Sally Sitou (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This Saturday, countries in East and South-East Asia celebrate the Mid-Autumn Festival. It's one of their most important festivals of the year—a day to celebrate the moon when it's at its fullest and the harvest when it is most bountiful, a day to eat moon cakes and rice cakes and to reunite with family and friends.

It's also a festival being celebrated in my electorate of Reid, in the multicultural heart of Sydney. Last weekend I had the great honour of leading the dragon dance as part of the mid-autumn festivities in Rhodes. It's the first time in Sydney we've had so many people take part in a dragon dance. More than 100 people joined in, despite the torrential rain. After the challenges of the last few years of bushfires, floods and the pandemic, there has never been a more important time for us to come together.

The festivities of Saturday were only possible because of the Rhodes Multicultural Community Association, an organisation run entirely by volunteers. Now in its eighth year, the Rhodes Multicultural Community Association started as a group of residents in Rhodes who regularly met to socialise, exercise and dance together. It's now grown to an organisation that supports the local community through English classes, information sessions, bike riding classes, art exhibits and migrant settlement programs. During the height of the COVID pandemic they supported the local community by helping families who were quarantining and by providing practical assistance to small businesses. Their work was so critical that they were awarded the resilience award by the Canada Bay council. Part of their work was to organise a mid-autumn festival to give the community an opportunity to celebrate with each other, and to share this with the wider electorate. It's an example that is replicated in so many communities in Reid. The Saturday I'll be celebrating the Mid-Autumn Festival at another event, this time organised by the Australian Korean Association of Sydney—also a volunteer run organisation that has done a fantastic job to celebrate Korean culture in Australia. It was established in 1968 and has been providing support to the community ever since.

To me, these two organisations demonstrate the importance of multiculturalism in Australia. Migrants bring the wonderful traditions of their homelands to Australia, and we are enriched by it. That is the story of successive waves of migration to this country—people who have left their homelands to come to Australia for a better life and to contribute to making our society stronger.

Since Australia first established a federal department dedicated to immigration in 1945, more than seven million permanent migrants have settled in Australia. More than seven million people from around the world have laid down roots here. They've built a life, contributed to the economy and strengthened the bonds of our community, and they have made Australia one of the most linguistically, culturally and religiously diverse countries in the world.

While our migration system has contributed to Australia's success story, in more recent years the emphasis has shifted away from permanent migration and towards temporary migration. I don't think we've gotten the balance right. Temporary migrants are not able to plan for their future here. Their life is precarious. It's harder for them to become embedded in our community because they face the uncertainty of having to pack up and leave. They are more vulnerable to workplace exploitation from unscrupulous employers. Yet we know they are contributing and important members of our community, often working in areas of chronic skills shortage, including aged care, child care and nursing. I welcome the Albanese Labor government's recent announcement that it will increase the permanent skilled migration cap by 35,000 places to 195,000 for this financial year. It's a great step for migrants, for workers and for businesses struggling under the current skills shortage. It also means we give skilled migrants the opportunity to contribute to our community, just like members of the Australian Korean Association and the Rhodes Multicultural Community Association.