Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I will be honest with you. I ummed and ahed about speaking on the Australian Citizenship Legislation Amendment (Strengthening the Requirements for Australian Citizenship and Other Measures) Bill 2017 because there are people on the Labor side of politics who are far more qualified than me. But after hearing a number of the contributions of government members, I thought it was important to put on the record views from my electorate and views from someone whose parents also migrated to this country. All of us have had the privilege of participating in citizenship ceremonies, and most speakers on this bill have mentioned that in their speeches. In Bendigo our citizenship ceremonies cite the second verse of the national anthem, which some people struggle with. The line that always causes people to smile is, 'For those who've come across the seas we've boundless plains to share.' It really reflects the nature of how many people in this country have migrated to this place to make Australia their home and to build their lives. It's something that those opposite choose to ignore at timed that suit them.

My parents, like so many in this place, migrated to Australia. My mum was a 10-pound Pom. She came over on a boat around the same time as the member for Warringah came over. They're about the same age. My dad is a migrant. He came over as a mechanic, also from England, at an age where there was an encouragement for young people with skills to come to this country. We have talked a lot on this side about how they would be affected by these rules today. The truth is, because they came from England, they get a pass. The truth is that they wouldn't have to sit the English test that so many other migrants and permanent residents from this country will have to do. Why their story is relevant is that whilst my mum went on to university since growing up in this country and is a brilliant academic working for Melbourne Uni, and would have no problems passing this test even if she was born in a country other than Australia, my dad is dyslexic. He is a great mechanic, a contributor to this society, but he would have no chance of passing this tougher test if his birth place was not England. That is one of the frustrations and problems that I and so many people on this side of the House have: you get a pass on having to sit the complex English test if you were born in the UK, the US, Canada or New Zealand. It's probably good for the Deputy Prime Minister that that is the case, because many of us have reflected in question time on how incoherent some of his answers are. It's probably good for the Deputy Prime Minister that the laws he is proposing won't reflect his own birth country, or the dual citizenship that he has with New Zealand. I guess it's a bit ironic that we're debating toughening up the citizenship rules on a date that the Deputy Prime Minister of this country can't tell us for sure whether he's a dual citizen or not.

This is the nature of this government—they'll go out there, they'll divide our communities, they'll create wedges, they'll say that you are worthy of Australian citizenship and you are not, without checking their own ranks to clarify whether they satisfy the rules of our constitution. It does make you ponder and question just what they are up to and why they are leading this debate in this way in our country. The citizenship test that the government is proposing, the requirement of English being at university level, seeks to divide those who choose our country to settle.

I mentioned at the beginning of my contribution about the citizenship ceremonies that we have in Bendigo. In the last five years there has been remarkable change in who is becoming Australian citizens and taking the pledge. The Australian Bureau of Statistics just recently released the stats for Bendigo. They really speak for themselves. About 15 per cent of the people recently arrived in Bendigo are from India, 11 per cent are from Myanmar, just under 10 per cent are from Thailand, about 8.3 per cent are from England and just over seven per cent are from the Philippines. That is also reflected in who is becoming Australian citizens and who is taking the pledge at our citizenship ceremonies. Take Myanmar. We are a region which has welcomed Karen refugees, people who were stateless until they became Australian citizens. The first elections they voted in as a people were Australian elections. Many of them grew up in refugee camps. Many of them have moved here and settled here. Their children who go to school here have quite a good grasp of English—and this is such a common story here in this country—but many of them wanting to become Australian citizens still struggle with English. They are attending their TAFE courses, but, as others have said, they get about 500 hours as part of their resettlement services.

Many of them seek to work. They work in food processing, which is big in our part of the world. They work for Moromack's chicken. They work for Hazeldene's Chicken. They work in abattoirs. They work on farms. They are part of our agricultural workforce. They work hard. But this government is saying they shouldn't qualify as Australian citizens, as they wouldn't be able to pass these stringent English tests. I find, as many find, that that is quite a slap in the face, and not what we do in Australia.

A lot of the Indian and Pakistani migrants in Bendigo would pass this test because they came here as skilled migrants. They are our doctors, our nurses and our engineers. They also contribute to our society. But what is so heartbreaking about what the government is putting forward is that it is pitting one group of migrants, permanent residents, against another, and creating a second tier, a second class, within our society, which goes against Australian values and against the commitment in the pledge we make to each other. To say that people in Bendigo who are of Myanmar or Karen birth are lesser people and less worthy of Australian citizenship than those from India and Pakistan is wrong. To say that a dyslexic mechanic who arrives in Australia doesn't even have to sit the test, but a Karen person does, is wrong. That is one of the reasons why we stand opposed to this.

It's disappointing to hear some of the contributions from those opposite, who say that that's just not true—that we're scaremongering. They should read what is being proposed. They should ask migration experts about what is being proposed. They should talk to academics to understand that exactly what their minister is putting forward is to create that second tier.

It is elitist to say you must have a university degree level of English to qualify for Australian citizenship. There are lots of people in central Victoria and Bendigo who don't have that level of qualification; are we saying they are now less of an Australian citizen because they don't have it? Is that the path down which the government wishes to take us? If that's the requirement for people who are migrants wanting to become Australian citizens, who's next? Is it the rest of us? We start to get to a place where the government is suggesting there are two classes of Australian in this country. It is really alarming that this is the direction that this government is going in.

One of the other comments that were made on Thursday afternoon, towards the end of the sitting day, was by my colleague the member for Wakefield, who was talking about how the Snowy Mountains scheme was built by so many migrants of Italian and Greek heritage, who moved to this country and helped build this critical infrastructure, and how we should recognise that contribution: they're Australians, like the rest of us, and should be embraced that way. The member for Hughes was heckling, saying, 'Don't you tell me about the Snowy scheme. My grandfather was involved. He was the commissioner of the project.' I think that kind of statement really sums up the disconnect between those on the government benches and those on this side. Yes, he was a commissioner. That means wealth and education at university level. So the person directing the project can be an Australian citizen, but those who are doing the actual work don't qualify. Is that what they're really suggesting—that level of elitism? That is the crux of what is being proposed, and a way in which the government is creating two classes within our society.

The Values Statement, too, is something where the government is suggesting that people who take the step to become citizens currently don't commit to our values. They do, and anybody who's been to a citizenship ceremony knows that, because of the pledge which people take when they stand on their feet:

From this time forward, under God,

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.

This is what they commit to when they stand up in that ceremony. The statements that are read by the immigration minister, by those conducting the ceremony, talk about Australian values. We already require that of people becoming Australian citizens. The theatre that the government and the immigration minister are presenting around this is incredibly misleading to our community. To go out there and suggest that people taking the step to become Australian citizens don't already commit to Australian values is wrong. Australia is this wonderful country of many cultures woven together to make the Australian culture. We say to people when they come here: share your stories, share your culture, enrich and share your values. It's something that has made us who we are today as a modern Australia. Whether you're our First Australians or our most recently arrived migrant Australians, we've all come together to form that rich tapestry of who we are. We should stare down the government and their attempts to divide us and our country in this way.

In Bendigo, we know what happens when people try to use race to divide our town. It was not that long ago that we had people coming into our town and trying to say that our local Bendigo Muslim community could not build a mosque in our town. Our council supported it, the vast majority of our community supported it, but some outsiders came in to say that it was un-Australian. They are wrong. It is very Australian to embrace and share your religion. This government is trying to enforce their view on what it means to be Australian in other ways. In this proposal they've changed the wait period for how long somebody needs to be living in Australia before they can apply for citizenship. A number of people living in Bendigo have been caught up in that proposal: people who moved to Australia to be our doctors and nurses at Bendigo Health, and people who moved to Australia to work at Thales, which manufactures the Bushmaster and the Hawkei. These are people contributing towards our society, and to change the rules on them at this stage of the game is unfair.

Finally, my parents both did become naturalised, like so many people who share a similar story. I was eight at the time, the oldest of three girls. I can remember it quite well, because it was in 1998, a period when Australia really encouraged everybody to take that step, even though, because they came from England, they had voting rights and would one day qualify for the pension. It was a real renewed push in our country to demonstrate how multicultural we were: whilst we might have been born in different countries, we've all come together here to really be Australian, to share our culture and to help build this great nation.

The diversity of people on the stage back then is similar to the diversity of people becoming Australian citizens today. Citizenship is something that we should celebrate. We should be honoured that so many choose our country to settle and to become Australian citizens. We should not allow the minister to bully us and we should not let this issue divide the country, particularly given it is a ministry and a government who can't work out their own citizenships. With so many of them referring themselves to the High Court, you wonder why they continue to set the bar higher for others wanting to become Australian citizens. I urge those opposite to read again and think about again what they've put before the House.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Australian Citizenship Legislation Amendment (Strengthening the Requirements for Australian Citizenship and Other Measures) Bill 2017 and to support the proposed amendments put forward by the shadow minister for multicultural affairs, Mr Burke. In so doing, I will make a number of observations to commence with. Since the initial invasion of this country by Europeans, we have been a country of migrants. Apart from the original inhabitants of this place, our First Australians, all of us have come here as a migrant in one form or another. In my own case, some of my antecedents come as convicts, some as free settlers. They were migrants from England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany. That's where they came from. We have had periods of migration, as we well know. The Chinese migration in the late 19th century was particularly important in developing northern Australia.

Then, for whatever reason, this country became entrenched in the view the only reasonable people in the world were whites. So we had the discriminatory migration acts and we had discrimination against anyone who wasn't, effectively, Anglo-Saxon. We discriminated against Aboriginal people in the Constitution, as we know. Nevertheless, we still had this wave of people coming here, and in the post Second World War period, of course, we had people who weren't Anglo-Saxon. We had a large number of people from southern Europe. As a child of the fifties and sixties, I well recall that in the primary school that I went to—just a little Catholic school here in Narrabundah, here in Canberra—many of our kids were from migrant families. Some of them, as others have spoken about, came here to work on the great Snowy River, on the Snowy Mountains project—a great project. Some came as refugees from Hungary. We know that today there was a state funeral for one of those great Australians, who had changed his name to Les Murray.

As a result of looking at this legislation, it's become very clear that, with many of those people on whose shoulders we built our country after the Second World War, had they been asked to pass the tests which are being asked for in this legislation—the English test—many of them would have failed. They wouldn't have been allowed into this country and they wouldn't have been able to become Australian citizens, because of their lack of capacity in the English language. We take great pride in that period of our heritage. We see it as important that we recognise the role of those great post Second World War migrants. We see it as important that in the late seventies we became the home to many refugees who became migrants and became Australian citizens, from South-East Asia and particularly Vietnam. It is important. But, under the rules put in place as a result of this legislation, they would not have been able to become Australian citizens, because of lack of capacity in English. Why is it we're saying that because people—who may be otherwise competent and have great capacity to do the work which they've come here to do it—don't have level 6 English or equivalent, we don't see them as being worthy of citizenship? That to me is dog-whistle politics at its worst.

There's absolutely no reason at all that people from non-English-speaking backgrounds should not be able to come to this country. Obviously they need to acquire functional English to be able to communicate, to work with people in our community. That's readily understood. And we know that there are people who have come here as migrants who have taken some years—in fact, lifetimes—to become proficient in English. There are some migrant mums who came here in the fifties, sixties or seventies and today are still not functional in English. They rely on someone else to interpret for them. Yet they are still worthwhile members of our community, and they and their families have made a significant contribution to this great nation of ours and to fulfilling that great aspiration of ours to be recognised as a multicultural country that welcomes people of all backgrounds.

So sadly, this legislation takes us in a different direction. I'm now going to refer to a bills digest prepared by the Parliamentary Library. It refers to item 41 of the legislation amending the requirement to provide that a person must have competent English. The minister may make a legislative instrument determining both the circumstances in which the person is competent in English and a means by which this may be established. This reverses an earlier easing of the English-language proficiency requirement introduced in 1984, when the requirement was reduced to 'an adequate basis'. It comes down to what is adequate and what is competent. It's very clear under this legislation, and as a result of what Minister Dutton himself has said, that there's been a significant change in relation to the English language requirement. He talks about increasing the IELTS level 6 equivalent to 'at a competent English proficiency level' and said he thinks there would be widespread support for this as well. Well, there's not widespread support for this as well, because it's clearly discriminatory.

The increase from basic competent English is not made along a consistent scale, the bills digest tells us. Basic English is satisfied by successfully completing the citizenship test. That should be enough. Competent English would be satisfied by completing a formal English language test to a specified level. And the level they have proposed is this level 6. Minister Dutton extended this argument in his second reading speech when he said:

English language is essential for economic participation and social cohesion. The Productivity Commission in 2016 highlighted the importance of English language proficiency for integration and settlement outcomes. There is also strong public support to ensure aspiring citizens are fully able to participate in Australian life, by speaking English, our national language.

No-one denies the need to have some proficiency in English. But what we're being asked to do here is accept the proposition that the new English test for people wanting to become Australian citizens should be at a university level. The bizarreness of that proposition should be obvious to all of us. Why is it that someone who seeks to come to this country, to be a member of our society, should have an equivalent of university-level English, when this has not been the case in the past and when, as I said earlier, previous waves of migrants haven't had to confront this absurdity? It wasn't the case in the period after the Second World War. It certainly wasn't the case in the seventies. Yet now we're being asked to believe that this is an example where we need to do this because of societal cohesion. What nonsense. What absolute nonsense.

The Parliamentary Library has done us a great service by providing in the briefing documents a table that shows the mean IELTS scores for people from a number of different language backgrounds: English, Chinese, Italian, Arabic and Vietnamese. The table states that the scores do not show Australian test results and that it's important to note that approximately 80 per cent of IELTS tests relate to education admission. However, the results imply that a requirement of level 6 will likely have a considerable effect on aspiring citizens from non-English-speaking countries. In particular, the scores for the written component demonstrate that this could be a barrier to citizenship conferral for people who are Chinese speakers, Italian speakers, Arabic speakers and Vietnamese speakers. According to the work that has been done by the Parliamentary Library, all of the people from these countries would find it difficult to pass the written literacy test that is being proposed by the government. How is that fair or reasonable? I ask the Prime Minister why he sees it as being so important that migrants be asked to complete the equivalent of university-level English to come to this country.

With regard to international comparisons, our requirements are far in excess of those of anywhere else in the world. In looking at other national governments that require the equivalent to an IELTS score, we see that Europe requires an IELTS of between 4 and 5, the Netherlands and Spain require an IELTS of approximately 3 and Canada requires an IELTS of 4. Yet we are asking potential Australian citizens to pass this test at IELTS 6. It's not appropriate, it's not fair and it's not reasonable. As one observer has said, it is very likely that we have the most stringent language testing for citizenship in the world.

I'm aware that we have some guests that we need to accord to, but I will just finish my contribution by saying this: it is not reasonable for us to introduce changes to this citizenship legislation which are divisive and discriminatory and which take us back to those dark old days of White Australia. It is simply not reasonable and it should not be done.

Debate adjourned.