been using for very long, you actually lose parts of your personality. The ability to show your sense of humour and the ability to communicate easily are lost for a while.

So we have people who come here to settle and, over the period they are settling, they exist without parts of their personality. They quite often lose their status—the status that they had earned in their own country. They have to start again here. They quite often come without their qualifications. When they arrive here, their children become Australian so quickly that the parents even lose that strong cultural bond with them in those early years. This is an extraordinary path that these people choose. It is incredibly difficult, and I do not think we should ever write off that experience in the way that I have heard it written off in this House in speeches by government members as something that is taken lightly or something that is done without thought or without recognising the significance of it.

You also cannot mistake at those citizenship ceremonies the joy and pride that these people feel when they make that final declaration. They are all out there trying to get their photo taken; they are all trying to get their electoral enrolment form signed. Most of them are there with their families. I find that most of those who make the decision to become a citizen very soon after that two-year period, which is the earliest time that they can do it, do so because they have families here. The decision to make Australia their home was made a long time before they arrived in Australia. Many of them have been waiting to get here for quite some time. They come here because their family is here, and this is their home from the day they arrive. They take the step of citizenship as a formal recognition of that at the first opportunity they can. I have not seen any evidence at any of the ceremonies that I have attended of people who take this lightly or do it without a considerable amount of thought.

I am also concerned about the government’s proposal—not included in this bill but out there in the public domain—to introduce English language and citizenship tests. Quite frankly, apart from such a proposal again raising the idea that some of these people do not know how to be Australians, I cannot see how it would work if the purpose of it is to protect Australia from people who become citizens without accepting the values of Australia. I do not see how an ability to pass a test, particularly a written one, would demonstrate that one way or another.

A test might demonstrate whether you can study and pass; however, if a person is coming to Australia in order to do Australia harm, they would probably wait the four years and then do the test. I just cannot see how a test prevents a person intent on doing Australia harm from becoming a citizen. Nor do I understand why not becoming a citizen would prevent them from doing harm. If you are going to do Australia harm, you can do it as a visitor. You can do it as a permanent resident. You do not need to be a citizen to do that; you only need to be here.

This test is an extra barrier to people who want to become citizens. It does nothing whatsoever to prevent people who want to do us harm from becoming citizens. It makes it harder for the good people. It does not make it harder for those we might want to catch somehow. A much better way to catch those people is by more stringent security tests in the early stages, before they even arrive here. Once they are here, it is a problem. Once they are here under any circumstances, it is a problem. If they are going to be a problem, let us make sure they do not get here in the first place.

Of course English language is important. It is very important for people trying to make their way in Australia. It is not always as easy for some as it is for others to learn. I know refugee families in my electorate who come here, particularly those from Africa, with very poor English, with no written language in some cases and with five, six or more children. They come here not knowing the basics of how to use a washing machine, how to turn on a stove or how to use a telephone. They come here highly traumatised from experiences that most of us would not want to imagine, with children who are highly traumatised following the death of their father, many of their relatives and some of their siblings.

These are incredibly traumatised people, and they may just need to rest for a while. They may just need to rest in this country in safety. Sometimes that is the best they can do emotionally when they first arrive here. We should be grateful that we can provide a place for these people—a place where a mother can go out to a park with her children, without worrying whether she will take those children home alive, which is the past experience of some of the people who arrive in this country. I desperately want those women and their children to settle well in Australia, but they need to do that in a way that they can. They need to do that at a pace that they can. Believe me, they do everything they can to settle here. They are so grateful for the opportunity to be here. They are still grieving for their homeland, for their families and for lost lives, but they are so grateful to be here that they will make their lives work in this country.

I met one recently, a young man called Ding. He does not live in my electorate; he lives just outside it. He is 24 years old and has five brothers and sisters in Australia. Both parents are dead and one sister is still in Egypt. He is studying second-year law and international finance. His two immediate younger siblings are also in university and the next three are in school—two in high school and one in primary school. He is their father at 24 years of age. He is doing absolutely everything that anyone could possibly expect to serve this country well simply by serving his family well and making sure that they can do well in the lives that they have chosen in this country.

If we are concerned that people are having difficulty settling in this country, there are two ways to look at it. We can do what the government has done and assume that the reason is some of them are just bad people and we have to force them to do the right thing. We have to force them to learn English by putting a test in their citizenship application. We have to force them to learn about Australian history. We have to make them wait longer to prove themselves. We have to treat them as though they are essentially bad people. Or we can take another approach, which I believe is more realistic, which is to assume that they are good people trying to do the right thing by themselves and by this country and provide the services that they actually need to do well.

The Howard government have cut funding to English language courses. If they think it is so important, let us see them put some money into it. Let us see them help people learn English instead of cutting the funding. But English is not the only issue for people trying to settle in Australia. One of the first areas, and probably the most important area, where people need to integrate is in the workplace. We have skilled migrants who come to this country who are kept out of the workforce for quite a considerable length of time because of the need for them to be able to transfer, for example, their accounting skills over to Australian law or their engineering skills into the framework of Australian codes of practice. They cannot get jobs here because they do not have experience working in Australia. They have difficulty getting work experience because of insurance problems. When they first arrive in Australia, they spend a lot of the time dealing with the practicalities of life in Australia, like how you find a flat when you do not have a reference, how you rent a home and different banking systems. They have a whole stack of practicalities that they need to get through, which wastes their time in the early stages of their arrival, and yet there is no assistance provided by this government for skilled migrants settling in Australia. They have considerable difficulties. There are practical things that we can do that will help people settle more quickly, feel more at home and build their lives here without beating people up and blaming them because they may not be able to move through this incredibly difficult process as quickly as others.

The integration issue is much more complex than what we hear debated in the media and in this House. When I talk to communities in my electorate, the issues of integration are quite often caused by the fact that the children integrate so fast and the parents retain their culture from another land for much longer—as they always will and as they always have. So the intergenerational conflict between parent and child, as the children reach teenage years, is a major issue of integration, but it is not a failure. It is because the children become Australian so fast. It is a sign of the success of our multicultural society that we have this intergenerational conflict. Let us support these people instead of attacking them. (Time expired)

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am happy to again follow the member for Parramatta because she has given, as usual, a considered and sensible speech, one in which she incorporates her own experience of these things that gives a forcefulness and validity to the points that she is making. As with the member for Parramatta, I want to support the amendment that the opposition has put forward and also deal with some of the significant matters that affect my electorate of Blaxland as well as the surrounding electorates of Prospect, Reid, Banks, Lowe and Watson—because the issues that we are debating today concern more than merely citizenship per se and the measures taken within the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 to address a series of anomalies in the 1948 act.

When you compare Australia in 1948 to Australia in 2006, the enormous changes during that period of time and the history of modern migration to Australia have left some groups of people effectively pigeon-holed or in difficulty, worrying that their status is not precisely defined or is not sorted out. There is a fundamental example here. An examination of that was undertaken at great depth when the Senate committee dealt with this. It is the situation of the Maltese: if people wanted to return to Malta for a period and seek to work, they were forced to choose. If they had Australian citizenship, they were forced to renounce it. What is proposed in this bill is a resolution of the problem for those people from Malta. This bill can restore to them the Australian citizenship that they had to give up.

Let us think about the intervening period from 1948 to 2006 and the waves of migrants who came to Australia who were in a similar position, where their originating country stipulated that, having left its shores, people had made a statement that they no longer wished to be Dutch, Filipino, Maltese or whatever—that they had chosen a new land and therefore that land should be the only one available to them. The whole history of people adjusting to the notion of whether or not you can have a dual nationality has been long and deep. We know how long this parliament struggled with the idea.

We know as well that, embedded in the dealings that the High Court has had with these matters, there is still a fundamental issue of whether or not people owe their allegiance to another power if they have taken up citizenship with one country and then take it up in Australia. This very point was dealt with in two cases—Singh’s case in 2004 and Ame’s case in 2005—as explicated in the Bills Digest. How were these people treated if they were citizens of another country and also citizens of Australia? They were treated as aliens.

Embedded at the very core of the Constitution is the notion that you can have allegiance to only one sovereign power. Our legislation attempts to take into account the fact that we have people from all over the world. We had people from all over the world in the 1850s in Australia. They came here to dig for gold, find their fortune and have a better life. They came from California; they came from every land on this planet. It was an extraordinarily multicultural society. That washed out in the subsequent 50 years or so, until Federation. We fined down to an Australia which was pretty much like the one we had at the start—Anglo-Celtic.

We also made sure at the start of the 20th century that we kept out everybody that we could. Australia was impelled by the notion that we should be a white Australia. That is what the Labor Party signed up to as one of its fundamental core values at the start of its history. We had people concerned and worried about the fact that we could be flooded with foreign labour and that that could undercut our conditions and wages and dramatically affect the conditions of Australian working people. How times have changed. But times and circumstances can revisit us. We are falling back into this very situation now with 457 visas and the other things that are being done to put immense pressure on Australian workers.

I once went on a holiday to the United States and rocked up to the immigration counters to have my visa stamped. If you are an American, you go through one set of gates. If you are from somewhere else, you go through another. I looked up at the signs and the counters that I had to go through said ‘aliens’. I thought it was something from American sci-fi films of the fifties. I was an alien in that land. It came as somewhat of a surprise to me, not being a constitutional lawyer, that the very same notion is embedded in our Constitution. This is not something that is just sci-fi. The whole idea of otherness—‘alienness’—is embedded in the notion that we should have just a single identity.

For a country such as ours, built on the Anglo-Celtic tradition and on newness and an innovative approach to creating a new life in a new land, the idea of being Australian came very slowly to people. They were still embedded in the British Empire and still saw that as their reference point, but they finally came to see themselves as Australian. It would come as a great surprise to many British people who are currently here—who have the right to vote and the right to reside here permanently—that they may not be classified as a real Australian either because, in fact, they are aliens according to the Australian Constitution. They owe their allegiance to a foreign power—that is, Britain. They could, in fact, be dealt with in the way that other aliens have been dealt with in Australia.

One of the things that is not properly dealt with in this bill is the question of the definitions that the High Court has used in regard to who is and who is not properly an Australian. The fact that we have passed legislation that allows dual nationality—allows people in countries where, on the other side, they have said, ‘It’s okay for you to have two nationalities; we’ll recognise that’—provides some peace of mind and comfort to people who have come to Australia and still want to retain that link. In a lot of cases it is necessary—for instance, with Filipinos not becoming Australian citizens because they will lose the property rights they had in the Philippines for both themselves and their family. This is the case with some other jurisdictions in the world as well.

Why people do not choose to become citizens and that they continue to be aliens is answered in part because of economic losses they or their family would suffer or be deemed to suffer as a result of taking that step or, in the vast majority of cases, because those Britishers, having arrived before the operation of the 1948 act brought in by Arthur Calwell and because they were part of the British empire and Commonwealth as we were, had a right to vote and a right to permanent residence in this country.

In citizenship ceremonies in Blaxland, I generally ask people, ‘How long have you been here—four years, five years, two years?’ It is two years now, but when this bill comes into operation, I could not have actually said two years except for quite a while ago, because this government has extended the residential qualifying period from two years to three years. In this bill it has extended the qualifying period from three years to four years. Whereas previously there were negotiations with the Council of Australian Governments where it talked about these issues, it has not talked about this issue at all. The government has done it on its own as part of its agenda to put citizenship in its values campaign. The government’s willingness to drive through into these areas, to find some mechanism by which it can open the lock to the next election and run a campaign to divert from what are the fundamental problems—run on the basis of emotion and not rationality—is the reason for kicking it up to four years.

There is no intrinsic merit in an extra year of waiting. When we came to power in March 1983, there was a five-year waiting period. I do not know why the government just did not flick up to five years, which is where they were before Labor came to power. Maybe it is just a steady progression. Implicit in this idea is that, if you wait longer, you will be more ready for citizenship—and there is an associated question here—if you can speak English well and effectively. However useful it may be to work your way through society, to enrich yourself and your family or to get a better chance at a better job by being able to speak English, if that provision were placed on Sir Peter Abeles or Sir Arvi Parbo when they lobbed into this joint, I do not think they would have got very far. Yet the reality is that they built substantial careers in this country, as have the millions of other people who came here who had no grasp of English at all or a very poor one.

The reality is that most of the postwar migrants who came in the fifties and sixties simply did not have the capacity or ability to speak English. They also did not have a great grasp of their original language because particularly those from throughout the Mediterranean came from peasant based societies that had been shattered by a complete world war—a village based society in which they were quite comfortable with their own local dialect. But, as for the language with the higher level of usage in Italy, for instance, or in Greece, they simply did not have the opportunity to learn it. The literacy that they had was much lower.

As migrants out of central Europe, for instance, where they had done it extraordinarily hard both under the Nazis and also in some cases under the impress of the Soviets, when they came to this place unable to speak English what help did they get from the Menzies government? I will tell you what help they got to settle here and to learn English. Either they were shown the door to the local factory—the Fountain tomato sauce factory down at Marrickville—or they could leave their family at Chullora or Villawood or over at the detention camp at Randwick and travel to Bonegilla or up to Jindabyne or to Bathurst for two full years at least, effectively leaving their family on hold while they sought to perform that fundamental task. The help they got was from fellow migrants who could not speak English either. People on the factory floor at Dunlop’s, when it was on the corner of Canterbury Road and Chapel Road at Bankstown, taught each other.

The core thing about taking up citizenship is associated with the whole question of settlement. How do you assist people to settle better in Australia? What happened in the Menzies period? It was: ‘Look after yourself and the devil will take the hindmost’. What is the situation in the Howard period? Look after yourself and the devil takes the hindmost.

In the forward estimates, the money available for English language teaching to migrant people has been cut by $10.8 million. Does that surprise me as the member for Blaxland? Not one jot or tittle. Why? Because the Adult Migrant Education Service operating in Bankstown, just down the road from my electorate, was savagely cut in 1996. Forty per cent of the funds available to that program were ripped out of the program in the first budget that this government brought down. And, progressively, they have whittled it back and back and back. So as they withdraw the funds—and they are still doing it—they campaign on the fact that people coming to Australia cannot speak English and hit them with a ruler over the back of the knuckles, saying, ‘You should be able to if you want to participate fully in our society.’

This is political campaigning, but it is political campaigning married to a complete withdrawal of the resources that should be available to people to help them settle better. It makes a political weapon of those people at the same time that it penalises them. So, if citizenship means anything, it should mean an undertaking from the government that is talking about fixing up past problems and a government—particularly Parliamentary Secretary Robb—that is talking about the need for people to have capacity in English. For the campaign they are running with that, it is a case of: ‘Put your money where your mouth is.’ Rather than taking it back, it should be put into these programs in order to give people the capacity to learn English and settle better.

But you need a great deal more than that as well. You actually need a recognition that the society we have crafted in 2006, for all its warts and all its difficulties and all its problems, is a dramatically different one from the savagery of Australia in 1948, when the Citizenship Act was put into place. It was a society split down the centre on religious lines, between Protestant and Catholic. It was a society that was split down the centre in terms of allegiance, between allegiance to the British Empire and the British Commonwealth and allegiance to the idea of Australia or an Australian republic. It was a society in which people walked on either side of the streets when they went off to school and threw insults or stones at each other and maintained their separateness.

The one fundamental thing that postwar migration did was blast away the bitterness, nastiness, savageness, parochialism and pestilence of religious animosity of pre-1948 Australia. That has gone, thankfully, because there were other challenges to all of the people who were here. They actually had to confront newness and difference and change. In the fifties and sixties that was encompassed by integrating people and assimilating them very strongly. The kids I went to school with ended up being more Australian than I was, because they wanted to be no different to anyone else. That was being demanded of them.

But a lot was lost in that. One of the great, almost criminal, losses was in the relationship between parent and child. Those poor people who came from peasant societies had had to struggle to get a living for themselves in continents that were ripped apart by war for more than six years. They had to scrabble for a future there as they had to scrabble for a future here, with no assistance in English language training and learning off other people who were also scrabbling for assistance. They were working as hard as they could, not being accepted by people and being rejected by their children because they could not speak English. They were being rejected by their children because they were different from the parents of the Australian kids that they went to school with. Those poor people had to scrabble for a future knowing that their children actually were ashamed of the fact that their parents were different. That is the great loss of the 50s and 60s in Australia in terms of the emotional deprivation of those migrants and the gulf that was opened up between them and their children.

Those sins were atoned for with multiculturalism in allowing people to be proud of where they came from and of the fact that they could speak another language and add diversity to Australia. It also allowed their children to see their parents in a different light. The fundamental of citizenship here is not where you come from but how you settle within this community. At its core citizenship is about owing allegiance not to a foreign power but to an Australia that you feel part of. But the Australian government have to take the lead to make people feel wanted and part of that. Instead of that, what they are doing is sending out messages saying, ‘Well, you’ve come here but we don’t want you for two years; we have changed that to three. We don’t want you after three years—you are not acceptable as an Australian. We don’t want you now until you have been here for four years.’ The government will get it up to five years if they stay in long enough.

But the reality is that, from whatever part of the globe people have come from and for whatever reasons they have come here, the key question is whether they can make a commitment to Australia and a commitment to Australia’s way of life and fundamental values. Most of the people I have seen at citizenship ceremonies want to do that. There are a lot of people who do not take the next step though. We have had an electoral redistribution in New South Wales where we have lost another electorate to Queensland. Part of the problem is that, linked to the citizenship ceremonies, where we say people have rights and duties, we do not demand from and encourage people: ‘If you are going to take up citizenship, you get yourself on the electoral roll.’ In their hundreds of thousands, people coming in from overseas are not doing that, just as young Australians are not taking up their duty to get on the electoral roll either and have a complete participation in the society.

I support the second reading amendment to this bill. I am against the proposal of the extension to four years and I am against a government that will not actually support people embedding themselves in society but rather takes away from them the right to have settlement and refuses to help them. The government would rather just say, ‘You come here and then you look after yourself.’

Nicola Roxon (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to join my colleagues in speaking on the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005. In doing so I will flag the general concerns that have been outlined by the member for Watson, who made the first speech on this side in this second reading debate on this bill and set out the concerns of the Labor Party around one of the major changes proposed in this bill—that being the change to four years residence before a person can become a citizen. He also took the time to set out a number of the issues that we support within this bill, because it is a package that has a number of components to it. Some of them are very positive things—for example, some increased flexibility of the periods of time that can be taken into account in seeking to qualify for citizenship.

It saddens me to be standing in this place talking about this legislation on citizenship when most of the time in my job when I am dealing with citizenship I am at much more joyous occasions. Like the member for Blaxland who spoke before me, I have a very ethnically mixed electorate. I go to citizenship ceremonies all the time. Often there are two sessions, one session after the other, with a hundred people each time. At these sessions, we would have people from 60 or 70 different countries taking out citizenship. It fills me with great heart when I see the sort of gene pool that we are expanding in Australia; it is a country with an extraordinary mix of people from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds and of different ages and experiences.

I think my electorate of Gellibrand has to date set a very good example for many parts of the country on how people can live together very harmoniously. We have gone through being an area full of Maltese, Italian and Greek migrants immediately after the war to being home to large numbers of Vietnamese citizens. They are now the highest ethnic group in my electorate after those who are Australian born. We now have a growing African community, mostly from countries in the Horn of Africa. It makes for a vibrant, exciting, interesting and wonderful part of Australia to live in.

I am just slightly disappointed that we are here talking not about the positive things that come from opening our country to citizens from around the world but about some of the negatives. The government is particularly focusing on some of the penalties, if you like, that have to be paid, rather than embracing those who have chosen our country, who want to make this their home and who are often the most fervent advocates of all the things that Australia is known for around the world. As I said, my part of Melbourne has been a very good advertisement for successful multiculturalism. I know that it is not the same around all of the country, but we need to make sure that the measures we take to change this, like some of those that have been debated today, will actually enhance and support, rather than oppose, a vast range of new citizens being welcomed into our country.

When I was campaigning for my election the first time around—some eight or nine years ago now—I can remember, and I said this in my first speech, how impressed I was at meeting a Vietnamese monk who runs a Buddhist temple in my electorate. He explained to me how he felt, not just when he was first granted citizenship but on the first election day after he was granted citizenship. He had a sense of acute obligation but also excitement that he was here in Australia, able to help shape the future of his new country. I thought that was such a humbling thing to have described to someone who was born here and who to some extent has taken their citizenship for granted. I think all of us who have had this experience cannot really appreciate the sense of satisfaction that many new citizens feel. That is why they go on, by and large, to become such valuable contributors to our community.

It worries me that a test, whether it is two years, three years or four years, is not actually going to be the measure of that. What is going to be the measure is how we make sure that we encourage new arrivals to embrace our community and society and to enhance it with their different experiences and backgrounds. This lets us all move forward. Probably no-one in the House disagrees with those aims. What we disagree with sometimes is the way that the government proposes to effect these changes, particularly the silly change of going to four years. There seems to be no justification that it will doing anything to create a more welcoming environment or, in fact, deliver some type of better person to become a citizen, which seems to be what the government thinks it will deliver.

I am also very concerned about the government saying that this is a way to enable people to become more settled in our community when funding for some of the very things that would help people settle is being cut or stopped—like the $10 million English program that has been slashed. These are not consistent positions for the government to be taking. It might be better to look at some of the restrictions that exist—for example, the times when people can take up that English training—rather than slashing the money, extending the period and saying that people should go off and somehow integrate on their own and learn English on their own without any assistance from the government.

I wanted to raise those general issues and express my support for the positions that have been indicated by my colleagues, but I also want to talk about two particular issues. One is how this legislation affects some people who are Maltese-born. This issue has been raised by a number of my colleagues already, so I do not intend to go over all of the detail. But I have over 2,000 people living in my electorate who were born in Malta—and obviously a large number in addition to that who would have Maltese heritage. I know that there are particular concerns about this bill, because it is not fixing a problem that has occurred for a number of families when they have returned to Malta and been required to renounce their citizenship. That has had an impact on their children and they have had to seek to re-establish a connection with Australia.

Because a number of my other colleagues have already dealt with this, I just want to add my voice to those concerns. It is important that we take the opportunity to fix this situation. There are probably more Cassars, Vellas and Davids in my electorate than there are in many others. People with a Maltese heritage have been outstanding community members and activists; there is a real reason for us to make sure that those who have a longstanding link with this country are not denied it because we fail to make some fairly technical changes that would just make sure that people are not left out.

I turn to another issue, which I think none of my colleagues will have raised. It is a particularly technical issue, but I want to flag it because it is something that a person I have a great deal of respect for has been working on for some time. Professor Kim Rubenstein, a professor at ANU, specialises in a range of issues dealing with citizenship. She has become involved with the case of a woman called Susan Walsh. Susan Walsh’s name is on the record because there has already been a large amount of litigation about this issue, but the facts are probably not well known around this House.

Susan Walsh was born in Australia to an Australian citizen parent but is not considered an Australian citizen. This odd circumstance has come about because Ms Walsh was born in Papua at a time when Papua was part of Australia—or was regarded for these purposes as part of Australia. Her father was an Australian citizen and her mother was an indigenous Papuan. Because she was born an Australian citizen and because of the period she was born in, she has now found that she is stuck in no-man’s-land under section 10 of the Australian Citizenship Act. She cannot apply for citizenship by descent, because at the time she was born she was born in Australia. One of the qualifications for applying for citizenship by descent is to be born outside Australia. Because of the quirks of history and the changing status of Papua, she is, for the purposes of that test, regarded as having been born in Australia, but for the purposes of whether she is an Australian citizen she does not get the protection of that act.

I do not want to go through all of the complicated circumstances. This is not the time or place to do that. I am sure that the departmental officials, having been involved in litigation that has been taken by Ms Walsh, will be acutely aware of the intricacies of this case. But it seems to me that when we are making a range of other changes it would be worth while examining whether the small number of people who were affected by this change could also be picked up by some sort of amendment to this bill.

There were provisions made at the time which allowed for the transfer. When Papua New Guinea became independent, unfortunately there were not notification provisions; it was not possible to go out and tell all of the people who might have been affected by this that they needed to reapply for citizenship within a period of time. The fact that Ms Walsh did not know about this meant that she lost her citizenship without being aware of it. It seems to me that it is worth putting these concerns on the record. When we have people with such an intimate connection to Australia not being able to avail themselves of Australian citizenship, it does seem to put us in a pretty silly position.

We live in a country where we want to encourage those who live here and have a connection with us. We should encourage those who have Australian parents and might have been born here, moved overseas and want to come back—they are the very people that we want to encourage to live in Australia, make it their home and have the benefits and responsibilities of citizenship. It is shame, then, that someone in Ms Walsh’s situation misses out. I would urge, if it is at all possible and appropriate, for the government to take this good opportunity to fix that problem—if indeed it is easy to fix. I imagine that when cases are contested in this way there are some technical problems that maybe the rest of us cannot foresee, but I would certainly like to know what they are. It seems sensible to me to take the opportunity to use this bill to fix that problem and obviously at the same time fix the problem that has emerged in relation to the large Maltese community.

I am not going to add any further to those comments, because many of my colleagues have already raised a range of other issues. I am pleased to be able to speak about citizenship. It is an important part of the fabric of our country; it is important for all of us who welcome so many new citizens and see the happiness and delight that there is across so many faces when people know that they have been formally welcomed into our community. Let’s make sure that we continue to do that and continue to support them rather than putting in place silly, arbitrary rules like this increase to four years that will do nothing to enhance their experience of Australia and nothing to ensure that they become the upstanding and worthy citizens that we hope all people who take out Australian citizenship will become.

Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wish to speak in support of the amendment to the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 moved by the member for Watson and comment on some of the remarks that have been made in this debate to date. A number of speakers have mentioned recent statements by Sheikh al-Hilali. It is my view that those statements are not consistent with the position of a leader of a great religion in this country. They are not merely demeaning and insulting to women, although they are clearly that; they are insulting to men as well, the implication being that men are unable to control their sexual urges. The fact is that the vast majority of men are perfectly capable of doing that. They do not entertain the idea of rape for a nanosecond. They understand perfectly well that no means no and they are resentful of the proposition that all men are prospective rapists, a proposition to which the sorts of comments that Sheikh al-Hilali made gave some aid and comfort.

I also want to express my concern about the fact that we have been witnessing in this country one of the oldest political tricks in the book, which is gaining political popularity and advancement through attacking and denigrating an unpopular group in the community. No doubt Muslims are unpopular in Australia. Courtesy of the work of Osama bin Laden and the Bali bombers, I have no doubt they have a low ‘approval rating’. If you asked many Australians what they thought of Muslims, you would not get a very positive answer. There is a lot of fear, mistrust and misunderstanding about. The question is: what do we do about that? We can either turn away from each other in fear, mistrust and misunderstanding or we can turn towards each other, reach out and try to understand each other. But the government wants Australians to think that it does not like Muslims either. We look at statements by Prime Minister Howard. In August he said:

There is a section, a small section of the Islamic population ... which is very resistant to integration.

He went on to say:

Fully integrating means accepting Australian values, it means learning as rapidly as you can the English language if you don’t already speak it.

In February Treasurer Costello said:

There are countries that apply religious or Sharia law; Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under Sharia law, these are countries where they may feel at ease, but not Australia.

The member for Mackellar said of the hijab in public schools that the headscarf was being used as an ‘iconic item of defiance’ and that although in an ideal society you should not ban anything:

... this has really been forced on us because what we’re seeing is a clash of cultures.

The member for Mackellar is on a unity ticket with Osama bin Laden on that one.

But, if you genuinely thought Muslims were a problem in Australia, what sorts of things might you do? You could try to reduce or contain their numbers, but the government has not done that. The number of Muslims has increased. Or you could take the view that things might improve if Muslims became more like the locals. The most obvious way to achieve that is to have young Muslim boys and girls going to the same schools as other Australian boys and girls, growing up together and learning about each other. This is how things happened at my primary school. We had never heard of multiculturalism, and we were guilty of calling the other kids wogs, dagos and so on, but the boy across the road from me was Hungarian, his mates, whom I also got to know, were Polish, another kid down the road who was a mate of mine was Greek, and so it went. But is the government doing this? No! We get more non-government religious schools springing up all the time. If the Howard government were serious about bringing Muslims in from the cold, it would be educating them in government schools.

Recently, the Treasurer very courageously lectured Muslims from the Australian Christian Forum about religion and politics. There was one thing he said in that particular lecture that did make some sense to me, which was about how Turkey has achieved success as a Muslim country where religion and politics are separated. Law and politics are in the public domain; religion is a private matter. I think he mentioned the role of the great and wise founder of the Turkish state, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, in securing this separation, bringing in the rule of law and creating a country where people do not seek to impose their religious convictions and beliefs on others. Mr Costello said:

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk ... found modern Turkey as a secular state ... He should be held out as a model of leadership for the modern Islamic world.

The separation of the state from religion liberates both. It preserves freedom for religion. It liberates the church from the baggage of unpopular and difficult political decision making. It liberates the State from the religious dogma which at times, has held back scientific progress.

I agree with the Treasurer on this point, and I have been making the same point myself in numerous speeches at Muslim gatherings ever since 11 September, 2001 forced us to confront and think about these issues with real urgency. But what was missing from the Treasurer’s holding up of Turkey as a role model was any reference to the role played by education.

According to a background paper to a recent World Bank study on the Turkish education system, over 98 per cent of all students are educated in government primary and secondary schools. Less than two per cent are educated in non-government primary and secondary schools. Non-government schools do not receive any direct government funding at all. There is some indirect subsidisation of private outlays on education, but the actual sources of funding for the miniscule non-government school sector are private foundations and firms—and, of course, household funds. So, when the Treasurer holds up Turkey as a model of successful separation of church and state, he should also come clean about how they achieve it—basically, no non-government schools. But here we are headed in the opposite direction: a government whose hostility to government schools is giving us a fragmented community without common values.

The other thing I think the government could do if it were serious about tackling the problem of fundamentalist jihadist Islam is to strengthen the hand of moderate Muslims. There is no doubt that the struggle being waged by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda is every bit as targeted against moderate Islamic leaders and countries as it is against the West. Tony Blair pointed this out very clearly recently, and sometimes Howard government ministers say similar things as well. But, when Tony Blair said it, what you heard was a loud groan from the aforementioned moderate Muslims, because his actions in going into Iraq and parroting George Bush’s foreign policy have not helped moderate Muslims—they have undermined them.

It is the same thing here. The words of the Howard government might be about supporting moderate Muslims in their war with the fundamentalists, but their actions are all in the opposite direction. Iraq is the most spectacular example of the way we radicalise Muslims and drive them into the arms of Osama bin Laden, but there are others. The West will not put a fraction of the time, money and effort that it has put into Iraq into securing a Palestinian state. That is something which would help the moderate Muslims. And when Muslims get singled out for criticism by Howard government personnel which is not based on logic—for example, there are the comments that Muslims need to speak English, when in fact it is true that there are people from many non-English-speaking background nations who struggle with English in the first generation, and it makes no sense to single out Muslims in this regard; and there are questions about Muslims and the hijab, where the member for Mackellar singled out one particular group and made no reference to others and their particular attire—then, again, the position of moderate Muslims is undermined.

Treating Muslims as whipping boys and girls may be smart politics, but it does nothing to build a functioning, tolerant, successful society. What it does is play into the hands of Osama bin Laden et cetera, who are trying to foment a religious war by persuading Muslims that non-Muslims are engaged in a religious war against them, and, therefore, that terrorism is a form of self-defence.

We have, both in Australia and in other countries around the world, a problem not with Muslims so much as with religious fundamentalism in whatever form it appears—Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, you name it. Anyone seeking to impose their religious convictions on others ought to be resisted and politely, but firmly, informed of the importance of the separation of church and state as well as the rule of law. From this ground there can be no retreat.

I have a number of Islamic constituents on trial for alleged breaches of the antiterrorism laws. I make no comment on the individual cases. The rule of law through due process is at work here, as it should be. I also have a number of Exclusive Brethren constituents. I do not know how many people watched the ABC’s Four Corners report about the activities of the Exclusive Brethren or have read some of the numerous newspaper reports in recent times about the activities of the Exclusive Brethren both in Australia and in New Zealand. But those who have seen the reports could not be other than very concerned about them. For the benefit of those who have not followed them, the media reports raised issues of tax exemption being used for personal enrichment, tax exemption being used for an organisation which is political in character, tax fraud, social security fraud, flouting Family Court orders, mental abuse and running on to the political playing field.

Exclusive Brethren members do not vote—in Australia we have always regarded voting as one of the responsibilities of Australian citizenship—but it is now apparent that they are intensely involved in the political process. There is a strong undercurrent in the reports that they put political money and resources towards supporting the conservative parties—the Liberal and National parties. There has been a deafening silence from the Liberal and National parties on the revelations about the Exclusive Brethren. I think two things need to happen: the Liberal and National parties need to cut off any campaigning or financial links they may have forged with the Exclusive Brethren and there need to be some inquiries into the allegations of tax fraud, social security fraud, flouting of Family Court orders, and government bankrolling of schools which ban computers and progress to university, among other things.

I have no doubt that, if similar allegations had been made concerning a mosque, we would have had government ministers falling all over themselves to get up in parliament and denounce the mosque and announce various inquiries and action. And do not think that Muslims do not notice this kind of double standard. A woman by the name of Irfan Yusuf in the Canberra Times on 10 October described the Prime Minister as condemning:

… certain isolationist practices of Muslims before defending a fringe Christian sect with even more isolationist practices.

So they do notice.

I have no doubt that getting people from all racial and ethnic and religious backgrounds to live together in peace and tolerance and harmony is the most urgent task facing the world today. Indeed, it probably always has been. And taking on fundamentalist or jihadist Islam is part of that task—no doubt at all. And I am prepared to sign up for whatever reshaping or redefining of multiculturalism is necessary to rescue it from some of the ‘anything goes’ cul-de-sacs down which it has led us. But this can only be done by people with clean hands on a secular basis, not by people who want to pander to Christian fundamentalists on the side. The idea that you can get away with shining a bright light on some corners and leaving others covered up in festering darkness is just nonsense.

Australian citizenship must be about equality of treatment before the law. It has to be about tolerance and respect for others and an understanding that we are not all the same. But that tolerance and respect cannot be shown to those who will not show it in turn and who seek to impose their religious convictions on others. It does not matter what religious convictions we are talking about—the same standard has got to apply. But the government has done none of those things. In relation to Muslims, it has constantly undermined moderate Muslims. Now it seeks to profit politically from all this, scoring off the Muslims, saying, ‘Oh dear, the Muslims are a problem; they need to lift their game.’ Perhaps, but what is just as important is that the government lifts its game lest its political success comes at the cost of a society which is divided, fragmented and maybe, in the years to come, terrified.

What messages should the government be sending out to new citizens? At citizenship ceremonies, I have drawn attention to the pledge of loyalty to Australia and its people, which comes with the words:

... whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.

These words are worthy of some reflection. They do not mean that you obey those laws you agree with or those laws that do not conflict with your religious views; they mean that you pledge to obey Australia’s laws without qualification and that you have committed to Australia’s democratic beliefs. The question that Australian citizens naturally ask is: what does Australian citizenship mean? I believe that citizenship and the present racial tensions in our society impose obligations on both new citizens and old citizens. Both new and old citizens have obligations to participate in and enrich Australian life, to reach out to each other and not to turn away from each other in fear, mistrust or misunderstanding. I believe in the kind of multiculturalism which says that everyone is valued and everyone is valuable and has something unique to offer to Australian society. I do not believe in the kind of multiculturalism that says that you do not make any kind of effort to fit into Australian society; it is good enough to seek out other people of your own background and live a separate, isolated existence largely in their company.

I think Australia is a terrific country. The first reason for that is that we have freedom of speech and expression. We have to really appreciate just how important that is and make sure that we do not undermine it with a veil of political correctness and do not create a climate where people are afraid to say what they really believe. Secondly, in Australia we have a great tradition of irreverence. We are not obsequious to authority. We are prepared to question and challenge those in power. As members of parliament—I know it is the same for others here as well—we are often on the receiving end of this culture, but I think it makes Australia a far better place than those countries where people line up and salute all manner of corrupt and evil rulers simply because, for example, they wear a military uniform. Thirdly, we have tradition of tolerance and no tradition of civil strife and conflict. This is a great blessing, and we should respect it by ensuring that people do not bring into Australia the fights and struggles of the old world and that they leave them at the door. Fourthly, as I said before, Australia has a very clear separation between church and state. There is no place for religious fanaticism or intolerance. No-one is entitled to impose or enforce their views on others. In Australia, there is strong support for freedom of religious expression and worship, and an equally strong understanding that religion is a private matter and is not to be confused with politics or the law, which are public matters. Someone’s right to freedom of expression and freedom of action stops at the point of their neighbour’s nose. You cannot interfere with others.

In closing, I want to say that I believe that Australian citizenship is a wonderful thing. We can reflect back on 1948, when the great Chifley Labor government introduced the concept of Australian citizenship. At that time it was a novel concept, and some people thought it might impair our allegiance to the British motherland—a view which should not be dismissed as frivolous but must rather be understood in the context of that time. In the wake of the sacrifices made during the Second World War and the decision to take into this country an unprecedented influx of new migrants, we appreciated back then and we have appreciated with increasing force ever since that we have a more independent role to play in the world. Of course, Britain remains the source of our legal system, our parliamentary democracy, our language and much of our culture, but we have, in the time since the Labor government legislated for Australian citizenship, been able to welcome 3½ million new citizens. We have become a nation of people from many different lands united in a distinctive Australian identity. I welcome that and hope that it continues for a very long time to come.

Kelly Hoare (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It seems surprising that the government has decided to revise the 1948 Citizenship Act, given that it has spent the last 10 years attempting to return Australia to the 1950s with a series of regressive and decidedly retro policies. The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 will make substantial changes to the legislation governing citizenship and place necessary restrictions upon those who may apply for citizenship, as well as reorganising some of the processes by which citizenship can be granted and revoked.

While Labor understands the need for a revision of the 1948 Citizenship Act, there are some elements of the citizenship bill presently before the House which are just plain unfair and some elements which are downright worrying. In particular, subclause 17(4) is deeply concerning as it raises important questions about our civil liberties and the freedom of information in this country that the government is yet to provide any reassuring answers to. For those not entirely familiar with the many amendments proposed by this bill, subclause 17(4) states that the minister for immigration must not approve an application for citizenship where ASIO has provided an adverse security assessment of that person. In other words, if ASIO decides that a person represents a real or potential threat to the country, the minister cannot, by law, approve their application for citizenship.

There are several things wrong with this, not the least of which is the fact that the minister’s power—that is, the power of an elected representative and member of parliament—would be secondary in these cases to the power of a non-elected, non-accountable body which functions under a heavy veil of secrecy. Why should a non-elected body be above parliament and above the minister? That issue aside, there is also the question of how and why ASIO’s assessments are made. It is not overstating the case to say that Australia’s recently implemented terrorism laws give this organisation an almost unlimited amount of power—power which its representatives are free to use in any number of situations and a power which they exert under a screen of anonymity and institutional silence.

As we have already seen in the case of Jack Thomas, ASIO are allowed to declare someone a security risk without ever revealing the sources of their information, providing proof of their claims or revealing anything about their investigation to the subject of it. In short, someone can be accused, tried and condemned often without even knowing they have been under suspicion and without any recourse to the legal challenges which are every citizen’s supposed right in this country.

In the case of risk assessment for the purposes of a citizenship application, ASIO is not required to reveal anything about their assessment except its result—that is, they can label someone a threat and effectively deny them citizenship without ever having to reveal why, and the subject of this assessment has absolutely no choice but to accept this. This is a violation of our civil liberties however you wish to look at it, yet the government seem completely unconcerned. They seem perfectly happy to let shadowy, non-representative organisations decide the future of potential migrants to this country, despite the obvious opportunities for misuse and abuse such a system would provide. These civil liberties concerns are serious, as is the minister’s lack of discretion in the face of an ASIO assessment.

Also worthy of the House’s attention is the fact that, under the present draft of this bill, the minister does not have discretion over citizenship applications made by applicants who have spent more than five years in a foreign prison. Clause 19D(6) in the proposed government amendments requires that any applicant who has spent more than five years in prison in their home country or overseas may not become a citizen. Flat rule, no negotiation allowed. This is an obvious example of how the government sees everything in black and white terms—if you have served time in jail, you must be a dangerous criminal and a threat to Australia.

We on this side of the House acknowledge that life is a little more complicated than that. For example, what if a refugee, after having lived here with their family for the required length of time, applies to become a citizen of the country which took them in their hour of need? What if that refugee had become a refugee because they had opposed the government in their home country and had been tortured, persecuted and imprisoned for speaking out against injustices? What if that refugee had been imprisoned for five years, 10 years or even 20 years, perhaps illegally, perhaps without charge or trial, for the simple crime of criticising a tyrant like Saddam Hussein or Than Shwe?

Is that refugee the kind of dangerous person who deserves to have their application for citizenship denied? According to the current bill, yes, that person has served time in prison; therefore, they are a threat to Australia and cannot become a citizen. Never mind that their crime was one of bravery and strength, and never mind that they may have been standing up for freedom of speech, freedom of political beliefs and freedom to live—all things which are entirely in keeping with ‘Australian values’, which the Prime Minister keeps going on about. Never mind that their imprisonment was unjust and possibly illegal; all that counts is that they have served time in prison. Labor would like to see some ministerial discretion allowed when assessing citizenship applications from those who have served time in jail, rather than the present blanket rule, in acknowledgement of the fact that circumstances are not always as black and white as the government would seem to believe.

This bill contains many changes, not the least of which is an increase in the age at which people can be considered exempt from the requirement to have a basic knowledge of English. At present, that age is 50. This bill will see it increased to 60. In relation to this, I would like to bring to the attention of the Main Committee the fact that the government recently admitted, before the Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee considering estimates, to slashing $10.8 million from the Adult Migrant English Program—the front-line program that offers migrants to this country their best chance of properly integrating into our society and becoming a valuable part of it. The government has slashed $10.8 million from a program that can mean the difference between a life of acceptance and a life lived on the periphery, never quite feeling at home and never quite understanding what is being said.

At the same time, this bill will increase from 50 years to 60 years the age at which citizens are no longer required to have a working knowledge of English. Where are these extra people going to get their English training? How will the migrant English program, already stretched by such brutal cuts to its funding, cope with an increase in student numbers? This is yet another example of the government not thinking things through properly. On the one hand it shifts the goalposts so that more people have to learn English while on the other it snatches away the funding for the very programs which would accommodate this. Which is it to be? Is the government going to face up to its responsibility to assist these people in becoming full and proper members of our society by speaking our language or is it going to take the cash and run, leaving migrants to muddle along as best they can? Of course these things cost money and, yes, it is money that the government would probably rather spend on something popular and vote producing, but in the long run the social costs of not properly funding the Adult Migrant English Program will be far greater than the present financial cost.

There is another issue raised by this bill, and that is the issue of ‘Australian values’ which has been so preoccupying the Prime Minister of late. The government seem to think that subscribing to Australian values should be a necessary requirement for attaining citizenship of this country, which is why I bring it up here today. By ‘Australian values’, they of course mean the things which they themselves have deemed vital and important. But, if it were to be the case that subscribing to ‘the world according to Howard’ was a necessary condition of Australian-ness, they would have to go ahead and strip me, along with hundreds of thousands of others like me, of our citizenship and our birthright, because I do not subscribe to a value system which allows for the five-year incarceration of an Australian citizen in an American military prison without even so much as a token trial. I, unlike the Prime Minister, think it is wrong to deprive innocent refugees of their liberty when their only crime is to seek a better, safer and happier life in this country. I do not believe that it is ‘necessary’ or ‘important’ or ‘key to our security as a nation’ that our young people continue to be sent to fight an illegal war in a rapidly deteriorating country. Do these things make me less Australian? Am I somehow less worthy of citizenship because I believe in human rights, fair and equal justice and peace? It would seem so in the eyes of the Howard government, despite the fact that these are the very values upon which all good societies are built.

The government just does not seem interested in peace, human rights, justice or any of the positive values which this country used to be renowned for but which in the past 10 years have been allowed to fall by the wayside. It seems to be interested only in furthering its own power and silencing dissent by painting anyone who criticises it as a dangerous opponent to Australia at large and a threat to all of us. This is the subtext to any conversation about Australian values. But these values are not my values, Prime Minister. They are not the values of open-minded, tolerant, accepting Australians. They are not even the values of many of those who voted for the government last time. This government is out of touch, and the Prime Minister’s insistence on narrow-minded, jingoistic, 1950s Australian values just demonstrates that yet again.

In short, while overall this legislation is a step forward in adjusting and updating our citizenship legislation to face the changed realities of the present day, many aspects of the legislation seem ill considered and ill thought through. It is hard to believe that a government so in love with its own power and influence as the present one would be willing to place a non-elected organisation above the immigration minister in terms of final decision-making power over citizenship applications from those deemed to be a security risk, yet that is exactly what this legislation proposes to do.

It is similarly worrying—though not altogether surprising—that the government is prepared to grant ASIO the power to make such risk assessments without needing to justify their findings to the public or to a court of appeal. And of course there is the outright stupidity of slashing funding for migrant English education programs while at the same time increasing the number of people likely to be seeking these services by increasing the English-speaking exemption age from 50 to 60.

We acknowledge that changes to the citizenship legislation may be necessary in this present age of heightened threat to Australia, but we do not believe that the government should be allowed to threaten our civil liberties or effectively devolve power to an opaque and unrepresentative organisation in the name of this. Labor will support this bill, but I urge the government to support the amendments moved by the member for Watson.

Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 are part of a wider debate in this community which is being actively fostered by the government and gives rise to a considerable concern about where Australia’s society is heading, what the underlying ethos is for the community on which our society is built and what it is going to be in the future.

The citizenship legislation ostensibly proposes to change the period of eligibility for citizenship by extending it from two years to four years. Like the previous speaker, the member for Charlton, I support the amendments that have been moved by the member for Watson. The introduction of the legislation occurs in the context of a wider discussion initiated by the government under the guise of a discussion paper put out by the member for Goldstein which contains a number of suggestions, including a compulsory English proficiency test for new migrants and a range of other propositions, most of which are directed ultimately at pushing Australia back to a more monocultural world where it is universally acknowledged that there is a dominant perspective, a dominant set of values and a dominant cultural dimension which those with different origins are expected to adapt to, to adopt, and, in some respects, to genuflect to.

That is the subtext of what is happening with this legislation and a variety of things that the Howard government is pursuing. Of course, it is not a great secret as to why this is being pursued. We are seeing the slow, gradual revival of a monocultural, assimilationist philosophy as the core explanation for what Australia is, how our society functions, what its norms are and what its values are, and we are seeing the mounting expectation that people should comply with these autocratically determined values or norms—usually handed down by the Howard government or some members of its cheer squad in the media—and that those who do not are in some way guilty of being un-Australian, guilty of not fitting in and susceptible to exclusion and, sometimes, to the most extreme forms of exclusion, like deportation.

That is the subtext of all of the things that have been initiated in recent years by the Howard government, all for deliberate political purposes. To divide Australia—to single out particular groups of people, the vast bulk of whom are entirely innocent of any wrongdoing, law-breaking or misbehaviour, and to brand them as being in some way inferior, as being in some way second-class citizens or as failing to fit the decreed definition of what it means to be Australian—is deserving of opprobrium and disdain from the majority of the community. To me such division is profoundly offensive. It threatens to return Australia to a situation where we are viewed with some fear and disregard by our neighbours; where, in the wider world, we are seen as a nation that has a dominant ethos that is racially driven; and where there is a set of implicit discriminations in the way our society functions that are designed to exclude particular kinds of people, to shut people out and to send messages that people of certain backgrounds, religions or ethnic origins are in some way secondary to or less Australian than the rest of us.

We should not in any way be naive about this, because in doing this the Howard government is clearly reflecting sentiments that are quite widespread in the Australian community. After decades of progress in eating away at those sentiments, driven by both Liberal and Labor governments—driven by prime ministers such as Malcolm Fraser just as much as by prime ministers such as Bob Hawke—after decades of progress in this country in eating away at racial discrimination, at intolerance and at dominant cultural identities that ultimately exclude other people, after decades of progress under governments of both major political parties, we now have a government headed by a man who has made it his mission to return Australia to a world where people who come from less dominant backgrounds are in some way relegated to a secondary position in Australian society. So let us be under no illusion: this is what this legislation is ultimately about. It is a small part of a wider strategy that is about excluding people. It is about differentiating. It is about dividing Australia. It is about ensuring that that underlying sentiment in much of the Australian community, which has slowly diminished, is legitimised and recognised as entirely appropriate and that discriminating against people on the basis of their racial or ethnic origin or religious orientation is mainstream. It is okay. It is normal. That is ultimately what this is all about.

Like most if not all members of the House, I have attended many citizenship ceremonies over my time in parliament and they are always, without exception, inspiring and moving events. They are profoundly Australian, because, compared with the kind of razzamatazz that you would typically see with equivalent events in some other countries, they are just a good balance. They are relatively low key. They do not go on for too long, usually. We sing the national anthem. We have a brief speech by one or two people—perhaps the mayor, or perhaps the federal or state member of parliament. There are the formalities of the ceremony and we hand over a certificate and some kind of symbol of the local area, like a native plant or something like that, and then subsequently there is a little bit of refreshment, photos and all those kinds of things.

In my experience, the people going through that ceremony are pretty well universally excited, proud and very pleased to be becoming Australian. In my electorate—more so than most—when I turn up to those ceremonies I see an extraordinary array of diversity. I see people from literally all around the world, and rarely do I see a dominant group of people. So it is not that common these days in the citizenship ceremonies I am part of to see people from one particular background as 30, 40 or 50 per cent of the group. Typically, you get all sorts and that is a fantastic thing for this country. It has made us a stronger, better country over the last 30 or 40 years—and long may that continue to happen.

But what the Howard government is doing is chipping away at the underlying sentiment which has made us such a success as a society in modern times: the underlying sentiment of tolerance, of decency, of recognition and acceptance of difference within a wider framework of commitment to the rule of law, of commitment to democracy and of commitment to equal treatment for men and women and an understanding that we all need to have space to live our own lives, to fulfil our own dreams and to pursue our own goals. That is what is at threat here. That is what is under attack here—an underlying ethos that is about real Australian values, true Australian values, not the American version that is so often peddled by the Prime Minister.

We should see Australian citizenship as something that we want people to take up. When people become permanent residents of this country—and certainly this was a dimension of the Hawke and Keating governments’ view on these issues—we should want them to become citizens. If you have acquired the right to permanent residency in this country, our starting point, from the position of government, should be that we want you to become a citizen. So why we would be actively putting barriers up, barriers that really raise the question of why, if this is necessary to try and exclude people or to make it harder for people to become citizens, were they granted permanent residency in the first place. It really flies in the face of the whole ethos of an inclusive notion of Australian citizenship.

The primary subtext, of course, is ultimately about Muslim Australians and is based on the views and in some cases the behaviour of an extremely tiny minority of people, and more particularly based on fears that reflect the views and behaviour of people from other countries who are neither Australian nor ever likely to become Australian. I find disgraceful that result of guilt by association, of the attribution of behaviours, views and motives that belong to people on the other side of the world from Australia who are entirely innocent of any misbehaviour, any wrongdoing or any law-breaking—the group vilification and attribution of those behaviours, attitudes and motivations to those people. The Howard government will be condemned by history for its chipping away at the underlying notion of decency and fairness in Australia and the still fragile notion that all people are entitled to a fair go and equal respect and equal opportunity irrespective of their religion, their race or their ethnicity.

Probably the largest group of Muslims in Australia are Turkish Australians—not typically associated with some of the more lurid headlines we see about al-Qaeda, about terrorism and about Islamic extremism. But in the welter of propaganda that is directed against Muslims in Australia, they are the kind of Muslims who are caught in the crossfire. Even something that is carefully and narrowly focused on one or two individuals, if it is not done in an appropriate way, ultimately ends up smearing large numbers of innocent law-abiding people who have integrated into our society, who continue to adhere to their religious beliefs, fulfil their religious obligations and, at the same time, are hardworking Australians who contribute to our society, go about their business and do not cause problems for others.

Like, I suspect, virtually every other member of the House, I find Sheikh al-Hilali’s expressed views on women totally offensive and outrageous. It is worth pointing out that had they been expressed in this country 40 years ago, the reaction would have been rather different. I can remember growing up hearing very similar views from people in equally prominent and important public positions. It is very clear from opinion poll data that there is a substantial minority of the Australian population, particularly men, who basically hold the same views. That does not justify Sheikh al-Hilali expressing these views, but we need to keep in mind the context that these views are by no means as exotic as we might like to think. It is to the great credit of our society that we have managed to change the dominant view about the role of women in our community and particularly about sexual violence, but we should not for a moment assume that that is totally entrenched or universal. It is not. So we need to keep in mind that those views are by no means totally exceptional in our community.

I condemn those views, but I also applaud the comments of Mick Keelty urging caution, particularly with respect to the media, with regard to the blanket condemnation of Muslims and the spreading of guilt by association. I want to mention one particular example of this which occurred in the Sunday Herald Sun on the weekend. It is normally a paper that I find basically pretty balanced and good; its politics are not exactly mine but, by and large, it does not tend to offend in this regard. However, my friend Khalil Eideh, who is a Labor candidate for the Legislative Council in Victoria and who is a Muslim of Arab origin, has been subject to an extremely unfair campaign over recent months of vilification and guilt by association on matters where his alleged misdeeds really do not stand up to any serious scrutiny.

This article was about a particular Lebanese Australian man who runs a website that is clearly extremist of some description or other, and he was described as having close links with Khalil Eideh. There was a photo of Khalil with that article, and the obvious purpose was to smear Khalil Eideh or to spread the guilt by implication to him because of his alleged association with an Islamic extremist. The evidence for this close association that was provided in the article consisted of two things: firstly, this particular man had attended community functions run by the Alawi Islamic Association, which Khalil has been the president of, and, secondly, he had put out a press release some months ago defending Khalil when he had been criticised in public. If that is close association, then there are an awful lot of very dubious characters around the place that I have to check my associations with, because that clearly has no connection with what any of us would see as genuine close association.

Khalil Eideh tells me that he barely knows this man, yet he is subject to guilt by association in the highest circulation newspaper in the country, which is suggesting that in some way this makes him an Islamic extremist. That is the kind of thing that is happening, and there are many more serious examples of this. That is the kind of thing that Mick Keelty was talking about. He was right to warn us about these things. But what is particularly disgraceful is that that kind of climate is being deliberately created by the Howard government for its own political purposes to divide Australians and to whip up anti-Muslim sentiment for its own political ends. That is where the real disgrace lies.

Finally, I cite an example of the successful integration in our community of a community in which at least half of the members come from a non-Christian background—probably half are Christian and half are Buddhist. They are Asian and they were subject to a lot of attacks and pressure about Asian immigration over the years, but they have triumphed and are a great success and, I might add, a great testament to former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser—and they are the Vietnamese community, with whom I have considerable contact. They have managed to survive and prosper in spite of often very negative contexts and now make a fantastic contribution to the Australian community.

One thing that is worth pointing out is that they still continue to campaign about events in Vietnam. They still continue to put pressure on the Vietnamese regime. They put pressure on members of parliament, and I note and applaud their attempts to persuade the Prime Minister to take a stronger line on human rights and corruption in Vietnam when he visits that nation in the very near future. I am happy to be associated with those campaigns. I am very pleased to note that one particular individual, Reverend Nguyen Van Ly, whose case I raised with the Vietnamese government when he was in prison several years ago, has finally, belatedly been released. However, there are many others in that position.

All of this campaigning by the Vietnamese community in Australia is done legally, lawfully and entirely within the laws and norms of Australian society. Is there anything wrong with that? No, there is not. It is a good thing, because ultimately Australia will benefit. So, if ever you want to see an example of where multiculturalism or where respect for each other’s different religions and origins actually benefits Australia, it is the Vietnamese community.

I support the position adopted by the member for Watson on these issues, but I again condemn the Howard government for playing with fire and creating and fostering a climate in this community which ultimately will do great damage to Australia and to the social harmony, diversity and tolerance on which we have managed to build a very successful society.

Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 is to replace the Australian Citizenship Act 1948. Generally it will facilitate dual citizenship and allow people to resume or take up Australian citizenship. It also includes proposals announced by the Prime Minister and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs—in particular, extending the waiting period for citizenship from two years to four years. It includes security checks before citizenship approval and provision for increased personal identifiers such as iris scans. Security risk assessment has to be undertaken by ASIO in order to get citizenship approval. I suppose aspects of this bill do not surprise me, because it involves the Prime Minister imposing his values on the Australian community.

In relation to the extension of the waiting period from two years to four years, an increase from two years to three years was previously flagged after discussion with COAG. But the inference in relation to the extension to four years is that somehow this will help us in relation to the fight against terrorism. I can tell you: terrorist sleepers will wait four years to take out citizenship if that is what is involved in engaging in a terrorist act. I believe it is a retrograde step to go to four years. We have had positive examples of the two-year experience, and I think the case for change has not been made.

The case for change, frankly, is a case that is marketed to the lowest common denominator in our community that thrives on fear and prejudice. It basically takes us back to the old attitudes that this country experienced when the White Australia policy was alive and well and supported by both sides of politics. In my opinion, two years is a sufficient period before someone can take out citizenship, if that is what they want to do. I would suggest that the government would be hard-pressed to bring forward positive examples to support their case for four years. Let’s hear them. Let’s see them. Let’s see where the two-year period has failed us. I do not believe it has. I do not believe it is sufficient to have a policy change of four years that is going to affect people residing in this country.

We should be encouraging people to take out citizenship and we should be avoiding the trap of making it harder. The interesting thing is that the statistics show that citizenship in this country has been taken up in large numbers. DIMIA provided community information summaries which showed, at the 2001 census, the rates of citizenship—the average rate for overseas born people being 75.1 per cent—for the following nationalities: Lebanon, 97 per cent; UK, 65.7 per cent; USA, 64.3 per cent; New Zealand, 36.5 per cent; Vietnam, 96 per cent; and China, 82.6 per cent.

The interesting thing is that, according to the census of 2001, the top birth places of eligible noncitizens were the UK with 36.9 per cent and New Zealand with 21.9 per cent—the ones that were not taking it up were eligible people from Anglo countries. Italy was 4.7 per cent; Malaysia, three per cent; Germany, 2.5 per cent; China, excluding the SARs and Taiwan, 2.2 per cent; the Netherlands, 1.8 per cent; India, 1.7 per cent; Ireland, 1.7 per cent; Indonesia, 1.6 per cent; and others, 22 per cent. So I do not accept that the need to move to four years is justified on the basis of the fear of terrorism. That is garbage.

In relation to the proposal by the parliamentary secretary and the Prime Minister that we have a citizenship test plan and the release of this document and discussion paper Australian citizenship: much more than a ceremony, I would strongly assert that the current requirements are sufficient. We have had a good take-up rate, and to turn around and say again that we will look at the overseas examples and that somehow this is going to make it better under this values test for Australian citizenship is just an absolute fraud that is being perpetrated on the Australian community and, in my view, is again an instance where we are pandering to the prejudice that is out there amongst not all but a section of the Australian community. I say the Australian people deserve better and, when you occupy the prime ministership in this country, we expect leadership. This is not leadership; it is a crass attempt to garnishee votes and, quite frankly, a crass attempt to feed into the worst elements of our society.

What does the United Kingdom use for preparatory testing for citizenship? Here are some questions from that test:

Which of these courts uses a jury system – magistrates, crown, youth or county court?

This is a test for UK citizenship? Other questions are:

Your employer can dismiss you for joining a trade union – true or false?

Which of these telephone numbers can be used to dial the emergency services ... ?

Which of these statements is correct – a television licence is required for each television in a home or a single television licence covers all televisions in a home?

I ask: do we want to adopt this test or something similar for those becoming Australian citizens? Get real; get fair dinkum.

What is Canada’s test? Some of their questions are:

Who are the Aboriginal peoples of Canada?

Where did the first European settlers in Canada come from?

These are reasonable questions. Others are:

What does Confederation mean?

What part of the Constitution legally protects the basic rights and freedoms of all Canadians?

What are the two official languages of Canada?

What does the Canadian flag look like?

What is the population of Canada?

Who is Canada’s Head of State?

How many electoral districts are there in Canada?

What is the capital city or the province or territory in which you live?

I would say that Canadian citizens by birth would have trouble answering a number of those questions let alone people who aspire to be citizens. But the more fundamental question I would ask is: what value does a test like that add to a person actually becoming a Canadian citizen? I think the answer to that is self-evident: none.

The US test questions—and I note these because they are in the parliamentary secretary’s discussion paper and they should be put on the record—include:

What colours are the stripes on the flag? Answer: The stripes on the flag are red and white.

Name the highest part of the Judiciary Branch of our Government? ...

In what year was the Constitution written? ...

Where is the White House located? ...

Which President was the first Commander in Chief of the US military? ...

Write or read aloud “America is the land of the free”, “Only Congress can declare war” or “The teacher was

proud of her class”.

In the Netherlands, the paper says questions include such things as:

the applicant is shown pictures of a man at a post office and asked what does the man need – the options are a passport, bank card or identity card shown in picture format

the applicant is played a recorded message and asked whether the message was a news bulletin or weather forecast

the applicant is shown a picture of a rain cloud and asked to look at the picture and say out loud what the weather is like today.

These are the examples that are contained in the parliamentary secretary’s discussion paper, and they need to be read out to show how ridiculous each and every one of those tests is in each of those countries which say, ‘If you can answer this test, it qualifies you for citizenship of our country.’ To me, what qualifies you for citizenship of a country is something very different. I think it is contained in our citizenship pledge:

From this time forward ...

I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its People,

whose democratic beliefs I share,

whose rights and liberties I respect, and

whose laws I will uphold and obey.

That is a pledge to Australia and its people—not to a foreign monarch. That was taken out, which allowed a lot of Irish people to come forward and take out citizenship. But it is a pledge that is simple and yet encapsulates it all. Notwithstanding that, people will take that pledge and not comply with Australia’s laws or Australia’s values. They will breach the law. They will fall into error. But that does not disqualify that particular procedure, which I would argue is the best procedure for this country to adopt. It does not require the necessity of going to the next level of a citizenship test or, indeed, this view of people needing English ability and a more knowledgeable view of the English language before they can take out citizenship of this country.

If we had always applied the test that some people are currently proposing, many people would not have taken out citizenship and many of us would not be here today, because our parents would not have got in in the first place. I defy this Prime Minister, this parliamentary secretary or anyone to argue that those migrants have not made a contribution to this country or that the problems they may have had with English in the first place were not overcome by efforts on their part. True, some people have not gone to the next level, but the next generation also needs to be looked at in terms of the overall package when someone takes out citizenship.

The Hawke and Keating governments poured money and resources into the English language program to encourage people to take up English, to be able to access the workforce and all things within the Australian community. There is no doubt that it is beneficial—and no-one is arguing that it is not—to have a knowledge of the English language. But to have a disqualifier because of it on someone taking out citizenship! A number of kids in our schools would not pass the test if you believed the assertions of some people about the quality of English that is undertaken in our schools.

We need to be very careful that we do not become too self-righteous, too holy and too prescriptive about what it takes to be an Australian citizen, because the greatest thing that this country has had going for it certainly is the postwar migration. The Olympics in Sydney were achieved on the basis of diversity, tolerance and understanding in this country. That is how Australia accumulated the votes to get the Olympics in the year 2000. We were a beacon to the world. Now we are turning on ourselves with this narrow, puritanical view of the world—this view that basically puts English above all else and does not give credit to the quality of the individuals.

We should be out there helping people, encouraging people to become more articulate in the English language, but I tell you what, Mr Deputy Speaker: you will never hear me say that it is a compulsory requirement, that it is what makes you a good citizen or that it is what makes you eligible to become a citizen. I think, quite frankly, that that attitude is the wrong attitude and it is one that should be resisted.

We should be learning from the mistakes of the past. We should be learning from the mistakes of the White Australia policy—the fear of the Chinese, the fear of the yellow hordes that formulated a lot of policy in the early part of the last century. The aliens act saw people having their names and addresses recorded, being photographed and being required to provide their future addresses when they moved to them. There was the fear of the alien and the internment of the alien, where you put everyone into a class.

To me the values have to be universal values, because what is it to be Australian in terms of hopes and aspirations? It is not necessarily knowing Bradman’s score—knowing that his average fell short of 100. It is not our sporting history; it is about putting in. I am a lawyer by trade so, for me, it is about universal values, human rights values, the rule of law. But you do not give someone a legal test before you say, ‘You are good enough to be an Australian citizen.’ That is a disqualifier. As I said, it is quite wrong to hold language up to the rest of the community to say we are going to get better citizens. What you are going to do is disqualify a whole class of people whose forebears, history has shown, made great contributions to this country. You spit in their face. It is a lack of respect and it is a lack of recognition of diversity. It is a narrowness. It is one of the things that has the coalition of the willing in trouble in Iraq.

We should not be going after the human spirit here. We should not be judgemental. We should have a situation where we accept a set of standards and a set of values that are common values and a situation where, if those values are ascribed to, we accept people in good faith. We do not have a presumption of guilt against people because they cannot necessarily speak English as fluently as we do.

I will not go into the history of this country, where certain tests were imposed on a certain person in the thirties to exclude him from this country because he was on the left of the spectrum, because the government back then was worried about his politics. I would ask the government to rethink a few of these things, because they are dead wrong and they are entering into a dark chapter in our history.

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

Can I take this opportunity to say to my colleague the member for Banks: ‘ditto’ on a wonderful speech. I am very pleased to be speaking to the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 today. I would like to begin with some history on the Australian Citizenship Act. With its passing into law on 29 January 1949, the Australian Citizenship Act established Australian citizenship as a legal category for the very first time. The act was, and remains, a significant piece of legislation in Australia’s history—one that continues to provide the key guidelines for how Australian citizenship is legally recognised and defined. Since its introduction, the 1948 act has been amended some 36 times. Many of these amendments were introduced to make the 1948 act more reflective of our growing migrant population and Australia’s changing relationship to Britain and to erase instances of discrimination contained in earlier versions of the act.

The 2005 bill before the House today and the additional amendments that the government introduced to the bill in October this year will replace the old Australian Citizenship Act 1948. Some of the amendments contained in this bill are an improvement on the 1948 act and, as such, I and many of my other colleagues readily welcome them. Many of these improvements encompass recommendations made by the Australian Citizenship Council in a report it released on 18 February 2000.

This bill also introduces a number of new provisions that the government has sought to justify as necessary measures aimed at better securing Australia against the threat of terrorism. These provisions were first hinted at by the Prime Minister himself in a press release dated 8 September last year, which was titled ‘Counter-terrorism laws strengthened’. Among other things, these new security measures include a greatly expanded role for ASIO in the area of citizenship, especially in relation to the granting of citizenship, new restrictions on the eligibility criteria for Australian citizenship that I would say go backwards rather than forwards and the introduction of new discretionary powers that will enable the minister to directly intervene in decisions regarding the granting of Australian citizenship, including the ability to deny citizenship to individuals regardless of whether they satisfy the citizenship eligibility criteria or not.

Whatever position one takes on these new measures, the very nature of these changes to our citizenship laws demand that they be given serious and detailed consideration. One of the welcome changes brought about by this bill relates to section 17 of the 1948 act. For Australian citizens who had renounced their Australian citizenship under section 17 of the 1948 act, the new bill makes provisions allowing them to resume their Australian citizenship if they are found to be of good character. Under proposed section 21 of the new bill, children of former Australian citizens who lost their citizenship under section 17 will also be able to acquire Australian citizenship by conferral.

These are improvements to Australian citizenship laws,  and the opposition supports them. However, under section 21 of the 2005 bill, children of Australian citizens who renounced their citizenship under section 18 of the 1948 act will still not be able to acquire Australian citizenship. In effect, this is the first of a series of discriminatory clauses introduced in this bill. Both provisions have significant implications for Australia’s Maltese community, and because I have a very large Maltese community in my electorate it is my responsibility to put their concerns on record here in this place. Children of Australian citizens who renounced their citizenship under section 18 of the 1948 act should be given the same rights and access to Australian citizenship as those children of Australian citizens who renounced their citizenship under section 17 of the old act. They should be given equal opportunity in their bid for citizenship, as was recommended by the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee in its inquiry into the position of expatriates. I, along with many of my colleagues, again call on the government to amend this obvious discrepancy in Australia’s citizenship laws. It is one which is unnecessary, discriminatory and unfair.

I want to turn to the new security measures that this bill introduces to Australia’s citizenship laws. According to clauses 17(4), 24(4) and 34 of the new bill, the minister is prohibited from approving a citizenship application while an adverse or qualified ASIO security assessment is in force, and this new statutory requirement—

Debate interrupted.

As I was saying before the interruption of the debate, according to clauses 17(4), 24(4) and 30(4) of the new bill, the minister is prohibited from approving a citizenship application while an adverse or qualified ASIO security assessment is in force. This new statutory requirement will apply to all applicants for Australian citizenship, whether by descent, by conferral or by resumption. In effect, this gives ASIO the power of veto over the granting of Australian citizenship.

One concern that has been voiced by a number of civil liberty groups is that this new arrangement has the potential to undermine an individual’s ability to properly appeal an adverse decision regarding his or her application for citizenship because the Attorney-General can certify that a person is either not to be notified of an adverse security assessment or that evidence deemed to jeopardise Australia’s national security should be heard in secret and kept from the applicant and his or her legal team during the appeals process.

The bill also introduces new provisions for the collection and storage of, as well as access to, personal identifiers used to verify a person’s identity during the application for citizenship. These include fingerprints and handprints, height and weight, a head and shoulders photograph, an iris scan, a signature and other possible identifiers which the minister is given the power to add to the bill at a later date. As it stands, the 2005 bill contains no safeguards that would prevent it from being amended in the future to make it permissible for personal information, ostensibly collected for the purposes of a citizenship application, to become accessible to other parties. The bill also remains silent on how personal identifiers collected will be stored. As it currently stands, the bill already allows for the disclosure of these personal identifiers to the Australian states and territories. These weaknesses allow for too many loopholes in the bill, and I would like to see additional measures put in place that expressly prevent the exploitation of such loopholes in the future.

Under clauses 24(2) and 30(2) of the 2005 bill, the minister is also able to refuse an application for the conferral or resumption of citizenship, even in cases where an applicant successfully meets all of the necessary criteria for citizenship. The 2005 bill introduces further measures. Under the new bill, the age at which an individual is no longer required to have a basic knowledge of the English language when applying for Australian citizenship is raised from 50 years to 60 years of age. In addition, under clause 22 of the 2005 bill, the permanent residency requirement was originally extended from two to three years, but this has been further extended to four years under the new amendments recently introduced by the government. Permanent residents must now live in Australia for four years before they can apply for citizenship, though I note that the government has finally heeded the opposition’s calls to have the retrospective nature of clause 22 amended, meaning that those who become permanent residents before the 2005 bill and its new amendments come into effect will continue to be assessed according to the two-year residency requirement.

In the case of its initial decision to increase the number of years permanent residents are required to live in Australia from two to three years, the government argued that such an increase was necessary for security reasons. I was not privy to, and I am sure no-one else in this chamber was privy to, the security briefings that led to the decision to increase Australia’s residency requirements to three years. I am yet to be convinced that increasing the qualifying period for citizenship acts as an effective deterrent against those who may wish to harm us and to harm our society.

The government’s decision to increase the number of years permanent residents are required to live in Australia from two years to four years becomes even more tenuous as the government switches from national security concerns to its new argument that increasing the residency requirements to four years will give new migrants more time to learn about and to adapt to Australian values and, of course, to learn the English language.

It is hard to overlook some of the absurd assumptions that are operating behind this argument—for example, that it is somehow possible to quantitatively measure the amount of time it takes someone to absorb and adopt Australian values, or that Australian values are so far removed from the way of life and beliefs of other people that it takes four years to master them, or that increasing the amount of time people remain outside of the national community as permanent residents rather than Australian citizens will somehow encourage them to identify more fully with Australia. The list goes on.

The government also claims that lowering the age at which proficiency in English becomes compulsory for new citizens from 60 years to 50 years is a measure designed to further encourage integration because, without a working knowledge of English, getting by on an everyday basis becomes harder—if not impossible. Yet, at the same time that the government keeps drawing a link between proficiency in English and successful integration, it continues to slash funding to those very programs designed to help new migrants learn English. Today it has wiped away some $10.8 million in funding to those English language courses and programs traditionally available to new migrants under the Adult Migrant English Program.

To make matters worse, the government has also drastically cut core funding to migrant resource centres across Australia, which have long played a key role in helping migrants integrate into mainstream Australian society. If the government truly believed that the English language was the key to integration and if it were truly serious about promoting English language skills for new migrants, it would not be undermining the very programs, agencies and networks that are there to teach English to new migrants and to better facilitate their integration into society.

Something else is going on when we have a government that argues for the importance of English as a tool for integration yet simultaneously undermines the very premise of its argument by slashing funding to assistance programs and English language courses designed for new migrants. Something else is going on when we have a government that bases its decision to increase the residency qualifying period for citizenship on the claim that new migrants need more time to learn Australian values and the Australian way of life.

Through all of this, I believe that there is another political agenda at work. One of the overarching claims made by this government—and which this bill reinforces by making it harder for people to become Australian citizens—is that Australian citizenship is something that new Australians should value and respect because Australian citizenship is a privilege and not a right. This is the political line that the government has been feeding to the Australian public: we need to make Australian citizenship more valuable, new migrants need to be given more time to learn what the Australian way of life is all about and we need to change Australian citizenship laws accordingly.

The clear inference from all of this is that, as things presently stand, new Australian citizens, or should I say ‘ethnic Australians’, somehow do not value Australian citizenship enough and that they have failed to fully integrate and embrace ‘the Australian way of life’, a term that is now so frequently and loosely thrown around by this government that, in most instances, it is hard to know what is meant. It is not hard to conclude that, much like ‘national security’, invoking ‘the Australian way of life’ has simply become a convenient rhetorical and emotional tool used by the government to justify its extreme policies. This is the problem that the bill we are discussing today supposedly fixes.

What is missing is any evidence that such a problem actually exists in the first place. Where is the evidence confirming that those who acquire Australian citizenship do not value it enough? Where is the evidence that new migrants need more time to learn the Australian way of life? The answer is that no such evidence exists. This government has introduced a bill largely based on arguments, insinuations, warnings and conclusions that it cannot substantiate. It is making a tremendous amount of noise about fixing a problem that does not actually exist or is certainly not widespread and systemic. If you look at the last 30 years in Australia, they bear witness to a completely different reality—one in which the policy of multiculturalism has proved incredibly successful in providing a solid framework for integration and social harmony in this country. Multiculturalism has been one of Australia’s great post World War II policy success stories and, in an age as turbulent as ours, it is a model that Australia should be actively promoting to other parts of the world. Unfortunately this government is either unable or unwilling to see this.

In its attempt to convince us that migrant communities in Australia are failing to integrate and failing to adopt Australian values, this government is effectively helping to create the very problems and the very divisions that it says it wants to fix. This government plays on people’s fears, taking every opportunity it can to manipulate and exaggerate social division and social discord. That is what the media has aptly labelled ‘wedge politics’.

In the case of the bill before the House, the message that this bill sends is not simply directed at those wanting to become Australian citizens; it is also directed at mainstream Australia. The message it conveys to them is that migrants somehow do not value their Australian citizenship enough, that they take Australian citizenship for granted and that they fail to fully integrate and embrace the Australian way of life. Immigration, integration, refugees, Arabs, Muslims—these are the preferred hunting grounds of the government as it continues to stoke the flames of division, fear and suspicion in this country for its own political agenda.

In ways both subtle and often insidious, the Howard government and its cohorts in the media have sought to denigrate and effectively erase from public memory the enormous contribution that migrants have long made to Australia’s economy and to its social and cultural life under the policy of multiculturalism. The intended target behind this divisive politics is the policy of multiculturalism itself. John Howard has never liked multiculturalism—he never uses the word—and for the last 10 years this government has been slowly chipping away at many of the policies originally introduced under its name.

Making citizenship into a problem is one more example of the groundwork this government is laying for a future assault on multiculturalism. This is, I believe, where the government is heading in the lead-up to next year’s election. In the same way that John Howard used Tampa and the arrival of refugees in Australia to rally the nation against what was always an exaggerated threat, so the Prime Minister is looking to use the issue of integration and the supposed failure of multiculturalism to once again rally the nation against what has become another exaggerated threat.

This government redefines immigration as a national problem and a national crisis. It promotes a politics that continually questions Australians from different religious, ethnic and cultural backgrounds over their loyalty to Australia and portrays them as an ever-present threat to some imagined and supposedly more authentic Australian way of life. The government has intentionally used such politics to drive an artificial wedge into the very heart of Australian society, pitting one section of the Australian community against another against a backdrop of fear, suspicion and mutual recrimination. This is the reality of what is being labelled Australia’s ‘cultural wars’, where the progressive gains this country has made under multiculturalism are slowly whittled away and replaced by cultural, social and political conservativism that remains inflexible, unyielding and in complete denial when it comes to Australia’s history of migration and settlement.

If you constantly harass and vilify a community and use punitive measures against them, if you constantly challenge their loyalty and relevance to Australia, then that community will become defensive. Integration occurs when people are made to feel welcome and where their differences are respected, not derided and rejected. This is the lesson that multiculturalism has taught us. We have enjoyed a successful history of integration in this country under the policy of multiculturalism, and there is no evidence that it has been a failure. I am a product and proof of this success.

We cannot risk losing the social cohesion that multiculturalism has made possible because of the acts of a small minority. We need to engage and talk to those groups we are concerned about, not further alienate and marginalise them. We need to make them feel included, not excluded. These bills and measures run the risk of being counterproductive. Malcolm Fraser is right when he argues that the government’s actions seem intended to lay the groundwork for an election fought around the issue of race. And Irene Khan, head of Amnesty International, is right when she says that multiculturalism is not a policy governments choose to support or not support; rather, it is a global reality that governments need to learn to deal with. We have done a tremendous job in dealing with multiculturalism in Australia and we ought not to do anything that jeopardises our cohesive and coherent society.

Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 consolidate and rewrite the Citizenship Act 1948. Most of the legislation is concerned with the taking of citizenship, according to the Australian Citizenship Council report released on 18 February 2000. The latest amendments, tabled on 12 October 2006, include recommendations from the inquiry of the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs into Australian citizenship and the inquiry of the Standing Committee on Family and Human Services into overseas adoption in Australia. These have resulted in amendments in relation to adoption rules and stateless persons.

This is one of those bills in which there are elements that the opposition can support and elements that we quite stringently oppose. We oppose the increase in a person’s residency from three to four years before they can apply for citizenship. We supported the changes from two to three years based on advice that was received in relation to the government’s security package, which it tabled in the parliament. After we received those classified security briefs, that decision was seen as achieving a correct balance. There has been no justification by the government as to why it has extended the period from three to four years, apart from its argument that it allows more time for people to integrate. It is an argument that we do not accept.

We also propose to amend the lack of ministerial discretion in citizenship claims by stateless persons who have been convicted for more than five years under foreign law. Although the position that we are taking will affect only a small minority of people, we feel that the lack of ministerial discretion will exclude people who have been jailed during dictatorial rule—for example, people in Iraq who were jailed for sedition under Saddam Hussein’s government—and therefore we are proposing those changes.

One thing we will not support is a short-sighted policy that delays people from committing to our values in the citizenship ceremony. We cannot support amendments that will cause migrants to take longer to integrate into our society by keeping them out of that mainstream. Australians everywhere should be concerned about this government’s proposal to make people wait four years before they make that very important commitment to our way of life. We want all migrants to be aware of our values when they come into our country, and delaying eligibility to take the citizenship pledge to four years shows how manipulative and how out of touch the Howard government really is.

I have had the privilege since 1993 as the member for Corio of attending many citizenship ceremonies, and I have to say that they are uplifting experiences. When you attend those citizenship ceremonies you come to understand the depth of the commitment that is being made by people who take out Australian citizenship and their sincerity and that of their families in making that decision. It ought not to be a decision that is prolonged. People who are willing to make that commitment ought to be welcomed into Australian society as quickly and as practicably as possible.

Gone are my days on the Colac Council in rural Victoria when after the business of the day—which often went into the late evening or early hours of the morning—the prospective citizens were wheeled in to take the oath as an afterthought to the main council meeting. What a dreadful way to induct new citizens into mainstream Australia—as an afterthought at the back end of a local council meeting, when everybody was tired and wanted to get home and the people had been sitting around for many hours waiting to take the oath of allegiance to Australia. Thankfully that has changed. It changed because the Labor government took this issue seriously. The Howard government presumably has the same sentiments, I would hope, in relation to new migrants and people wanting to become Australian citizens.

I must commend the City of Greater Geelong for the manner in which they conduct their citizenship ceremonies on behalf of the Australian government and the Australian community. They have structured a meaningful ceremony that invites participation from not only those migrants who are seeking to take out Australian citizenship but also their families and friends. It is a joyous occasion and one which, as I have said before, when I attend, I find most uplifting.

During the week I viewed Australian Storyand anybody who saw that could not help but be uplifted by the young Geelong man, Tim McCallum, who was featured. Tim has a promising singing career and he received admission some years ago to the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts. He turned up to that particular institution for the initial induction and then decided to go down to the beach for a swim with mates. He went into a wave and into a sandbank and suffered a serious injury, which thankfully has not terminated his singing career. But Tim may live for the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Tim McCallum has been a feature of those citizenship ceremonies. He does a lot of good work around the City of Greater Geelong. Part of his good work is that he sings at our citizenship ceremonies. It is always a wonderful occasion, much appreciated by those people taking out Australian citizenship and appreciated by the Geelong community. On the floor of this House I pay tribute not only to Tim McCallum’s courage but also to the fact that he makes himself available with a deep sense of public service to the Geelong community and shares his great musical talent with people who take out Australian citizenship on that very important day of decision for them.

We are very fortunate that in the City of Greater Geelong we have the Geelong Ethnic Communities Council and a migrant resource centre which operates under its auspices, serving people from non-English-speaking backgrounds who have come to Geelong to make their living, set up their families and make their contribution to Australia. Recently I attended the 30-year celebrations of the Geelong Ethnic Communities Council, which now operates under the name of Diversitat. That was another uplifting and joyous occasion, because there the Geelong community—and well over 20 per cent of the Geelong community comes from a non-English-speaking background—celebrated a council that was formed when, I think, five or six people sat around a table and decided that it was important that the ethnic communities got together to expand their contribution to Geelong and to make sure that appropriate services were available to support the many people who had migrated to Australia and settled in Geelong. Many of those, people who did not speak English, came to Australia to work in our factories in Geelong and in other business enterprises. They did not have a command of the English language and worked assiduously to learn the language and to make a contribution.

Let me put on the public record the appreciation of the Geelong community for the vision and sacrifice of the original founders of the Geelong Ethnic Communities Council. I refer to John and George Angelovich, Joe Pavlovich, Eugene Pedzinski, Frank De Stephano and Mile Stojanovski. I want to also put on the public record the thanks of the Geelong community to Jordan Mavros, the former CEO of Diversitat, who made an enormous contribution to bringing communities together, resourcing them, supporting them and making them genuine participants in the wider multicultural community in Geelong. I pay a tribute also to Michael Martinez, the current CEO, and the staff of the migrant resource centre for the innovative ways that they continue to deliver services to Geelong’s migrant community, supported very well, I must say, by previous Labor governments and the current Bracks government. We are very fortunate that the Geelong Ethnic Communities Council is expanding. We have new groups that have just joined: the Indian, Maori, Sudanese, Nigerian and Chinese communities. Geelong is a multicultural city and we are proud of it. Let me say to the rest of this nation from the floor of this House that we have little tolerance for those who want to attack multiculturalism in our community.

I say to the Geelong Muslim community: you are most welcome in our midst. Along with the other communities that have built Geelong, you are playing your constructive part in a whole range of areas: your contribution to the economic life of Geelong, the educational life of the city and the cultural life of the city. We appreciate your involvement in the community, your membership of the Geelong Ethnic Communities Council and, indeed, your participation in the wider Geelong community.

A most fascinating element of this whole debate has been discussion at the national level and at the community level on the issue of values. I am reminded of an article that appeared in the Sunday Times on Sunday, 17 September 2006, where some comments were made by Amir Ali, chairman of John Howard’s Islamic advisory board. He laid out in this article what would be considered some of Australia’s values. I have not met Mr Amir Ali—I am sure he is a well-meaning person in making comment on these matters and when I raise this I do not disparage his contribution to the debate at all. But when I went through the list of values that had been suggested in this article in relation to what Australians should assume, I must say some alarm bells began to ring.

Here is the list, which I extracted from this article, and various statements that were made about values. Firstly, we ought to have a respect for and tolerance of diversity of opinions. I would have thought that is a value for any civilised society. Surely that is not one that we ought to be trumpeting as uniquely Australian; that is a given for anybody who calls themselves a civilised person. Another value is loyalty to Australia. I have not met anybody who has taken out the oath who has not had in his or her heart a loyalty to Australia. I have to say, I grew up in a school where we never hoisted the Union Jack, and there were some very interesting reasons why that occurred. I guarantee that everyone who went through that school is no less a citizen for not hoisting the flag and saluting it every morning. I will not go into the reasons for it—it might have had something to do with my name. However, let me say that all of the people who went through that school in the main were civilised beings. There was no question of their loyalty to Australia. We had a bit of a problem with loyalty to a foreign monarch some 10,000 miles away, but we had no problem in our loyalty to Australia.

Other values here are respect for national icons and upholding democratic values and laws. They are a given for anybody who wants to live in any civilised society anywhere in the world. Treating everyone equally is an Australian value, isn’t it? Willingness to help others in times of trouble—what is unique about that? That is not just an Australian value; that is a global, universal value—as is valuing the environment and encouraging aesthetic values such as sport, music and the arts.

I have to say: if this is the debate we are going to have on values, let us have a real debate on values. Let us have a real debate on the fundamental values of the Prime Minister and the government. I have a good value that the Prime Minister ought to put out in the public arena: telling the truth. What about the value of truthfulness? We have had the ‘never ever’ GST, ‘children overboard’, Telstra and the war in Iraq. What about the universal value of truth? Maybe members opposite would like to debate that point. While I am at it, let us get down to the absolute truth and Australian values; what about a non-core value? Perhaps we ought to have core values and non-core values, like the PM’s core and non-core promises, because then we can get a more accurate fix on whether in fact a person is a good citizen or not.

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

He could make a commitment to come in on the core values and then call it a non-core value when you get here!

Gavan O'Connor (Corio, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. The honourable member for Hotham is incisive in his analysis, as usual, and his contribution to this debate is most valued because the stupidity of the Prime Minister in harping on about values is that he has none himself. If he valued truth, he would not have been up to his ears in deceit about Iraq. I ask yet again: where are the weapons of mass destruction?

What about the good Australian value of compassion? We sure showed that with the Tampa and our immigration policy. What about a respect for democratic values? That is a good one for the government to adopt. If you are a minister in the Howard government you have to be charged by the AFP to be thrown out. This is a government without any ministerial standards and it abuses the democratic processes of this parliament day in and day out. Maybe a commitment to democratic values by the Prime Minister and members of the government ought to be the order of the day.

When the government comes to this debate in a serious manner and not seeking to manipulate the fears of Australians, we might have something to talk about. But, when the Prime Minister has non-core Australian values, he forfeits the right to occupy the position. A Prime Minister who involves himself in deceiving the Australian people time after time forfeits any high ground in the values debate in Australia. Let us get it very clear here. The values debate is not about migrants and inclusiveness in the Australian context; it is a base and bald manipulation by a government that is losing political ground, is arrogant and must rely yet again on manipulating the fears of the Australian people. The multicultural community of Geelong will not wear that in any way, shape or form. I am pleased in this debate today to oppose that element— (Time expired)

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am delighted to follow my friend and colleague the member for Corio. He is a passionate supporter, as am I, of multiculturalism in this country, believing like all on our side that it has been the great strengthening cement for the growth and diversity that this country has experienced. The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 replaces the 1948 Australian Citizenship Act. Whilst that act was the first to establish Australian citizenship, Australians retained their status as British subjects under that act. The reality is that, as a nation, we have grown significantly since the Second World War and we have had a massive contribution to that growth through immigration. With that, the concept of citizenship itself has had to evolve. Indeed, that original act has had 36 amendments to it, the most recent being in 2002. All of it has been developed in the spirit of bipartisanship, of not playing politics with the issues of immigration in this country. There was bipartisan recognition of the need to modernise the act to take account of the advances that had been made and the developments in the nation.

When Labor were in office we held an extensive inquiry under the chairmanship of another good friend, Senator Jim McKiernan. He and his committee made some very worthy recommendations—and they were shelved with the change of government in 1996. Now, 10 years on, this government finally has decided to do something, to pick up the task that we commenced over a decade ago. It has also drawn on the conclusions of the Australian Citizenship Council, but in all of that the government’s proposals were not tabled in the parliament until the 2005 bill, which we are debating. Why was that? It was not because the government had come to the view it needed to modernise—this was Labor’s position and it should have been a bipartisan position. The government came to that view because they felt they had to do something post the London bombings. This bill is not genuinely driven by a desire to modernise, to embrace or to update our experience as a nation with multiculturalism, to be proud of it, to promote it and to enhance it. It is not to build on the good qualities of tolerance and inclusiveness; the government wants to fire up, yet again, the urgency of the need to play on fear brought about through terrorist activities.

So here we have it, a government that wants to move on this issue and promote the values, if you can call them that, of fear and division rather than the values that we on this side of the House espouse of hope, opportunity, compassion and tolerance—the sorts of things that the member for Corio was talking about. It is these latter values that have to guide our approach to a comprehensive rewrite of this act. We on this side acknowledge the importance of doing other things if they are recommended to us, particularly in the wake of the London bombing. As important as that was in July of last year, I now ask the question: why are we not debating it until November the following year? Urgency, it seems, only matters when it is on the front page and fear is in people’s minds. Out of sight, it is also out of the government’s mind until some new spark, some new opportunity to drive the wedge, emerges again. I will come to that in a minute.

Also interesting to observe is that, post the London bombings, at the COAG meeting the premiers agreed to increase the time required to apply for citizenship from two to three years. This was picked up in the 2005 bill but not implemented until now. And now we have another amendment before us, without any consultation, to extend it by another year.

There is a lot in this bill with which we agree. Much of it we advocated, but there are key concerns. The government, as I said, is now amending the bill to increase the time required to apply for citizenship by another year. Labor vehemently opposes that extension. The original extension was based on consultation and agreement with the states and on intelligence briefings consequent on the London bombing. We accepted the process; we agreed on the outcome. No such consultations occurred in relation to the four-year requirement. We do not agree with it. Our second reading amendment opposes it. If the provision passes, Labor will reverse it on coming to power.

So why the change to four years? There has been no explanation by the government. It comes about because the newly appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Robb, the member for Goldstein, conducted consultations and presented a discussion paper called ‘Australian citizenship: much more than a ceremony’. It went out in September this year. That discussion paper put out a number of proposals for consideration. One of them was the four-year extension—we acknowledge that. Another was the requirement for newly arrived migrants to pass a yet to be defined test, and another was the requirement to learn English.

These are controversial proposals, but of course they can be debated. We recognise the discussion paper putting them forward and we will engage in that debate because we have some very strong views. But why are we legislating for one of those proposals without the consultation that the government said would be accommodated by the release of the paper? It is unnecessary. It is provocative. That is the way this government acts. Labor, in office, will move to reverse this decision if the legislation passes.

Also presented in that discussion paper—it is not included here, but I want to make some comment about it—is the provocative requirement for people to speak English. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, provided resources are made available to do it. I make this point: I hope this is a provision that the government will not make retrospective because, if they do, there will be a lot of people who will not be able to remain in this country. The government would be sending a lot of people home today—people who have made real contributions to this nation.

Earlier the member for Kooyong spoke of his father’s experience as a person who never really mastered English, even though he thought he did, because he was too busy working hard to provide for his family and helping to build a new multicultural society. I am reminded that, when I first became the member for Hotham, the Nissan car plant in my electorate closed. That was a consequence of the Button car plan, when there was a massive rejigging of the industry away from total manufacture to component manufacture, and it saw the demise of one of the key manufacturers. At the time Labor had a program called the labour adjustment program that was designed for this restructuring. It was not there to pretend the restructuring would not happen but to recognise that people needed a hand up, that they needed help to make the transition.

The big problem at the Nissan plant was that we had 150 nationalities in the place. The trouble was a lot of them could not speak English. There was no point giving them the training programs because they could not speak the language or read the courses—and why? It was not because they had not made a contribution to the nation—many of them had worked in the plant in one form or another for decades. They had not been required to do so because all the company required of them was process working. We were maturing as an economy. Labor understood at the time the importance of committing resources, real resources, to help people make the transition, including the ability to speak the language.

English language training and people’s capacity to speak are important. It is just as important for the nation’s cohesion, for its growth, as it is for the individual’s opportunity. It is not enough to require proficiency in English; we must also provide the resources to enable people to learn the language. Labor understood that. It did much to provide assistance in settlement, in advocacy and in language training. But what do we have from the Howard government? It has cut back that assistance. On the one hand it is out there arguing that people should be required to learn the language and on the other, in the same year, it has cut another $10.8 million from the Adult Migrant English Program. What hypocrisy is that?

It is all very well to have the notion that people have to do things, but when they are not doing them and when they are not assisted to do them, they are not programs for inclusion—they are programs for exclusion. That is the point that this government has to come to grips with. It is not just English with which we have to help new arrivals; employment programs are another good case in point. The other day I received four DVDs from Minister Sharman Stone applauding achievements under the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, a scheme which Labor introduced. It is one of the most successful labour market programs ever developed anywhere in the world—a program that has a success rate in excess of 90 per cent, a program that was given significant impetus by us under the Working Nation program, which was cut back by this government.

But, more than that, when I was the Minister for Employment, Education and Training, I understood the importance of tailoring aspects of that very successful program to meet the needs of migrant communities. Think about it: the types of migrants who came to this country had great entrepreneurial flair. What they did not have was the wherewithal, the ability and the resources to set themselves up in a business, to learn accounting procedures or many of the sorts of things that we take for granted. We tailored the NEIS program very specifically to recognise the support and assistance needed in migrant communities. It was a raging success and another initiative where Labor is prepared to not just talk about the need for people to get into business or learn the English language but also provide support mechanisms to help them do it.

The other important initiative was the support for the migrant resource centres—interestingly a program that a former member for Goldstein passionately supported. When Ian McPhee held that seat he continued the resourcing of the program. I should know as my father was appointed by him to chair the Prahran Migrant Resource Centre, a position he held for more than 20 years. Prahran is one of the most successful migrant resource centres in this country. That was an example of bipartisanship by an earlier member for Goldstein. I will be very interested to see, with the admonitions to new migrants that the new member for Goldstein would have them adhere to, whether he and the government are prepared to commit the same level of resources to help people take up the challenges that are being thrown out to them. Migrant resource centres are terribly important not just in their support for migrant communities but also for their advocacy and understanding—going out to bat for the special needs of newly-arrived migrants. They are an essential part of a settlement program, of an inclusion program, and of understanding the special needs, reaching out and committing the resources.

When I became the member for Hotham I made sure that we established such a body in the constituency—SEAAC, the Southern Ethnic Advisory and Advocacy Council. That still exists today and does a fantastic job in providing advocacy, assistance and support. More than that, though, it has been a magnet for the essential services in our community—the police, the fire, the ambulance—to work through these networks to respond to the particular needs of communities that are struggling, whether it is in terms of understanding or people going off the rails with drugs and crime. These are the sorts of things we have to commit resources to. We have seen significant examples of where that interface has been able to help and extend to developing young kids, particularly in sport. I am proud of that because I see it on the ground, but it will only happen if you resource these organisations. They have had their resources cut back because this government mouths the words of inclusion but does not practise the mechanisms for ensuring it.

I also make the point that I support the amendment in relation to the particular provision that has an impact on the Maltese in our community. There are some 300 in my electorate. I know the member for Gorton and the member for Prospect have larger proportions. Because of a quirk, there was a circumstance in which people who had to renounce their citizenship under section 18 at a particular time were, as a consequence of the way in which the law in Malta applied, deemed as having retained rights to Maltese citizenship, not having acquired them. I see that the government have made some moves in this direction. I hope that they are prepared to go the full extent. I think there have been some discussions going on. We have certainly proposed an amendment. I urge the government to get this right. There should be no group discriminated against. It is possible for this to be addressed.

I am convinced that immigration has unequivocally been good for this country—good for us economically, good for us socially, good for us culturally. It is a policy that enjoyed bipartisan support until Pauline Hanson—a circumstance that the Howard government condoned. Remember, I say this: of all the leaders of parties who have supported the bipartisanship, there is only one who did not, and he happens to be the Prime Minister today. He was the person who made the point that there were too many Asians in this country, and do you know what happened? The Liberal Party of that day took the Liberal leadership from him. That is what happened. Malcolm Fraser never would have done it. John Gorton would not have done it. You name any other Liberal leader—none of them played that card; only John Howard did. Australia has been a model of multiculturalism. We were able to hold our heads up proud as a nation of tolerance and inclusion. We all know the backlash that occurred with Hansonism and the government’s failed response in relation to it. Businesses were saying we were suffering because the things that we had been valued and respected for no longer existed.

But the Prime Minister does not just stop there. I almost drove the car into the one in front of me when I heard him a couple of Fridays ago reintroduce a word I have not heard for a long time—assimilation—and hold up the Greek community as one the great groups that had assimilated successfully into this country. This Prime Minister either does not get it or he is deliberately trying to impose his agenda. The Greeks that came here do not consider themselves as having assimilated—and I know they have not. I have many of them in my electorate. Certainly they have integrated, but they are proud of their culture, proud of their language, proud of their ancestry and proud of not only their ongoing contribution but their contribution to strengthening this nation. It is wrong, patronising and demeaning to say that they have become assimilated. They brought their language and their culture. They have adapted and they have been a significant contributor, like so many other groups in the community.

To draw people here, we have to go the extra yards to make sure that they are not only made to feel included but also helped to be included in our society. That is what this bill fails to do. We oppose the four-year extension but, more importantly, we will be looking at what the government intends to do in relation to the discussion paper. (Time expired)

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think the debate on our new citizenship laws is timely because it lets us reflect upon things that are of fundamental importance to us as a nation. I speak very frequently at citizenship ceremonies in my electorate and I do so because I think it is one of the most important moments in a new citizen’s life. It is the moment when they make a decision that they will become loyal to Australia above anything else and that they will take on the responsibility that goes with being a citizen, as well as taking the bounty of Australian policy that comes with it. I frequently say that we have invited people from all over the world to bring with them their culture, background and knowledge and it all goes into a big cauldron, a big melting pot, and what comes out is uniquely Australian. But there are some things that are just not welcome in the pot, and the first thing is anyone who does not believe in, subscribe to and uphold the fact that men and women in Australia are equal. That is not welcome in the pot. Anyone who comes and has a prejudice on the base of race or religion is not welcome in the pot.

In Australia we have, over a long period of time, come together and agreed on the rules and the laws that govern us and when we agree with those rules and those laws we feel free. When we talk about being free in this country, that is what we mean; we have agreed on these fundamental laws and rules, and in that society we feel free. It is possible for a slave to feel free if they agree with the rules and the laws that determine they shall be a slave. And so it is possible for people to say they will accept a lesser standard than we have here and claim that they have a freedom, but it is not the benchmark that we have set here in Australia. As I said, fundamental to that is an understanding of the equality of men and women in Australia and freedom from prejudice on the basis of race and religion.

I said that I attend citizenship ceremonies because I believe them to be important in the lives of those people who are taking up Australian citizenship. It is a great honour to take it up and that is the way, for the most part, they feel. It is an exciting moment and I always like it to be a ceremony where they can indeed feel that something special is taking place.

There was an awful moment at one stage when those people taking the oath and the affirmation were instructed by some bureaucrat down in the bowels of the earth that they could all mutter it together. What came out was a jangle of language which nobody understood and it took away from the importance of that ceremony. Fortunately, that foolish edict was withdrawn and now the oath and the affirmation are taken separately so that you can hear a person professing the statement that comes with the conferring of citizenship.

I suppose that, of the most debated issues relating to this bill, the first is that we are increasing the period that you need to be living in Australia legally to four years. That four-year period has been opposed by the opposition. Personally, I think the four years is an improvement. I think when you are dealing with something as important as citizenship it should have a decent length of time. When the Labor Party reduced it to two years it was done for political purposes, not good citizenship purposes. Many of us objected to it being done at the time. To raise the period firstly to three years and then to four is a good move.

The second point that has raised some discussion—adverse, from some—is the fact that there will be a prohibition on the minister approving applications from those assessed by ASIO to be direct or indirect risks to Australian security. This prohibition will apply whether or not citizenship is by descent, conferral or resumption. I also think that is a very wise provision in the circumstances. I do think that we have to be particular about who it is we offer citizenship to, that they are the sorts of people who will truly make good Australians.

The citizenship bill also introduces provisions to revoke citizenship acquired as a result of third-party fraud and strengthens the revocation provisions relating to serious criminal offences. This is also important in giving proper backup to our concept of what citizenship means. Again I go back to my citizenship ceremonies and what I might say there. One of the things that I do is to encourage people who become citizens to take up an activity of a voluntary nature, which again is very much the mark of what makes an Australian citizen. Indeed, in this country, we could not function to the degree we do without volunteers, whether they be volunteers in surf-lifesaving, in the rural fire service or the SES, in Boy Scouts, or Girl Guides or service clubs. Whatever the range, there is someone somewhere who can fit in and can in fact add to what the Australian community enjoys, and in turn they will become part of that community and become known in the community. I have often said that I think that voluntary activity is the mortar between the bricks that build the edifice of our nation, and so I do encourage all who become new citizens to join and partake of the activities in the community they have chosen to reside in, to become a part of the Australian citizenship body.

The new citizenship act sets out that someone who is applying for citizenship by conferral should be over the age of 18 at the time of applying, should be a permanent resident at the time of application, should understand the nature of the application—and that, too, is a very significant point: that they understand that they are indeed swearing allegiance to this country—should possess a basic knowledge of English, should have adequate knowledge of the responsibilities and privileges of Australian citizenship, should be likely to reside or continue to reside in Australia or otherwise maintain a close and continuing association with Australia and should be of good character at the time of the minister’s decision to grant the application. Those are serious points which need to be highlighted. They are the sorts of points that should be the essence of making a decision as to whether or not a person is suitable to become a citizen of this country.

I cannot not comment on the comments of Sheikh al-Hilali when we are talking about the concept of citizenship. There is a person who ought never have been allowed permanent residency, let alone citizenship, in this country. This man was allowed to remain here because it was politically expedient at the time. I think one of the most offensive parts of the speech he made at the close of Ramadan was where he said that the rape would never have taken place if the girl remained alone in her room with her headscarf on—in other words, a prisoner, not free. He said that she had the vice of enticement. Therefore, if she is locked up she cannot entice a man, who must be at all times free. They are concepts of freedom which are totally against what this country stands for.

Men and women are equal. That means women are able to pursue the ability that they have, to disport themselves in accordance with the laws that we have and to not be treated like they are slipping into slavery. There may be some who wish to go on the slippery slide to slavery. We have to be vigilant and we have to protect the rights of those who are seen to be oppressed. I want to put this very strongly: to live in a community where that dictum is being taught, presumably to young men who adhere to the following of that sheikh, is something that is not acceptable in our nation.

When we consider what action needs to be taken, what reaction is required, we have to look at the sort of ideology that is being preached—and I make a distinction between that ideology and religion observance. It is an ideology, just as communism was an ideology or Nazism was an ideology. It is about the oppression of people. There were people under the Nazi system who may have felt free because they agreed with what Hitler was saying, yet it was abhorrent and we went to war to stop it. Yet here is a man in our midst preaching hate and preaching that women are to be oppressed. He is in hospital now. He will be being looked after by nurses—female nurses. Under his version of things, if they look him in the eye that is an unacceptable offence and consequences will flow. That is not acceptable in my country.

As we consider this citizenship bill, we have to do so not only in light of how many years people have to be here and whether they are of good character but also in light of what it means fundamentally to be Australian. And what it does mean is that men and women are equal and that we are free of prejudice on the basis of race and religion. It means that we create a society where people can reach their maximum potential and where the individual is considered an important person in their own right—not part of a collective where decisions are taken for the collective and the individual can be sacrificed to those collective decisions.

This is a critical time in the development of Australia. We have invited people here in good faith and asked them to be part of us. But we cannot allow that to be a subversive influence; one that will say that in Australia we have some citizens who are lesser than others because there is a dictum being preached by a man who has control over his own community and whose followers suffer. We have to make sure that the rules that we have agreed on that make us feel free remain the dominant rules and laws irrespective of how they are challenged or attacked. That is our responsibility and it is our responsibility as members in this parliament.

The only reason that I as a woman can stand in this parliament today representing my electorate—and having been a minister of the Crown—is due to my forebears, my father and generations before him, who fought for this country and gave me the gift of freedom. It is an obligation we should protect on a daily basis to ensure that the next generation has at least as good a gift as I had—any less and we have all failed. We have a great job to do to ensure that that gift goes to the next generation and the one after that.

Rod Sawford (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The implied reason the government has given for the extension on the qualification period for citizenship from three years to four years is ‘national security’. I take national security issues seriously and I am sure you do too, Mr Acting Deputy Speaker Hatton, and I am sure most people on our side do as well. The reason I put national security in inverted commas in this context is that it is the government that is not taking national security seriously. In fact, the sequence of events relating to the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 is clear evidence that the government is playing politics with the very important institution of Australian citizenship and it is using national security as the tool in this game.

The cynical abuse of the fundamental institutions of this nation is typical of the record of this government. This government has never been shy about abusing national institutions or groups of people in society for very base political reasons. We all remember the election climate of 2001: the lies, the asylum seekers who threw their children into the sea and the released doctored photographs in the final days of the campaign—all lies. That these stories were complete fabrications is now a matter of public record. This shows how this government is prepared to demonise groups of people for its own cynical political purposes, and we all know there are numerous other examples. The bells are also ringing in this case.

The government gave national security as a reason for extending the qualification period for citizenship from two to three years in the original bill, which was prepared 12 months ago. The opposition accepted in good faith this extension and the reasons the government gave for it. The opposition had to accept that the government was telling the truth. The government refused to provide the information and the opposition had no other way of verifying it. So, when the government intimated it had information critical to national security that necessitated the extension of the qualifying period, the opposition was in no position whatsoever to reject or argue that claim and, because we were not prepared to put the safety and security of Australians at risk, we had little choice but to say we would go along with the legislation.

This is an example of where the proper operation of the parliamentary system of government relies on the integrity of the government of the day. Although the government’s integrity in such matters has been ripped to shreds over the ‘children overboard’ affair, the opposition had no information contrary to that provided by the government. Thus the opposition agreed to the government’s original extension. That was the situation a year ago. If we had doubts then—and we did—we ought to have very serious doubts now.

If there were serious issues of national security at stake and if Australians were exposed to risk while the two-year rule applied then why has the government let the legislation lie on the shelf for the past year? In that year probably 120,000 immigrants have become new citizens, and about the same number have entered the country and begun their qualifying period of two years. If there were critical national security concerns, as the government claimed, why has it allowed another 120,000 people into the country under the old two-year qualification rule?

For many of us the question answers itself. The so-called national security issues the government nominated were a fabrication. The only alternative explanation is that the government is incompetent and sloppy on the critical issue of national security. That is probably true too. Both reasons are possible, but I judge the first reason as the more likely simply because of the government’s long record of cynical abuse of national institutions for its own political purposes.

The likely scenario is that the government judged that the opposition would oppose the increase from two years to three years. It would then put the legislation aside to use in another divisive election campaign in 2007. When the opposition took the government at its word, the legislation was shelved for a year and brought back in a new form. The new form extends the qualifying period from two to four years. It is clear that the government are prepared to cast most people who seek to enter this country as being of evil character—until they can prove otherwise. That seems to be their attitude—at least for their own crass political purposes.

My view is that the overwhelming numbers of people who seek to come to this country are good people who intend to make a positive contribution to our society and our nation, and who do that. I participate—probably like you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and most members here—in almost every citizenship ceremony in my electorate of Port Adelaide. It is one of the most rewarding functions. Different councils have different emphasis, but they are joyous occasions. It is a very happy time. Friends, families, kids, national costumes—it is a terrific thing. It is a time of optimism. Pride marks the culmination of the process of immigration settlement and citizenship.

My electorate has a very large number of immigrants and new citizens. The Vietnamese community, for example, has a significant presence. I have made some very good friends in that community. They have made an enormous contribution to my area and to the nation generally. Not least of all, as you can see by my girth, is the contribution made by the Vietnam Restaurant, judged recently as the best Vietnamese restaurant in the country. In fact, it is the best Asian restaurant in the country.

My wife, Aldona, is also an immigrant, coming to this country with her parents at a young age. Her parents were Lithuanian, caught by the Russians, caught by the Germans, then again caught by the Russians, caught by the Germans. They finished up in Czechoslovakia, then up in Meppen and then in Genoa, like millions of other refugees in war-torn Europe. They could have gone to Canada, but the next boat went to Australia. That was good enough; they were out of there. With a suitcase and two little kids they got on the boat and came here. They had no English, no possessions and no money. Like a lot of immigrants at that time, they were grateful to come to a country which has been able to provide such opportunities for them and their children and to which they have been able to make their own contributions.

Of course, apart from the Indigenous people, we are all immigrants. From the first days of European settlement, new immigrants to South Australia first stepped ashore at Port Adelaide. Where else? The clever ones never ventured much further. My family has lived there for 170 years. It is a long time.

Citizenship, as we say at the ceremonies, is the common bond that unites us all in a mutual commitment to Australia, regardless of our birthplace, ethnic background or religious affiliation. By international standards our citizenship system is welcoming to newcomers. We have a shorter than average qualifying period of permanent residence; that is true. We do not have a strenuous language test. That is true too. This reflects a deliberate choice of adopting an inclusive approach that can act as the unifying force in an increasingly diverse population. You can treat people as being of light and goodness and you can treat people as being of dark and evil. I think the goodness and light is the attitude that we have used since the end of World War II, and it is one that we ought to continue.

Australia has conducted an enormously successful high-intake immigration program over the past half-century. I think we have the highest per capita rate in the world. More than 3.2 million immigrants have gone on to become citizens, contributing to the building of the nation of which we are all proud. It is an immigration and citizenship program that has enjoyed bipartisan support, at least until recently. Remarkably for such a huge immigration program, there have been few failures: a few Nazis after the war, a few hiccups with Malcolm Fraser and some people from the Middle East in the seventies and early eighties. But overall, it has been overwhelmingly successful.

The only other concern with the system is the take-up of citizenship, which, at around 75 per cent, is lower than I think all of us would hope for. There are about 950,000 eligible noncitizens who have not taken up citizenship in this country, despite meeting the residential requirements, including 350,000 people born in the United Kingdom and 200,000 born in New Zealand. Somehow I think that figure is about 500,000 really. New Zealanders seem to be here in great droves. It is in the national interest that every resident eligible for citizenship becomes a citizen. Every effort must be made to increase the take-up rate. I do not think that the government’s new legislation, however, will assist in any way—in fact, it will only hinder that.

It is an interesting quirk of history that the legal status of Australian citizenship is around just half the age of the nation itself. Australia became a nation in 1901. It is one of the longest continuing democracies in the world, of which we all should be proud. It was not until 1949, on Australia Day, that the federal Australian Citizenship Act, which was introduced in 1948 by Ben Chifley, the Prime Minister of the day, came to fruition. In fact, Ben became the first Australian citizen at that ceremony here in Canberra.

Prior to the act, most residents were, legally speaking, British subjects. I can tell you that when my family fought at Fromelles and Pozieres in World War I and at Tobruk and on the Kokoda Trail in World War II they did not regard themselves as English or British; they were Australian. They were Australian from the time the eldest child was born in this country, in the 1850s. But legally we were British subjects.

It is interesting, that first Australian citizenship ceremony. After Ben Chifley, the next seven people to be granted Australian citizenship were born in seven different countries. They were all men—you would not get away with that today: Angel Maguira, from Spain; Jan Jandura Pucek, from Czechoslovakia; Paul Marvig, from Denmark; Thiel Marstrand, from Norway; Michalos Mavrokefalos, from Greece; Auguste Duran, from France; and Mladen Bumbak, from Yugoslavia. Right from the very beginning, this prime event was designed to emphasise and signify the multicultural and multiethnic character of Australian citizenship—right from the very beginning. People think this word ‘multiculturalism’ is some sort of touchy-feely, pretty word of the last 20 years. No, it is not. It was implicit in that first ceremony. The act decreed that most people born in Australia prior to that day automatically became Australian citizens. That was me. Unfortunately, Australia’s Indigenous people had to wait another 18 years before they were legally entitled to become citizens, to our great shame.

As I said, since 1949 more than 3.2 million people have taken the step to become an Australian citizen, helping Australia to become one of the most culturally diverse nations on earth. That diversity is one of the defining characteristics of our society. It is something to celebrate, to take pride in. It is a strength, not a weakness.

Our immigration program has been lauded as one of the most successful immigration and settlement programs in the world. Why are we running away from that? Are we ashamed of what we have done? What we do not need is a government that is prepared to sacrifice such a successful national program for cynical political purposes. Unfortunately, that is what is evidenced by the government’s latest version of the legislation that has been brought into the parliament.

As I said earlier, it is my view that the government increased the qualification period from two to three years in its original legislation for cynical political purposes. It thought that the opposition would argue that the system has worked very well for half a century—like I am arguing now—and that there is no need for such a change. The government probably also thought we would argue that the increase in the qualifying period for citizenship could hardly have any bearing on national security issues. After all, there are stringent tests to be passed in order to win a residency visa in the first place, and presumably this process would weed out any unsatisfactory potential residents—and, if not, why not? It is a fair question to pose to those who query this argument. Secondly, it really stretches plausibility that the authorities can find out in three years that a person is an unsatisfactory potential citizen but they cannot find out in two.

The government’s arguments for change were shallow and barely believable and led to serious doubts about their veracity and sincerity. Nevertheless, as I said earlier, the opposition agreed to the change because the government argued they had ‘national security’ reasons that compelled this change. Look, we are aware that the circumstances of security in the world have changed, but that is not the reason. Personally I could not see the justification for the change to the citizenship qualifying period. I cannot see that, but of course I accepted the position decided by my party. My doubts about the sincerity of the government’s position have been confirmed by the failure of the government to put this legislation, said to be of critical importance to national security, before the House during the last year, and any lingering doubts have been entirely blown away by the form in which this legislation has come back into the parliament.

The government now proposes that the qualifying period be increased not from two to three years but from two to four years. That the government intended to use the original legislation, when rejected by the opposition, for cynical political purposes in the next election campaign is now without doubt. That is the only possible explanation for the revised legislation. There are a few other things hidden in there, but that is the only real reason. But, unfortunately for the Prime Minister and this government, the opposition will not be drawn into this cynical political game. We will support this legislation, not because we agree with it but because we value the national institution of citizenship so highly that we will not see it abused for crass political purposes. We will not allow the next election campaign to become a rerun of the disgraceful, cynical campaign of 2001. Labor are committed to Australia being an unified nation, not a divided nation. We value our new citizens and the contribution that they have made to this nation, and we will not allow them to be vilified by the government for their own electoral ends.

This latest version of the bill is nothing other than another attempt to play politics with the very important Australian institution of citizenship. I condemn this legislation, but I also accept that I will have to support it, probably for the good of the nation, so that citizenship is not trashed, because, if the legislation is defeated—and it will not be—there is no doubt in my mind that the government will drag the good name of new citizens through the mud in the next election campaign for its own political purposes.

This government is in trouble. It is not in trouble because of citizenship, skills, education, health or climate change; it is in trouble because it has buggered up the economy. That is the real reason. It has had these huge surpluses and it has given them away instead of spending them on infrastructure, education, training or research—on trying to raise the bar at which this country operates—and now it has a problem. Interest rates are out of control. Inflation is nearly four per cent. They are the determinants, as they always were, that have this government in huge trouble. Yes, there are other reasons why elections are won and lost, and we saw that, unfortunately, in Madrid in Spain not so long ago and we have seen it in Israel twice. But, generally, it is the economy that dictates whether governments win or lose.

What is so sad about this citizenship bill is that, as the previous member on our side, Simon Crean, said, we have had bipartisanship on this program for over 50 years. I do remember Ian MacPhee, the former member for Goldstein. He was a very good friend of my predecessor, Mick Young, and I was very proud to be in their company on a number of occasions. Their friendship was quite remarkable, but it was a very close friendship. When they spoke about this country, from very different backgrounds, they spoke of it as a nation of coherence, of togetherness, of being proud, of being inclusive and of seeing the goodness and uniqueness of people from all over the world—not seeing evil. Of course we have some evil people who sneak through the system, but they should not be the determining factor of this citizenship program, which, in my view, is the most successful in the world.

I am not afraid of a debate about improving it. In some ways in this country we walk away from debates within political parties and within this parliament. We seem to be afraid of debate. I am not afraid of debate, but I do not want to see this program trashed. This government is well on the way to doing that, and that is to our eternal shame.

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Childcare) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Isaiah Bowman, who was an American geographer, said:

Citizenship comes first today in our crowded world. ... No man—

I am sure he meant no person, but he said ‘no man’—

can enjoy the privileges of education and thereafter with a clear conscience break his contract with society. To respect that contract is to be mature, to strengthen it is to be a good citizen, to do more than your share under it is noble.

He was right in placing citizenship at the centre of our responsibilities to one another as a nation.

Our views of citizenship have changed significantly over time. Many people think of the Athenian democracy as the world’s first democracy, and its greatest. We have many proud Greeks in our parliament and in our community who take a lot of pride in Athenian democracy. But the Athenian democracy, of course, did not give the vote to women or slaves. Their idea of a citizen was, of course, different from our idea of a citizen. Of course, our ideas about citizenship and about the responsibility of citizenship and the rights of citizens change over time. That is as it should be. Ideally, they change for the better.

The member for Port Adelaide reminded us that it took 17 years after the first Australian citizenship ceremony for Indigenous Australians to be recognised and counted as Australian citizens. It is shameful that it took as long as it did, but what a positive thing it was when that referendum was held and Australians so overwhelmingly supported and acknowledged the importance of Aboriginal Australians being counted and classed as full citizens—another positive change when it comes to citizenship. What we want to do with Australian citizenship is continue to improve its strength and continue to improve it as an institution—not weaken it and traduce it, as this legislation in part does.

The Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 makes a number of changes that I am very concerned about and it foreshadows other changes that I am also concerned about. As usual, with this sort of nasty legislation it is like giving the worm pill to the dog, isn’t it? You wrap it in bacon to get the dog to swallow it. This citizenship bill has positive measures that Labor is conscience bound to support, like the positive measure of returning citizenship to people who themselves or whose parents have given up Australian citizenship in the past. That is most particularly important for members of the Maltese community who have made a very strong and convincing argument that some of these changes are necessary and are an improvement. In amongst it are all the nasty little surprises, like the proposal to extend the waiting period for citizenship from two to three years and the government’s suggestion subsequently that that should even be increased to four years. Some of them are even talking about five years.

Surely, if we have the proper checks on people before they come to Australia as permanent residents, extending the period for which they must wait for Australian citizenship makes us no more secure as a nation. Excluding people from citizenship or delaying when they take up the responsibilities of citizenship makes us no more secure as a nation. It is obvious that, in a period where the terrorist threat around the world is something that governments should and must take seriously, we would look for ways to strengthen our security. But no single person has yet explained to me how making people who have been checked before they come to Australia wait for three rather than two years makes us safer from terrorism. The people who flew aeroplanes into the twin towers on 11 September 2001 could have been in the United States for a week, a month or a year and it would not have made any difference. Many of the people who exploded bombs so tragically on the London Underground were born in the UK—they were British citizens. Our response to the threat of terrorism cannot be this knee-jerk exclusion that makes people feel less Australian and less committed to our body politic. It does not increase our security at all.

There has also been this sort of hint, although it does not appear in this legislation, that we are going to do something about an English language test. It is very important for people to learn to speak English when they live in Australia. The very best way of doing this is to offer them as much teaching and training as possible. Everyone knows that the government has actually cut resources to the Adult Migrant Education Program by $10.8 million and many of the courses do not meet the requirements of new migrants and in particular refugees.

When you look at the people who are most likely to have difficulties learning English, they are people who do not have literacy and numeracy skills because they have come from places that are in crisis—war-torn countries—and they have had to leave school much earlier than they should have or would have liked to, if indeed they have been able to go to school at all. The other people who are slowest learning English are women raising their families, who migrated here as part of a family unit and have young children at home. I think it is so incredibly offensive that we say to these women that, because it slows them in learning English and they are not interacting every day in the workplace, the work that they are doing at home raising their very young children is less important than the work that their husbands are doing while learning English in the workplace.

The reason I feel so strongly about this is that this is exactly the situation that my mother was in after she migrated to Australia. My father learned English much more quickly than my mother did because he was at work every day interacting in English. The first job my mother had was in a factory where nobody else spoke English either; they were all postwar migrants. I find absolutely deeply offensive the idea that we would value lower than my father’s work the work that my mother was doing in raising the three of us children—putting all of her time, all of her energy and all of her effort into it, giving up her opportunity for independence and her opportunity to learn English as quickly as my father. My mother spoke to us in Slovenian and that means I am bilingual and so are my brothers; in fact, two of us speak three languages, but that is another issue. Has the fact that we learnt Slovene as our first language, our mother tongue, disadvantaged me in any way in my life? I would say in every respect that it is an advantage and I have my mother to thank for it. We have this talk of how we are going to start putting English language tests on people before they can become Australian citizens. The idea that my father would pass an English language test and my mother would not because she was at home raising a family means we need to look at these proposals very closely.

It amazes me. I remember growing up and my parents saying to me: ‘It was terrible when we first came here. We’d be sitting quietly talking to each other in Slovene on the train and someone would walk up to us and say, “You should be speaking English when you’re here.”’ This is when they were talking to each other quietly on the train. God forbid that we should ever return to an environment where we start to speak to each other in this way. It is important for people to be able to communicate in English. The way that they learn to communicate in English is not just through adult education classes. It is by speaking to their next-door neighbours. It is by feeling welcomed in the school community. The way my mother learnt to speak English was by speaking to Mrs Watts next door and Doris Jones down the street and Mrs Fletcher around the corner, who used to come and have a cup of tea with her and help out with her very young children because she had no relatives in Australia. That is how people learn English—by being included in the English-speaking community, not by being excluded and traduced in this way.

What is this citizenship test going to include? The United Kingdom has a citizenship test and it has been fascinating to look at the details. About one-third of people are failing this test because it asks questions like: what are quangos and non-departmental public bodies? Rhetorically, Mr Deputy Speaker, I wonder if you would like to have that question asked of you. Another question is: what is proportional representation and where is it used? Another question is: how are judges appointed? I think even the people who make the appointments find that a little bit of a mystery. Another is: how many young people are there in the United Kingdom?

That is one level of extreme, where the questions are very difficult to answer for most people—for most people born in that United Kingdom, I would say. The other end is the United States, which has a test that includes questions like: ‘What are the colours of the American flag?’ What is the point of that test? I think probably the best test is the one I found on the email. It is obviously a draft. It says it comes from the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs. I have not seen a final copy; I assume it must be a draft. It asks questions such as:

How many slabs can you fit in the back of a Falcon Ute while also allowing room for your cattle dog?

When packing an Esky do you put the ice, or the beer, in first?

I like this one:

Does “yeah-nah” mean

a) “Yes and no”

b) “Maybe”

c) “Yes I understand but No I don’t agree”?

There are some fantastic questions:

Which Australian Prime Minister held the world record for drinking a yardie full of beer the fastest?

That is a very important one to know, I think. It goes on:

On which Ashes tour did Warney’s hair look the best?

a) 1993

b) 1997

c) 2001

d) 2005

And:

Did you cry when Molly died on a Country Practice?

We all know it would have been un-Australian not to have cried when Molly died. It goes on:

When you were young did you prefer the Hills Hoist over any swing set?

There is another obvious answer. I guess we will reserve judgement until we see what this test is but, as for the idea that we are going to get anything sensible out of this government, many of us remember the preamble to the Constitution, which was perhaps the most poorly written piece of bilge water I have ever seen. But we are yet to see what we will get in the citizenship test.

The Australian citizenship pledge, on the other hand, something that is said at every citizenship ceremony that we go to and that I am proud to repeat again on Australia Day every year to recommit to Australian citizenship, says:

From this time forward, under God—

you can say ‘under God’ if you wish—

I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people,

Whose democratic beliefs I share,

Whose rights and liberties I respect,

And whose laws I will uphold and obey.

It tears me up every single time to see a room full of people who choose to be Australian, who have come here because they want to contribute to our community and to our nation. To hear these people repeating these words moves me every single time. When I say to them in my citizenship speech that people will tell them that they are very lucky to have become Australian citizens—and that is true—I also say to them, ‘But we are lucky to have you,’ because these people choose to come here and commit to becoming Australian citizens, and their greatest desire is to fit into our community, to work hard and to raise their families in an environment that is peaceful and safe. They say those words and they make that commitment. Why do they need to say more than that? Doesn’t that cover it?

You wonder: if we had taken this approach to citizenship over the years, who would we have missed out on coming to this country? There was a terrific piece in the Melbourne Age a couple of months ago by Dan Silkstone and Ebony Piera that went through the sort of people who arrived in Australia not speaking English. Sir Gustav Nossal arrived in Australia in 1939. The authors say:

… he did not speak a word of English. Neither did his parents. Now he is one of the country’s most decorated scientists.

The Nossals became Australian citizens two years after arriving. But they would have found it difficult to achieve citizenship under the proposed requirements, says their celebrated son.

The authors go on to quote Sir Gustav:

“My parents’ English was very poor. They became citizens quite quickly but it would have been very borderline for them if they’d had an English language test.”

The authors say:

He opposes any tests, saying it would be impossible to make it fair and non-discriminatory.

Sir Gustav is quoted again:

The migrant experience in this country has been an extraordinary success …

It is a Melbourne newspaper, so of course they also talk about Lord Mayor John So, who came to Australia from Hong Kong as a 17-year-old student and who, I believe, still has a fairly colourful way of speaking English. John So may well have missed out. He says:

Over time, migrants will develop the communication skills required to assimilate. For some people that will take a short time; for others it will be longer. But the time frame is not important.

The point he is making is that these people make a contribution to Australia. Another example is recycling billionaire Richard Pratt, who, the authors say, came to Australia from Poland as a reffo in 1939. He did not know anything about his new home when he was coming here. His parents did not know much else other than they needed a safe place to go. He is quoted as saying:

It goes to the core of who I am … I am an Australian, an immigrant, and the son of immigrants.

Businessman Sir Arvi Parbo is another one. He migrated from Estonia in 1949. He, too, knew little about Australia but went on to lead companies such as BHP and Western Mining. Professor Mary Kalantzis arrived from Greece when she was a child. Her parents spoke little English. She says:

Never could they have passed a citizenship test. They were poor, illiterate peasants from Greece. They could not even have passed a test in Greek!

Their daughter, the authors go on to say, was recently appointed Dean of Education at the University of Illinois in the US.

Who would we have missed out on with the proposals that this government has for Australian citizenship and what is the purpose of raising these issues now? Is it really to improve the security of Australians at a time of international uncertainty? How exactly does it do that? How exactly does making people wait longer to become citizens, excluding them from the community and encouraging hostility against them, actually make us more secure in the world? Frankly, terrorists could fly in tomorrow and in a week’s time be able to launch a fairly successful attack on a major Australian institution. We do our best to make sure that does not happen, we need to take all possible measures to make sure it does not happen, but I genuinely do not understand how any of these measures actually improve that.

With this government saying constantly that citizenship is so important, so valuable and so precious, it is funny that two weeks ago, in the second week of October, neither Malcolm Turnbull, the member for Wentworth, nor the state opposition leader, Peter Debnam, could be bothered turning up to the 27 September ceremony in their electorates. The person asked to give the speech about what it is like to be an Australian citizen was none other than the US Consul-General, Steve Smith. As Joe Hildebrand said, reporting in the Telegraph, ‘He is a lovely bloke but about as Australian as the Statue of Liberty.’

As I say, the bill is like the worm tablet—it has been wrapped in bacon and we will swallow it. It does have some good and important measures in it, particularly, as I say, for Maltese citizens, but we as a community really need to ask ourselves what it is that we fear and how we can include people and encourage citizenship rather than discourage it.

Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak on the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005, but before I go to the detail of the bill I would like to highlight the incredible impact that migrants have had in Australia and in particular in my electorate. In doing so I would like to associate myself very strongly with the comments that were included in many of my colleagues’ contributions to this debate, in particular those of the member for Port Adelaide. He said a great deal of what I believe and think about this bill and I want to congratulate him for what I think was an excellent presentation on many aspects of the legislation.

Unfortunately, a lot of people who do not know Canberra all that well believe that this is the home only of politicians—for some part of the year—and public servants, with little regard to the multicultural side of our community. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The data that I want to refer to is from the 2001 census. Obviously the numbers have changed a bit since then, but in 2001 the census showed that over 38,000 people in my electorate alone were born overseas. This included, at the time, over 1,200 from Germany, over 1,000 from Italy, over 700 from Malaysia and over 400 from Greece. In 2001 there were also over 40,000 people in my electorate whose parents were both born overseas, compared with over 83,000 people whose parents were both born in Australia. This data demonstrates that Canberra is certainly an incredibly multicultural place.

I, like many of my colleagues, have the opportunity to attend many events in my community that are conducted and held by ethnic communities. Last Sunday, for instance, I had the pleasure of laying a wreath on behalf of my community at the Greek memorial up near the Australian War Memorial in commemoration of Oxi Day, or ‘No’ Day.

Petro Georgiou (Kooyong, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is pronounced ‘Ochi Day’

Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Mr Georgiou. That is a perfect example of how you can value language from other countries. I also recently attended the celebration of the 50th anniversary of Hungarian Revolution, and I have to say that when I went to that particular function, the organisers were overwhelmed by the number of people who attended. In fact, they were wheeling in piles of chairs to handle the numbers and they were thrilled that so many people had turned up to the event in Civic here in Canberra. Last Saturday evening I had the pleasure of attending the wedding celebration of a Muslim family in my electorate. There were 600 people there. It was a fantastically joyous occasion and something that was a first for me. It was an evening that I enjoyed incredibly.

I also go every year to the annual celebration for the Mon people, an ethnic grouping from Burma. I have a very close relationship with the Thai and Laos communities here—and I am just naming a few. There are so many here in our town of Canberra. Given the size and the geography of this community, it is very easy to get around and get to know them all. It is not unusual to now also see new arrivals from the Sudan at the local shopping centre. I am seeing that more and more, and I am very pleased to see that they are able to choose my community as their community. It is always a great pleasure to share in the rich culture of ethnic communities. It is also a great pleasure to see these communities display their great love and loyalty to their new home, which has given them a chance to improve their life circumstances. They have offered so much to us by them coming here.

I enjoy going to the functions organised by ethnic communities and being Italian or Maltese for the day. Part of this is being immersed in their language and their culture. Some of our most loyal and hardworking migrants have not had the opportunity to learn English and, whilst this may not be ideal, it has not detracted at all from their contribution to this country. As other speakers have said, I also take every opportunity I can, when invited, to go to the citizenship ceremonies and to speak to them. On those occasions I always make a point of thanking them for choosing this country and this city—this community—as their home. I always impress upon them to please never lose their language or their culture, because while they maintain that, it adds so much to the dimension of our communities here.

The other thing I want to mention in passing is that we have the National Multicultural Festival every year in Canberra. It gets bigger and more representative, with many thousands of people attending. And—given the odd little blip we have seen in Cronulla and elsewhere—I would like to offer, without being superior about it, that it seems to me that the way the communities mix and live together within Canberra and the rest of the Australian Capital Territory is a great lesson in how you can settle communities from other backgrounds very successfully. I am very pleased to see that we have that down to a tee, I believe, in our community of Canberra.

I have great respect for the migrants who have come here. Our postwar migration program has been extremely successful, and I believe that the success is due to the fact that we accepted those migrants in good faith and we treated them with great respect. Unfortunately, I am not of the view that some of the actions of the current government are in that same spirit. These bills were first proposed following the London bombings in 2005. Some of the provisions are very welcome; others are not so welcome and raise deep concerns for both myself and my colleagues. One of the provisions of the Australian Citizenship Bill when it was first introduced was to increase the time qualification for citizenship from two years to three years. This was recommended by COAG following consideration of the best available intelligence. In that context, we on the Labor side agreed to support that change to three years. We agreed that there could be some merit in that change, although some people had reservations about it, as the member for Port Adelaide said earlier.

However, the government then sat on this bill for a year and only introduced it this week, almost one year later. It was revealed in Senate estimates earlier this week that, during that year, 117,208 people had been processed for citizenship using the old system. If it is so vital for us to increase the delay for citizenship for the security of our community and our country, why has the government sat on this for a year and allowed 117,208 people to pass successfully through the citizenship program? Now the government has introduced an amendment to the bill which will increase that change from two years to four years. I ask: on what basis has the government decided to increase this time qualification? The federal government has given no justification whatsoever for the increase. It does not make sense and it only serves to make it more difficult for people who want to become Australian citizens.

We desperately need skilled migrants to Australia to address our workforce shortage. The increase in the delay for citizenship may turn some people off coming because they have to wait longer to become a citizen. But, more importantly, it throws a blanket of suspicion over their motives for coming here. That is the issue that concerns me the most and that is why I cannot support this provision. It is not in the spirit of Australia’s extremely successful postwar migration program; it is not in the spirit of the way our citizenship program has run in the past.

Another provision in this legislation is that a citizenship application of an applicant who is considered to be a security risk by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, ASIO, can be refused. Again, while the claimed basis for the changes is security reasons, because of the one-year delay in introducing these bills we have had 117,208 people processed in the last year without ASIO necessarily having the power that this bill will give them. Even if they are known to be a security risk, one could ask—and it is a question that must be answered—where is the evidence that these changes are useful for security? The previous speaker, the member for Sydney, mentioned the tragic bombings in London. But the perpetrators of that shocking crime were not even migrants or new ethnic arrivals but British citizens, some of them born in the country. I do not understand the logic of arguing that these changes are necessary for security reasons when there is sadly no guarantee whatsoever, in the world in which we find ourselves today, of where such offenders will come from.

I would also like to comment on the provision in the bill that would prevent the minister from approving a person becoming an Australian citizen if the person has been convicted of an offence against an Australian or foreign law for which the person has been sentenced to a period of imprisonment of at least five years. I do not believe there should be a blanket rule about people who have been convicted and sentenced for at least five years under a foreign law. Unfortunately, many people around the world are unfairly convicted and imprisoned. We cannot assume that all countries around the world have fair and just legal systems. But, more importantly, what about political prisoners or those who have come to Australia from places such as Burma, the Sudan and a range of countries? Just think of Nelson Mandela, who was in jail for 20 years. Would we reject him on the basis that he was in a prison for longer than five years? He would not be welcomed, on my reading of the bill—and I stand to be corrected. If I have got this wrong, I would be very happy to hear it. This legislation would mean that a person like Nelson Mandela could not come here. We would reject him.

I lived in Burma some years ago; I served there with our foreign mission. I think of the people who have bravely stood up to the shocking, ruling military regime in that country. I think of Mugabe’s regime. I think of any number of people around the world. What this bill is saying is: ‘If you have fallen foul of those corrupt regimes, tough, but we don’t want you.’ It is the most incredible question that really deserves a better answer than I think we have been getting so far, if any, from the government.

On a positive note, there are some provisions that we do support. The bill facilitates dual citizenship and will allow many people to resume or take up Australian citizenship, which they were unable to do prior to this legislation. This will benefit Australian citizens who have adopted children from overseas, people with a Papua New Guinean background and the Maltese community. People of Maltese origin who renounced their Australian citizenship under section 18 of the Citizenship Act of 1948 have not been able to resume citizenship under section 23AA of the Citizenship Act. They were deemed to have retained their rights to Maltese citizenship rather than having acquired foreign citizenship. In March 2005, the Senate Legal and Constitutional References Committee stated that Australian citizenship should be more inclusive and children of people who renounce their citizenship under section 18 should also be eligible for Australian citizenship. And I am pleased to say that at the last ALP national conference we passed the following resolution:

Labor will streamline the citizenship resumption arrangements for those who lost citizenship as a result of previous provisions regarding dual citizenship in Australian and Maltese law.

I am sure this will be good news to the 200 or so people in my electorate who were born in Malta. I know that they will be very happy with this change.

The government has released a discussion paper on a number of issues relating to citizenship. One of the key issues is whether Australia should introduce a formal citizenship test, and it raises some very interesting questions. For example: what level of English is required to participate as an Australian citizen, and how important is a commitment to Australia’s way of life and values for prospective Australian citizens? While I think these are valid questions and it is important to debate these issues—I do not shy away from that and I am never frightened to have a debate about these sorts of issues—my major concern is the context in which the government has raised these issues. Why is it that the government is only now highlighting the importance of English skills for Australian citizens? Whilst anyone with commonsense would agree that it is ideal for Australian citizens to speak English, there are many first-generation Australian citizens who came to Australia as migrants, have made a great contribution here and yet even now still cannot speak English fluently. As I said earlier, I often attend functions where the main language being spoken is not English, and I refer to a wonderful function I went to at the Hellenic Club here in Canberra—a wonderful community. Where would Canberra be without the Greeks? I am not quite sure. But we would not be where we are now. Their contribution has been magnificent.

Duncan Kerr (Denison, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You don’t have to suck up to Petro!

Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

A section of that community held a fundraising activity for the Special Olympics ACT participants, who were recently competing in the games in Brisbane—successfully, I might add. At that particular function, several hundred people generously donated to help those kids get to the Special Olympics in Brisbane and the major thankyou speeches were given that day in Greek. Was I offended? Not at all, and neither were any of the Special Olympians. The question here is really: why do we devise these crazy tests and what grounds and values do we put a tick beside to indicate that they are a good idea? Not one of those people in that room was failing to contribute to our community—not one of them. If they want to have their big speeches in Greek, good on them; I could not be happier. That is not the test. The test is what they are doing living in and contributing to this community, not whether or not they have a speech at the Greek club in Greek.

I would be less cynical about the government’s motivations in raising this issue if this very government had not slashed almost $11 million from its Adult Migrant English Program. How crazy. It is unethical for a government to constantly talk about the importance of citizenship and integration whilst cutting funding to programs which will facilitate that very integration. There was no legislative requirement in years gone by. There was a course of encouragement and welcome, with an English language course available—for all of those years—for those who could get there. Of course they benefited if they could. But the member for Sydney brought out some very important points about the reality of living with family, working and having all sorts of commitments, and whether or not you can easily access these sorts of English courses, values courses or whatever else we are thinking about.

The government often raises these issues and applies them to certain ethnic and religious groups in a way that concerns me. My fear, my deep concern, is that the debate about citizenship is being used as a political tool and could end up dividing people in this country in a way that we have not seen before. The member for Port Adelaide put it so well. The bipartisan attitude towards citizenship in this country is now under threat, and that is what we do not want to see happen. I am happy to debate the issues about language skills and citizenship but not if it is going to be used to marginalise and discriminate against certain people in this country.

I will finish by saying that I have seen the new ads on television encouraging citizenship. They are all very lovely, but I have not seen one yet—maybe it exists; maybe I am not watching TV at the right time of day—where there is an obviously black person or an obviously veiled person. They are all looking fairly mainstream. The other comment I make is: why run these ads encouraging citizenship while at the same time proposing that we put up hurdles and barriers to that very citizenship process? For me, nothing is better than to go to a citizenship ceremony in my city, here in Canberra, and to see the joy and the commitment that people have made. Some have come here by economic and social choice. Some have come here from the most shocking of backgrounds. But the one thing that they have in common is that they stand up and take that oath really wanting to do so. I do not know what test we could devise that is going to make them prove more than they do now what they really want to do by living in and contributing to this community.

In summary, I support these bills on the whole, as a bitter pill, but I strongly support the motion moved by the shadow minister for immigration. Among other things, it opposes the increase in residence requirement to four years. That increase is a crazy notion. I really hope against all hope that that amendment will get up and we can get a bit of sensibleness back into part of the bill.

Ann Corcoran (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to talk about the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005. The main purpose of these bills is to rewrite and consolidate the old Australian Citizenship Act 1948. This act has been amended many times since then. Back in 1993-94 the Joint Standing Committee on Migration conducted an inquiry into the act. One of the conclusions of that inquiry was that the act was cumbersome and dated and needed to be rewritten in clear language. The second purpose of these bills is to address problems that some people have as a result of old rules about dual citizenship. The third purpose is to increase the waiting period from the current two years to four years, once government mooted amendments are in place.

These bills are here before us at the same time that a discussion paper about Australian citizenship, issued by the government, is in circulation. That discussion paper raises a number of issues that I want to talk about a bit later. These bills do not directly cross any of the issues raised in the discussion paper, but they are related and I guess that in the ideal world those issues would have been addressed in these bills. However, I am not suggesting that these bills be delayed any further, given that they have been lying on the table for 12 months already.

At Federation in 1901, Australian citizenship as a legal status did not exist. There is no mention of citizenship in the Australian Constitution. Australia’s population then consisted of British subjects who were permanently residing in Australia, British subjects who were temporarily here and ‘aliens’. The legal status of Australian ‘citizen’ came into effect on 26 January 1949 under the Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948. The title of this act changed later to the Australian Citizenship Act 1948.

What is citizenship? It is useful to set it out. The preamble to the Australian Citizenship Act states:

Australian citizenship represents formal membership of the community of the Commonwealth of Australia;

and Australian citizenship is a common bond, involving reciprocal rights and obligations, uniting all Australians, while respecting their diversity;

and Persons granted Australian citizenship enjoy these rights and undertake to accept these obligations

by pledging loyalty to Australia and its people, and

by sharing their democratic beliefs, and

by respecting their rights and liberties, and

by upholding and obeying the laws of Australia.

Those words are very familiar to all of us who go to citizenship ceremonies. It is fascinating now to read the speech that went with the introduction of the 1948 bill. I am indebted to the Parliamentary Library for this information. The Australian Citizenship Act 1948 was proclaimed to commence operation from 26 January 1949. The introduction of the 1948 act took place in the context of establishing Australian citizenship for the first time, while maintaining the status of ‘British subject’ for Australians. The minister who introduced the bill said:

The bill is not designed to make an Australian any less a British subject, but to help him express his pride in citizenship of this great country. … To say that one is an Australian is, of course, to indicate beyond all doubt that one is British; but to claim to be of the British race does not make it clear that one is an Australian. The time has come for Australia and the other dominions to recognize officially and legally their maturity as members of the British Commonwealth by the passage of separate citizenship laws. Therefore, it gives me great pleasure to introduce this bill that will enable Australia to proclaim its own national citizenship …

The link between Australian and British citizenship was finally severed in 1984. It is interesting to note these words from nearly 60 years ago and to realise how much we have changed since then. At this time when we are talking about citizenship and values, some people are worried that the world is changing too fast. It would be cynical of me to suggest that some people are actually encouraging us to be worried and fear to change—but that is an issue for another day. We have moved well away from seeing ourselves as an offshoot of Britain. At that time, the almost cringing attitude was probably a reflection of where the community saw itself, but it certainly is not how we see ourselves today. Today, a person can become an Australian citizen in a number of ways: by birth, by descent, by adoption or by grant of citizenship. It is the last method of becoming an Australian citizen that we are discussing today.

The bill, which was originally put on the Notice Paper more than 12 months ago, had a change to amend the waiting period for citizenship from two years to three years. We were told at the time that this was because of security concerns. I understand that those concerns were discussed at COAG and that COAG agreed to a 10-point plan, which included increasing the waiting period for citizenship from two years to three years. That was 12 months ago. Now we have an amendment to the bill, proposed by the government, that the waiting period be increased to four years. I will make two points about this. Firstly, it has taken 12 months to get this bill to the point of being debated. One really has to question the validity of the argument that the period should be changed from two years to three years on security grounds if a delay of 12 months is of no consequence. It is worth noting that, in the intervening 12 months, approximately 117,000 people became Australian citizens—people who would have had to wait, for security reasons, had this bill been dealt with when it was first mooted.

The second point worth making is the process, or lack of process, in the move to four years. As I said, we have been told that originally the government had security concerns which it took to COAG. COAG agreed to the 10-point plan, which included increasing the waiting period to three years. Now we are being asked to support increasing the period to four years, but there has been no discussion or consultation about this and no reasons offered for this latest move.

I have to ask: why this change and why now? We are in a period of debate about Australian values and discussion about rules of citizenship. If you were a cynic, you would question the real motive behind this change. There has been no reason put forward for the move from three to four years. I find it hard to accept the validity of the argument of security for the move from two to three years, given the long delay in getting this bill to the point of being debated. I cannot support the move to four years, given the lack of argument for that move.

One of the changes in this bill which I think is good allows citizenship to be restored and granted to many people who were forced to renounce it or who lost it as a result of the old legislation. Originally, anyone wanting to take out Australian citizenship had to renounce citizenship of other countries. That requirement was dropped in 1986. In 2002, section 17 was repealed, which meant that Australian citizens taking out citizenship of another country did not automatically lose their Australian citizenship. Amendments made at the time allowed those who had lost their citizenship to regain it if they met certain conditions. Those conditions included a continuing and close association with Australia, an intention to continue to live in Australia for three years or an intention to commence living in Australia within three years. Unfortunately, the condition about living in Australia stopped a number of people resuming their Australian citizenship. It meant that those who took out citizenship in another country in 2002 or later were able to hold dual citizenship—that is, their initial Australian citizenship plus another—even though they do not intend to live in Australia in the near future. However, those who took out citizenship of another country before 2002 have lost Australian citizenship and many cannot resume it. It is clear from evidence that was given to the Senate’s Legal and Constitutional References Committee that a number of these people do not even realise they have lost their Australian citizenship. This bill takes away that conflict. This bill allows those who lost citizenship through the old section 17 to resume that citizenship. The only condition now is that applicants must be of good character.

The second group of people with issues that are addressed by this bill are children of Australian citizens who return to the country of origin, when the children later renounce Australian citizenship. The classic example, as you have heard other speakers talk about, is many members of the Maltese community or, more particularly, children born in Australia to parents who came here from Malta. As they were born in Australia, under Australian citizenship laws these children became Australian citizens. As children of Maltese-born parents, they were also automatically deemed to be Maltese citizens. Some of the parents decided to return to Malta, taking their children with them. Before 2000, Maltese law required such persons to renounce any foreign citizenship by the time they were 19 years of age if they were to retain their Maltese citizenship. Maltese citizenship at the time was virtually essential for the education, social welfare and economic benefits it offered, so most of these now young adults did renounce their Australian citizenship. These people lost their citizenship under section 18—that is, they were deemed to have renounced their Australian citizenship rather than having lost citizenship by acquiring citizenship of another country. The original bill did not extend the same, more relaxed rules to those who renounced their citizenship as it did to those who simply lost their citizenship. I understand that recent amendments that were put forward by the government mean that both sets of people will now be able to regain their Australian citizenship if they pass a test of good character, and this is a welcome amendment.

Again in the original bill there was provision for a person to be denied citizenship if that person had served time in prison. The original bill gave the minister no discretion and he or she had to refuse an application if that person had spent time in prison. That provision is very short-sighted, and I hope it was put in there without too much thought. I understand that it is now being removed by an amendment the government is proposing. But, just in case, let me spell out the problem with that particular provision. If passed into law, this provision means that we cannot accept as an Australian citizen anyone who has spent time in prison, regardless of where that sentence was served or why. I am not suggesting that a serial murderer should be given Australian citizenship—indeed, that person would presumably be barred by the good character test—but the provision, unless amended, will affect a person who has served time on trumped-up charges in a country where the reigning authority is brutal—for instance, Iraq. It is crazy to let this provision pass as it first appeared. We should not let another country’s laws decide who will become Australian citizens. We must reserve that privilege for ourselves. We must decide the criteria for Australian citizenship.

The final aspect of this bill I want to discuss is the provision which says that the minister must refuse an application for citizenship if that person has an adverse security assessment by ASIO. It is not clear to me just what information the minister gets when a person has an adverse security assessment. It is not at all clear that the person concerned gets any details of that assessment, and therefore they are not in a position to challenge that assessment. This smacks of Big Brother. Whilst we must protect ourselves from security risks, we must also make sure that proper processes are in place to ensure that appropriate assessments are made and that this does not become a backdoor way of denying citizenship.

I referred earlier to a discussion paper that has been issued by the government about Australian citizenship. That paper asks us to address four questions: about whether or not we should introduce a formal test for aspiring citizens, about how important knowledge of Australia is for an Australian citizen, about the level of English language required to participate as an Australian, and about the importance of a commitment to Australian values and way of life of aspiring citizens. At the moment, those applying for Australian citizenship have to have been here for two years and have to be committed to staying here or at least maintaining a close association with Australia. Applicants go through an interview process and are required to demonstrate a basic capacity to understand and speak English—enough to be able to answer simple questions about themselves. Applicants are given information about Australia: our values, our history, how our system of government works and, of course, about the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship.

The discussion paper canvasses the benefits of a formal test to ensure applicants know what our values are, know something of our history and how we do things, and can speak and understand English. In the ideal world every person living in Australia would be able to read and write in English fluently. And, by the way, it would not do us any harm to be able to communicate confidently in other languages either, but that is another issue. The reality is that not even all Australian-born Australians can read and write fluently.

The reality also is that many migrants in this country have contributed enormously to our economic development and our quality of life despite not having good English and, in many cases, having very little English. Many migrants who came here in the postwar period never learnt much English. They did, however, make sure their children learnt English and many of them were very determined that their children got the very best education. This education often extended well beyond the compulsory schooling age. They were determined that their children would have opportunities that they did not have. They were determined that their children finished their education with training and a qualification that allowed them to enter the workforce and so contribute to our society. There is no way we can say that this cohort of migrants has not contributed in a very positive way to our society; but would they have passed a rigorous English language test? Maybe, but maybe not. The real test that is needed, if one can be devised, is a determination to contribute.

My experience tells me that most migrants have come here in the first place because they want to get on, and that determination to do well is all that is needed in the first instance. Being able to communicate properly in English is obviously something everyone in the country should be able to do. I am just not convinced that the inability to do so, particularly if someone has not been here very long, is a reason, in itself, to bar a person from citizenship.

At the same time as the government is talking about the need for everyone to know English, we see it slashing funds to the migrant English language program. The logic of this is lost on me. We either care about people learning English or we do not. We cannot talk about English being so important that someone may be barred from being an Australian because they do not have a good grasp of the language on the one hand and, on the other, take away funding of the very programs that help newly arrived people learn our language. This action makes me query the real reason behind the implied push by this government to introduce formal testing for those applying for citizenship.

I want to finish on the matter of values. All of a sudden we are talking about Australian values as though there is no tomorrow. The discussion taking place in some quarters is very insulting and offensive. I have heard people in this place talk about our unique values, as though no-one else shares our values or has similar values. If we are asked what our values are we get answers like decency, tolerance, respect for others and even the dreaded word ‘mateship’. I heard Dame Edna say, just this week, that as far as she was concerned we need only one value: niceness. She is probably right. None of these values is unique to Australia or Australians. We do not have a monopoly on values. It is offensive to other cultures and to other countries to think or say that we do, or to act as though we do. Good values are important; they should be at the base of everything we do. It does not do us any harm to remember a few of these values when we are drafting legislation.

It is important that we are all reminded of our values from time to time. It is a useful thing to take advantage of a citizenship ceremony to reflect for a minute on our values; to remind our new citizens, and ourselves, of our values. This is a long way from saying that we need to present applicants for citizenship with a test on values. Just think of the absurdity of the concept. Think about what the test might be trying to achieve. Is the purpose of the test to identify the people we do not want here because they are bad eggs? Would a test of values do this job? I do not think so. That is what police checks and character tests are for.

Is the purpose to tell applicants that these are Australian values? This is probably a more useful objective but a test is not the way to do it. It is far better to give this information to people as they arrive and as they apply for citizenship. The clear message should be that these are the traits that Australians hold dear and that are important to our way of life. The message should not be that these are the things that we suspect you, the new arrival, have never heard of, that you had better start learning and that there will be a test in due course.

One trait or value that I admire is generosity. The attitude behind this discussion paper is not one of generosity. It paints us as a mean-spirited people; a community prepared to ride on the back of the hard work done by a generation of migrants but not one prepared to share our good fortune with anyone else. It paints us as a people scared of anyone who is not just like us. This is a narrow, mean way of looking at the world. It is also short-sighted. We are capable of much better and I call on the government to think again about how we apply the values we ascribe to ourselves.

Kim Wilkie (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to discuss the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005 and also to speak on the amendment moved by the member for Watson. One thing that we often forget in Australia is that we are all migrants—often when we go to citizenship ceremonies we even forget that ourselves. The Aboriginal people came here some 40,000 years ago and settled in this country, and the rest of us probably came here over the last 200 years from previous generations. Our country is made up of over 190 different nationalities, which have all combined to create a distinctly Australian way of life and culture. It is a harmonious culture that has defined our character without civil war or conflict. In fact, in less than 200 years we have been able to achieve what many nations or civilisations have taken up to 2,000 years to achieve, and that is a great credit to Australia and the people who have come here over those years.

The broad components of this bill are generally supported by the opposition. Indeed, why it has taken the government so long to get to the stage we are at today is, quite frankly, beyond me. It would appear that when the government put forward much of the legislation, which was announced with a great deal of fanfare, it had one eye on the polls and since then, of course, it has all evaporated. For goodness sake, the bill was introduced in November 2005 yet debate has only begun this week. At the time, 12 months ago, following the cowardly attacks on communities in London, we were told there was a massive security imperative to amend our citizenship requirements. Indeed, one of the central components of the original bill was to increase the citizenship waiting period from two to three years based on security advice given to the federal government and agreed in the COAG 10-point plan.

Why has the government ignored this security advice for 12 months? Just this week we have heard that over 117,000 people have been processed for citizenship under the old system—the very same system the government believes was deficient in screening out security threats to this country—while this bill was gathering dust. And we are told by this government that, for security reasons, it wants to expand the citizenship waiting period to four years. What is the security advice, and why did the government sit on its hands for 12 months following the additional advice? The parliamentary secretary has provided no justification for the increase to four years—no justification whatsoever.

In September in the Australian, Stuart Rintoul posed the question of whether a recently naturalised Sudanese family would have made better citizens if they had been required to wait four years instead of two. Stuart Rintoul wrote:

It was a question Mr Robb never really answered as he spoke of the Government’s ‘judgment’ that it took four years to understand Australia’s history, laws and culture sufficiently to become a citizen, just as in Britain there was a five-year wait.

The parliamentary secretary was then quoted in the article as follows:

‘Our judgment is that for most people two years is not sufficient to have, in their DNA, what it is that makes Australia tick,’ he said.

Four years is far too long. What am I going to tell my constituents about the increase in waiting times—that the government had a feeling in its waters, or that the parliamentary secretary spun a chocolate wheel and it landed on the number 4?

This is an issue in Western Australia, where I am informed that around 12 per cent of residents were born in the United Kingdom or Ireland and over five per cent were born in Asia. In fact, in recent years, Western Australia has had the highest proportion of overseas migration in the nation. This fact is reflected in the many wonderful citizenship ceremonies I attend at the councils of South Perth, Victoria Park, Belmont, Canning and Gosnells.

I am sure we have all been to the citizenship ceremonies. To witness the genuine enthusiasm that these new Australians feel when they take their oaths of allegiance to our nation is, as I am sure all members will attest, a very moving experience and it makes us proud to be Australians. Whether attending a citizenship ceremony, being handed a native kangaroo paw for their garden or observing the welcoming ceremony of a local Indigenous dance group, witnessing the pride and sincerity in which these Australians take the oath is one of the great pleasures of being a member of parliament. Let me say, however, that I believe there are some double standards here.

Let me make the first point. Citizenship is a wonderful thing, but even the best and brightest of our new citizens—those with Australianness running through their DNA, to quote the parliamentary secretary—can never aspire to hold the highest office in the land: our head of state, currently Elizabeth II, Queen of Australia.

The second point is about the difference between a citizen’s oath and our own oath as a federal member when we take up office. I have long believed it is bizarre that our duty to the Australian people is not better reflected in our oath or affirmation of office. It is simply incongruous that federal members must swear allegiance to the head of state but not to those people they represent—the Australian people. Acknowledgement of an MP’s responsibilities to the people of Australia should be made in addition to the oath or affirmation of allegiance to the Queen. I believe Australians find it strange that federal parliamentarians make no formal acknowledgement of their allegiance to those people who directly elected them. The sentiments of the citizenship oath, which pledges loyalty to Australia and its people, should be echoed by the oath taken by MPs.

Late last year, the Western Australian parliament took the step of allowing MPs the choice of declaring their loyalty to the Queen or to the people of the state. New South Wales took a similar step earlier this year. In Western Australia, Ben Wyatt, the new member for Victoria Park, a state seat that falls within my federal boundaries, become the first MP in Australia to give his allegiance only to his state following the by-election in the seat formerly held by Dr Geoff Gallop. Ben Wyatt is making a fantastic contribution to Victoria Park as a Noongar member of the parliament, one of the first owners of the land—one of the first settlers I talked about who came here over 40,000 years ago. Ben is making a great contribution. I believe that this would make a fantastic development at the federal level.

As we have heard, this bill will update Australia’s citizenship law by replacing the Australian Citizenship Act 1948. The significance of the 1948 act is particularly interesting because, with its enactment, the government of Ben Chifley introduced the principle of citizenship for Australians as Australian rather than British. The empire was of course in decline and independence movements across the globe were dramatically altering the prewar colonial landscape. Vast migration programs to Commonwealth countries such as Australia were also underway. Australian citizens remained British subjects but, from the proclamation of the act in January 1949, were recognised as citizens of their own country. The act did of course retain the concept of aliens—those defined as not British subjects. Amendments to the Nationality and Citizenship Act in later years progressively changed the assumption of this Britishness. Indeed, the concept of ‘British subject’ was removed by the 1973 amendment, although the concept of ‘alien’ remained until 1986.

In recent months, the issue of the 1948 act has arisen in terms of the government’s plan to introduce a citizenship test. I believe it was the member for Kooyong, who is here today, who made the point recently that, under the Australian Citizenship Act 1948, people are currently assessed on the following: basic English language knowledge, understanding the nature of the application and its meaning, and an adequate knowledge of the responsibilities and privileges of Australian citizenship. Yet, paradoxically, we have a government that was prepared to cut over $10 million from the Adult Migrant English Program. As the Australian’s Greg Sheridan wrote in September:

We also know that English language, while immensely useful, is not absolutely essential for the deep personal commitment that citizenship involves. Surely we all know Cantonese grandmothers, east European family patriarchs and others who have made wonderful Australian citizens but who could not have passed this silly test.

Mr Sheridan continued:

Moreover, there is reason to doubt the Howard Government’s good faith here. In its early years in office it cut funding to English language training for migrants. A report by the nation’s education ministers accuses the Government of seriously under-funding the English language teaching of refugee children. That is not boat people or visa over-stayers, but people we choose to take as refugees from camps around the world.

I know from past experience of a lot of situations in this country where migrants have come in from, say, Greece or Italy, or from many other countries, and the husband has gone to work and had an opportunity to work with other Australians who speak English. They have learnt to speak English through that mechanism. But the mothers or the wives at home have not had an opportunity to learn English. Some of those people are now grandmothers, and they still have great difficulty in speaking English. Under this proposed arrangement, despite the fact that their families have made a fantastic contribution to this country, we would not allow them to become citizens because they do not speak English. How ludicrous is that? Many of them have children, and their children have children who are making a wonderful contribution. But, under these proposed rules, no, they are not allowed to be Australian. I think that is ridiculous. It is just crazy.

Once again we are dealing with a sneaky government. We talked about Australian values. To me, we want people coming to this country to have the Australian values of a fair go and tolerance. That, as I said before, is the reason we have built up such a wonderful country over the last 200 years. But we have a government that, whilst preaching a fair go and tolerance, does not display a fair go and tolerance. It is the most anti fair go and intolerant government I have ever seen in this nation.

We are dealing with a sneaky government, as I said. This side of the House believes that our national security is too important for the games being played by this government and, quite frankly, for the 12 months of incompetence that has delayed this debate. Attacks on Australian workers and the least fortunate in our community are quickly implemented by this government, yet important initiatives which have the broad support of the House are left to gather dust. The member for Watson has moved an important amendment which I said earlier I fully support. I call on members to support his amendment which states:

(1)

opposes the increase in residence requirement to 4 years.

(2)

notes that the government consulted with the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) on increasing the period from 2 to 3 years on national security grounds but undertook no consultation on the increase to 4 years and has given no adequate reason for this measure;

(3)

opposes the discriminatory treatment of people who lost their Australian citizenship under section 17 of the old Act (acquisition of citizenship of another country) and those who lost citizenship under section 18 (renouncing of citizenship) given that it fails to provide equitable treatment for a number of groups, but particularly the Maltese community; and

(4)

notes that a stateless person would be denied citizenship if convicted for an offence of greater than 5 years even if it were a trumped up conviction under a brutal and oppressive foreign regime.

I recently spoke of the persecution of the followers of the Baha’i Faith in Iran, and I dread to think that followers who arrive on our shores may be denied citizenship because of false imprisonment under the Iranian regime. I believe the amendment proposed by the member for Watson satisfies the requirement for a reasonable period of time for people who reside in Australia to seek citizenship and welcomes with open arms people who wish to call Australia home, with all the rights and obligations that that entails. I commend the amendment to the House.

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian citizenship legislation before us tonight consolidates and rewrites the old Citizenship Act of 1948. The legislation also implements measures to allow citizenship for many who have lost it or who did not have access due to former restrictions on dual citizenship. This includes members of the Maltese community, Australian citizens who have adopted children from overseas and people from a PNG background. The amendments proposed in this bill also give effect to the decision to increase the waiting period for citizenship from two to four years, which, as previous speakers have indicated, we oppose. The updating of the act to include the new recommendations has been discussed by committees of both the Senate and the House, and I think that the amendment put forward by the member for Watson highlights some of the inadequacies of the overall legislation before us today.

When I considered what to say about the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005, I had very mixed feelings. A number of feelings pervaded and contradicted each other. Australia has gone down a road that I do not think we should be embracing, and I really fear for the future. I fear for where we will be in 10 years time. I fear for the kind of nation that we have become. I have always thought of Australia as a very inclusive, caring nation—one that I was so proud to be a citizen of—but some of the things that have happened in this country since 2001 make me ashamed and make me question the future.

It is good to see the member for Kooyong in this House now, because I think he has made some very positive contributions in respect of where our nation is heading. He is one voice in a government that is not inclusive of people who come from overseas and seek to become citizens. Things have happened that should not have happened. These are times when people who have turned to Australia for assistance and solace have not been given that assistance and solace. These are times when we have deflected our thoughts and actions away from core issues and core values; however, the idea of including value statements in citizenship ceremonies is fraught with danger.

One of the experiences that I have enjoyed more than anything else as a member of parliament has been to attend citizenship ceremonies. Members on both sides of the House have talked about their experiences. I was at a citizenship ceremony last week, and I was overwhelmed. Amongst the people who were taking out citizenship were a number that I had directly helped to get their visa to come into Australia. Subsequently they have had children, and they have been embraced and welcomed into Australian families. They came up to me and thanked me for the support that I had given them at a time when they needed it. What I did was no different from what other members on both sides of this House do, but I found their gratitude and the feeling of pride in becoming Australian citizens overwhelming. It was so important to the people who were part of this ceremony to now be considered truly Australian.

This bill will make it harder for people to become citizens. We should embrace and encourage people to take out citizenship. When I spoke at this ceremony last week, I encouraged people to take out citizenship. I told them that we were debating this legislation this week in parliament and that, if they have friends or relatives who are thinking about taking out citizenship, they should do it now; if they do not, they will have to wait four years. I understand what a big step it is for a person to decide to take out citizenship of another country. Even though they do not have to give up citizenship of their own country, it is still a very big step.

At citizenship ceremonies, I ask people how long they had been in Australia before they took out citizenship and the longest case was 82 years; at Lake Macquarie City Council, the record is 87 years. It is not a frivolous decision to take out citizenship of a nation; people think about it and they value it. I think that, in the current climate, the government is moving down the track of viewing citizenship as more of a privilege rather than something that we should be encouraging. In Australia, we have an ageing population and research has shown that, even with increases in immigration, we will still have an issue surrounding an ageing population. We should be encouraging people to come to our country—not just bringing people in on temporary work visas where they are here today and gone tomorrow, but giving them the opportunity to contribute to the long-term wellbeing of our nation.

I find it hypocritical that the Howard government talks about people having to pass an English test and increasing the age that a person will have to take that test from 50 years to 60 years of age. Previous speakers have highlighted the problems associated with women who stay at home and care for children. The hypocrisy of this requirement is that in 1996 or 1997 this government cut the number of hours and the funding for English courses. That was one of the first acts that it took. If it is going to be a requirement that people have to pass English tests, it has to be properly funded. That is something that this government has not done. I think it needs to go back and think about that. The government is raising the bar but it is not putting the resources there for people to be able to jump over it.

The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs said, when talking about changing the residence requirements for citizenship from two years to four years:

This change together with the proposed citizenship test, with its English language requirement—

which is underfunded—

will help ensure citizenship applicants have had sufficient time in Australia to become familiar with our way of life and appreciate the commitment they are making when they become citizens.

I have news for the parliamentary secretary: I think that people already appreciate that. What does he want? Does he want them to get on the ground and grovel and say, ‘Please, please, please? I am grateful! I will be eternally grateful for the rest of my life!’ Rather, we should be embracing, welcoming and recognising that people who want to become citizens of this country actually have something to offer and we as a country should be valuing what they are prepared to give to this nation. He also said:

... increasing numbers of people spent significant periods of time in Australia as temporary residents prior to becoming permanent residents - this was why only one of the four years spent in Australia had to be as a permanent resident.

Once again, it is very much a little bit of this and a little bit of that. The member for Swan previously touched on the pledge that we as parliamentarians have to make in comparison to the citizenship pledge. The citizenship pledge is:

I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people,

Whose democratic beliefs I share,

Whose rights and liberties I respect,

And whose laws I will uphold and obey.

What could better encapsulate the values Australians should have? I think that says it all. If people asked me what Donald Bradman’s average was, I would have to scratch my head. I would probably fail. Maybe I should not be an Australian citizen, because I am not up to speed on Donald Bradman’s average. Don’t look at me in horror, please!

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You’re not an Australian!

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will be deported, yes. That it is very arbitrary and I think that the values that will be placed on people seeking to come to Australia will reflect the values of those people who are writing them as opposed to the values that we all hold dear—and what should you value more? Be loyal to your country, be committed to democracy, value people’s rights and liberties and agree to uphold the law.

I know that the parliamentary secretary has released a paper talking about Australian citizenship, called ‘Australian citizenship: much more than a ceremony’. I think we all agree with that. There would not be a person in this parliament who does not agree that it was much more than a ceremony. People make that decision after thinking very long and hard about it. As I mentioned, 82 years is the longest time spent in Australia by any person that I have been at a citizenship ceremony with, but regularly people are there who have been in Australia in excess of 60 years. So it is not a decision that people take lightly and it is much more than just a ceremony.

To think that the parliamentary secretary could trivialise it to such an extent shows that he does not really understand what people go through when they attend those ceremonies. He talks about tests; he looks at the possible parameters for testing in this paper: a written English component, an oral English component and a separate listening and reading component. People will have to do a comprehension test. I wonder whether he is going to line up all those Australians who would have problems doing a comprehension test and test them—and what happens when they fail? Are we going to send them out of Australia along with me because of my failure to understand what Donald Bradman’s test average was? It is an English language test based on an educationally defined level of competency. Wow, that is a big ask; that is quite a hurdle for people to have to jump over.

It is a test of a person’s knowledge of Australia and of our way of life. What would that encompass? Would it encompass a list of the 10 best speeches in Australia? Would it encompass when all the cricket matches are on and when the AFL and the rugby league and the rugby union matches are on? Would it encompass knowing where people meet, where there are multicultural activities and where people welcome and embrace each other? Would it be looking at the history of Australia not from what I suspect is the parliamentary secretary’s point of view but looking at the contribution that people from all nations in this world have made to this country—the contributions that have made Australia the country it is today?

In this document he details some of the tests that are undertaken in other countries. In the Netherlands there is a listening test of 40 minutes, with 25 exercises based on recorded answers and a story, and a pass mark of 40 per cent. There is a speaking test of 20 minutes, a reading test of 60 minutes and a writing test of 60 minutes. That is for 20 exercises. There would be so many Australians that would fail that test.

You can look at the tests of other countries such as the United States and those in the United Kingdom. The United States has quite an interesting one in which it asks: ‘What colour are the stripes on the flag?’ and ‘Name the highest part of the judiciary branch of our government.’ I suspect that there would be quite a few Australians who do not know the answer to those questions—and who maybe do not know how many points are on the stars on the flag or what corner the Union Jack is in. I think that what is happening here is not about ensuring that people who come to this country understand what it is to be Australian.

I think this is more of the Howard government’s wedge politics—more of the division and more of the blaming of people who come to Australia and treating them as second-class citizens. In one way or another, we have all come from another country, and I think that it is time that this government concentrated on unifying our nation—not on creating division and dwelling on the differences and on fear but on bringing people together and on the core values that make a society a great one: one of inclusiveness, one of valuing each other and one of working together as opposed to one of division.

Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Like a lot of speakers in this debate, as I was preparing for this speech I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the many citizenship ceremonies that I have attended in my time as the member for Capricornia and what a powerful and moving thing it is to stand with the candidates for citizenship as they recite their pledge of commitment to Australia. It is always an opportunity to congratulate those people for taking the very big step in their lives of applying for and taking on Australian citizenship, and it is also a fantastic opportunity for each of us who have been born in this country to rethink what it means to be Australian citizens. It is those sentiments that go through our minds as we approach the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005: how proud we are of Australian citizenship and what should be involved when newcomers to this country take that important step to join us as Australian citizens.

To the extent that the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 facilitates the acquisition of Australian citizenship by immigrants to this country, the Labor Party welcomes and supports the measures and the bill as a whole. But there are things that we have problems with that are encompassed in our second reading amendment, which I will turn to during the course of this speech. The bills before us this evening consolidate and rewrite the Australian Citizenship Act 1948 and, as I said, much of them facilitates the taking of citizenship according to the recommendations of the Australian Citizenship Council report which was released to the government in 2000. But I have to say that, as I read the specific provisions of the bills more closely, I said to myself that the government just cannot help itself. The government has to bring politics into play in everything it does and, sadly, nothing is out of reach for this government when it comes to playing politics and ideological games. In this instance it is citizenship, and there are also aspects of national security which this bill touches on that, you would have to say, the government has treated as fair game for its political games.

In saying that, my suspicions are really triggered by the timing of this bill. As we can see, the bill is entitled the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005. Well, 2005 is almost a year ago now, and that is what has triggered my suspicions and those of the Labor Party in approaching this bill. Some of the most significant measures in this bill came out of the response to the London bombings last year. At the time, we were told that these were very urgent measures that COAG had agreed to and had signed off on to be included in Australia’s legislative framework, but here we are, well over a year down the track, and we are only just debating this bill. So the government tells us that these things are urgent, but you do have to wonder. They are urgent in the headlines of the day but, over a year down the track, we are only just having the debate about these measures.

Of course, the measure that really comes to mind when I am making that accusation against the government is the change in this bill that will require permanent residents to wait four years before they can make their application for Australian citizenship. Under the current scheme the waiting period is two years, and after the London bombings when there was that meeting of COAG it was agreed by all the premiers and the federal government that there would be a shift from two years to three years, so that applicants for Australian citizenship would have to show that they had been permanent residents for three years.

Labor agreed with that. We agreed with that on the basis that the COAG recommendation was based on security advice at the time. We accepted that the security experts in our country had advised that it was a good idea to shift from two to three years. Of course, the Labor Party was not privy to the exact details of that advice, but, when it came out of COAG that that was the recommendation, we were prepared to accept it. A year down the track, we are now confronted with a bill that makes the shift from two years to four years, and there is no suggestion from the government that this is based on any change in the security situation. We have not been given any reasons why there has been a shift away from the proposed increase from two years to three years, which Labor supported, to an increase now from two years to four years. It appears to be on the whim of the parliamentary secretary.

So, while we are very conscious that there is always a balance in these things—a balance between the desire to encourage people to take out Australian citizenship after they have spent time in our country as permanent residents, versus the security issues involved in granting Australian citizenship to applicants for that important legal status—in a situation where we are not given any reason for the jump from two to four years, we maintain our position that we think three years is appropriate. That was based on the security assessments that COAG cited in its original recommendation, and the Labor Party see no reason to change from three years up to four years, as this bill proposes—and, of course, that is canvassed in our second reading amendment. We are just not going to support what appears to be a politically motivated and short-sighted policy.

There are a number of other changes. As I have said, we have major problems with the jump from two years to four years, and that is one of the most significant changes in the bill. There are other technical changes, which I might come back to in more detail. But I turn now to one of the changes that I guess prompted me to take part in this debate on this bill—that is, the changes that affect the Maltese community in this country.

Australia has a long history of welcoming migrants from Malta, and the descendants of those migrants make up the large and very significant Maltese community that lives in Australia today. Nowhere is that community more important than in the city of Mackay, which is just to the north of my electorate of Capricornia. It is the place where I grew up, so I am very familiar with the important role that the Maltese community plays in Mackay. I must admit, though, that I did not realise just how far back the history of the Maltese community in Mackay extended. I was having a look at the Mackay Maltese Club website this afternoon and I found that, in fact, the history of the Maltese migrants in Mackay goes back to 1883, when a shipload of Maltese migrants was indentured to work in the cane fields, and they settled in the Mackay area.

Over the years, many more Maltese immigrants came and joined those original settlers in Mackay, and they really have been the backbone of the cane industry over many generations. They started out doing the hard yakka, cutting cane and working in the fields. Over the years they formed partnerships, often between family groups, and bought their own farms. They now make up 25 per cent of the Mackay region’s population. Mackay has about 125,000 residents and some 25 per cent of them are descended from those original Maltese immigrants. Growing up in the area, I was surrounded by Camilleris, Schembris, Vellas, Borgs, Galeas and all those names that people from the Mackay region associate with the Maltese community. We know that those families have made enormous contributions and continue to make enormous contributions, both in the sugar industry and in the life of the community generally.

I will go back to the bill and what it means for the Maltese community. The bill seeks to address the situation where a person has lost their Australian citizenship through the operation of section 17 of the Citizenship Act. So, where someone has taken on other citizenship and lost their Australian citizenship, this bill makes it easier for those people to regain their Australian citizenship.

The Maltese community are in a slightly different situation. In the example of Maltese migrants, their Australian-born children were deemed Australian citizens but, as their parents were Maltese born, still retained their Maltese citizenship. In order to retain Maltese citizenship, prior to 2000 the law in Malta said that these individuals had to renounce their foreign citizenship before they reached the age of 19. The cohort of Maltese who returned to Malta and renounced their Australian citizenship faced a number of hurdles in attempting to regain Australian citizenship.

This bill, as I understand it, will address the situation of those people who lost their Australian citizenship by reason of the operation of section 17, but it does not help the children people whose citizenship was renounced through the operation of section 18. So, in particular, it leaves out the children of Maltese migrants who were forced to renounce their citizenship under the law of Malta.

This was addressed in the report of the Senate Legal and Constitutional Committee inquiry into Australian expatriates entitled They still call Australia home: inquiry into Australian expatriates. The inquiry heard evidence from people representing the children born after their parents had renounced their Australian citizenship. This was particularly the case for those people who had returned to Malta and who were forced to renounce their citizenship as a result of the law of Malta. The Labor Party have flagged this in our second reading amendment, and I believe that we will also be moving specific amendments to deal with this situation. I would encourage the government to consider these amendments, because there seems to be no reason to discriminate between people who have lost their citizenship in those various situations.

In the time I have left I want to turn to another aspect not of this citizenship bill but of the government’s immigration policy in general—that is, the use of 457, or ‘skilled migration’, visas. These visas have become a much discussed issue in many areas of Australia, and that is certainly the case in Rockhampton. As the Labor Party has said all along, there is a place in Australia for genuine skilled migration, but the 457 system has become synonymous with rorting. There are few if any checks being conducted by the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs into whether or not a real skills shortage actually exists in a particular area before granting a company access to these imported workers, and that is where I think this system of 457 visas has really fallen down. There does not appear to be the necessary rigorous assessment by the government—or, more specifically, by the department—of whether or not a skills shortage exists in the area and whether the applicant to hire 457 visa holders has made reasonable attempts to fill the position with a local worker. Often the company’s word is taken for granted by the department, leading to widespread abuse of the visa class and a lowering of workplace conditions for the workers.

As the Labor Party have said numerous times—I have to say we have been proved right on many of the occasions on which we have raised these concerns—this is all part of John Howard’s wages race to the bottom. It is part of his plan to ensure that Australia’s working conditions are peeled back and that we compete with China and India on wages, rather than skills.

We all know that it is the government’s failure to supply adequate training opportunities for Australians that has lead to the current skills shortage, and the Prime Minister came out a couple of weeks ago with his announcement of a skills package. But we know that the government’s answer to the skills shortage has always been this short-sighted and short-term reliance on imported workers.

The Prime Minister denies over and over again that the 457 visa system is being rorted. We even saw the hard cold facts revealed in Senate estimates put to the government in question time today, and they still denied that this system is ripe for exploitation. This was shown even before the estimates hearing today. The Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs admitted back in September that her department was investigating no fewer than 182 employers for alleged breaches of the 457 visa scheme.

Time and time again, Labor has brought to the House examples of 457 visa holders who have been differentially treated in the workplace, and time and time again the government returns with little more than lip service to the issue. There are hundreds of 457 visa holders—and I mean literally hundreds—working in one meatworks in Rockhampton while, five kilometres down the road, there is a meatworks operating with an almost 100 per cent—I know it is not 100 per cent but it is almost 100 per cent—local Australian workforce. You have to ask what is going on with this 457 visa system if you can have one company relying very heavily on the 457 visa to find skilled workers—or so-called skilled workers—while five kilometres down the road another company in the same industry is managing to fill their needs with local workers.

In another industry, we recently saw the example of the Filipino welders in Brisbane being paid 20 per cent less than the market rate of pay, and they were workers with insufficient English to understand safety instructions, as well as numerous other examples of 457 visa holders being underpaid and working under conditions that are unacceptable for Australian workers.

This issue needs to be resolved by this government. We are all aware of the necessity of utilising foreign skills in specific niche areas where those skills genuinely cannot be found in Australia or parts of Australia. But, when it comes down to the rights of overseas workers being violated or when the use of the workers is a tool to bring down Australian workers’ wages and conditions, the system needs reviewing—and it needs reviewing quickly.

As I said, this legislation largely has Labor’s support to the extent that the measures allow citizenship for individuals who lost it and for those who did not have access to it due to previous dual citizenship restrictions. We also support the measures that facilitate the obtaining of Australian citizenship by appropriate applicants. But we do reject the use of Australian citizenship as a political pawn by the government whenever it feels the need to create a diversion or to play wedge politics. As I said at the beginning of my remarks, Australian citizenship is a source of great pride for those of us who are privileged enough to hold it. It is also a source of enormous pride for those of us who participate in citizenship ceremonies for newcomers. Actually it is not true to say ‘newcomers’; as the previous speaker, the member for Shortland mentioned, it is often people who have been in this country for many decades who take that step. But whenever that step is taken, it is to be congratulated and welcomed. We reject any attempts by this government to use citizenship in the practice of wedge politics.

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Committee for the opportunity to say a few words on these very important bills, the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and the Australian Citizenship (Transitionals and Consequentials) Bill 2005. These are very important bills which have been a long time coming. Before I get into the substance and some of the issues related to the bills, I want to note that there has been a lot of talk in this place about security and security issues—particularly in relation to citizenship. I want to make the point that the citizenship bill was first brought forward in November 2005, but we are only debating it now.

A whole year has gone by during which the government has made issues over citizenship, security matters and security checking for individuals. In that period of time, as we found out in estimates only days ago, 117,208 people have been processed for citizenship under the old system. We have a dichotomy. On the one hand, the government has been saying how urgent and important it is to ensure citizenship checking and security checks so that only people of good character are allowed into this country. On the other hand, 12 months have gone by and 117,000-plus people have been allowed in under the old system. I just do not think it is good enough that the government has allowed this legislation to sit for so long.

There might be an explanation in the fact that the government often uses important measures like this as a political tool. That is what offends me: this bill is being used, in part, as a political tool. It is very important legislation which is supported by the Labor Party because it does address a lot of essential things. There are a lot of deficiencies in the current system that needed to be looked at. But we have seen, in the past 12 months, 117,000 people processed without ASIO being able to legally refuse someone’s citizenship application based on any knowledge of a security risk that they might have posed. I find that move by this government almost bizarre. Labor believes that Australia’s national security and citizenship laws are far too important for the government to have made the decision, on the whim of a parliamentary secretary, to delay this legislation.

I also want to make the point that citizenship confers on people a great honour and a great privilege but, in itself, does not protect anybody from a would-be terrorist. In itself, it does not do anything like that. Citizenship can give us a better understanding of who the person is, but it does not necessarily protect us, as we found out in the United Kingdom, where terrorists were actually British citizens—and not just British citizens but natural-born British citizens. We found that in Australia would-be terrorists, or people who potentially planned to commit a number of crimes, were Australian citizens and were born here. Of course it is no different in the United States, where terrorists and would-be terrorists are of American citizenship or of American descent. So citizenship in itself is not a protection mechanism, but I believe it is a very important mechanism as to how we define ourselves and a great honour to be bestowed on anybody.

I concur with the member for Capricornia when she spoke briefly about the pride that people feel at the many citizenship ceremonies we attend—as I am sure you do, Mr Deputy Speaker Jenkins. The room is always filled with many smiling people taking great pride in becoming Australians. They do it with a great sense of purpose, duty and responsibility, and you would be hard-pressed to find anybody who does not do it for the right reasons. Of course we need to be vigilant and of course we need to ensure that the people we give our citizenship to are people of good character. There is no doubt about that. That is something that the Labor Party supports. In fact, I think citizenship is so important that we need to get it right, and this bill comes very close to getting it right. But there are a couple of areas that I will talk about in a moment where I think we may not have got it quite right.

The citizenship legislation also gives us an opportunity to talk a little about what citizenship means to different people. It certainly means something very important to me. I became a citizen in 1974 and have since relinquished my previous citizenship. It is something that is very important to me and my family and to my parents, as I know it is to everybody else who takes it on. You feel this new sense of loyalty. You feel this new sense of pride that Australia really is your country, that this really is your home. It does not mean, of course, that you ever forget where you came from or that somehow that diminishes who you are as a person, your heritage or your culture, but it does mean that you feel much more a part of Australian society and much more a part of our culture, of our ways.

There has been a lot of discussion in the community and in parliament about testing people, about requiring them to do certain things, some of which are good and some of which are not so good. But they certainly are important. It would not be easy to find an equal platform on which to define just what Australian citizenship or being Australian means to everybody. There would be a whole range of definitions, a whole range of different views. I think there would be less agreement on defining what it is to be Australian than there would be on defining what it is to be un-Australian, because we hear it so often. It is bandied around this place almost as a daily word used to describe a whole range of things—anything we find distasteful, anything we do not agree with. If somebody in the community who perhaps does not look Australian, even if they are and even if they are a fourth generation Australian, suddenly commits a some horrible act or something we find disgusting, then they are described as un-Australian. We find that all over the place, but that in itself does us very little justice in here or in trying to deliver the exact message to people who may want to become Australian citizens.

There are things that all of us could probably agree are un-Australian. I would say they are ‘un’ anybody’s culture—un-European, un-American, un-British. For example, I would agree that the riots we saw in Sydney not so long ago were un-Australian—not a nice thing. If they took place in the United States, people over there might say that that behaviour was un-American.

What is important here is that, through our laws, citizenship is given to the right people, to people who actually want to take it up for the right reasons, and that the government does everything in its power to support them. The government needs to take its role seriously, and it is more than just the role of setting down a set of rules and guidelines as to what citizenship is about. It really is also a role of supporting those people and giving them the tools they need to become fully-participating Australians.

One way the government could provide those tools, of course, is through the Adult Migrant English Program, which actually helps them learn the English language. I agree with many people that being taught English as part of living in Australia is very important. It is important to how you get on in life here. It is important to your prospects of obtaining a job and to assimilating to whatever level you desire with the people around you and becoming part of your own area, part of the new culture and part of this new entity that people coming to Australia experience.

I have many Vietnamese migrants in my electorate, along with many others—Chinese, Spanish, Italian and a whole range of people. I always say to them it is important to learn English. It is important to teach your children the new ways. It is important for you to learn the new ways, but it is just as important not to forget the old ways. It is important not to forget your own language, your own culture, your own food and where you come from. I think the two have to be married together. If I could define anything about what really being Australian is, that is it—being able to accept others for what they are and where they have come from. In this parliament we have a number of people who were not born in Australia; I think it is one of the great strengths of this parliament and our democracy that we are adult enough and mature enough as a nation to accept that people who are Australian but may not have been born here can be and are loyal to Australia. I think that is an important point to make. It certainly is a very important point for many people I know.

But the government has got it wrong in a couple of areas—firstly, the extension of the waiting period for citizenship from two to four years. We supported the recommendation by COAG, which was based on some classified security information, that the waiting period should be extended from two to three years, and that would be the right number. That would allow for the right processes to take place and we support that, but we do not think it is right to make people wait four years. Basically you are delaying the opportunity for people to fully participate in our society. And the government can give us no good reason for it. There is no explanation; there is no justification. It is just an abstract number pulled out of the air. If there were some security analysis or some sort of evidence brought forward that said changing it from two to four years is better than changing it from two to three years then perhaps we could support it, but we cannot support that part of this legislation because it is no good. Three years is the right time to have the security checks and to ensure that people have the right access to the tools and mechanisms provided by government so they can fully participate and make the right decision about becoming a citizen.

If you have made that commitment to Australia, I am sure that you would like to become a citizen after 12 months. We have put a hurdle there. We have said, ‘No, you have to wait.’ We have agreed that you should have to wait three years. Three years is a long time if a person has made a commitment to this country. Given all the other rules and checks that are in place, three years is the right time. Four years is wrong. The government has got it wrong and it cannot give us a good reason. It should just review it and make it three years.

The other thing is that the government needs to support people and provide them with the right tools. That should be done through English language programs. The government talks and plays at political point scoring on the value of migrants learning English. That is fine. I agree also that it is very helpful to migrants, but give them the tools. Give them the programs. Make it happen. I think something that indicates some of the problems with the government’s approach to citizenship in this bill—and, as I said earlier, it is used more often than not as a political tool or a political wedge—is that the government has actually cut back on funding for the Adult Migrant English Program. In fact, it has cut funding by nearly $11 million. That is a lot of money to cut out of a program that was not quite adequate as it stood before the funding was cut.

The evidence is in the results: currently only 11 per cent of the 36,000 AMEP students exit with functional level 3 English. Eleven per cent is pretty low. I will not necessarily criticise the system as to why it is so low, but I will say that obviously more effort needs to be made—perhaps flexibility and teaching method issues need to be examined. There must be a better way to ensure a better figure than just 11 per cent. Only 53 per cent complete the maximum number of hours of tuition, which is 510 hours. That also needs improvement. More money needs to be invested. Only 36 per cent actually finish the program. There is a whole range of deficiencies with the old system. That is why we support a better system, but in this new legislation there are a number of areas which we believe are still deficient, particularly the Adult Migrant English Program, and also the change of the waiting period from two to four years. The government should really look closely as what it has on the table.

Labor support these bills, but we note the lengthy time it took to bring them forward. The politicisation of citizenship is wrong, and these bills should come about for the right reasons. There has been no commitment from the government to improve the Adult Migrant English Program, and it is a very important that that program be improved. The extension of the waiting period from two to four years has no justification. However, these bills need to go ahead. They will go ahead and they will get Labor’s support, but the government ought to be on notice that, when it comes to these things, they are not the only people who have some right to views on citizenship and how it affects migrants and the Australian community alike.

Debate (on motion by Mr Neville) adjourned.