Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to speak today on the very important matter of multiculturalism and Australian citizenship. This is a topic that has been spoken about by a number of senior members of the coalition government of late. I think it is good we are having a public debate on some of these matters. I wish that there were a clearer message coming from the government about what their view is on multiculturalism, Australian values and the obligations of all people that take up citizenship.

Whilst all members of the government and senior ministers are as entitled to their views as anybody else, when people in public life—such those of us here, as political leaders, and particularly those in positions of government—express their views on these important matters that go to the heart of our nation, they should at least make the effort to understand what it is they are talking about. The level of ignorance in some of these comments is quite profound and astonishing. There is no reason why any of us in parliament or government should know 100 per cent about every topic, but, if you are talking about something significant and particularly if you are singling out groups within the community like Muslim Australians, you should at least have some idea of what you are talking about.

There are mixed messages coming from this government, a quite bizarre contrast. There is the tourism message that is going out to large parts of the world, at great public expense, saying, ‘Where the bloody hell are you? Why don’t you come here? It’s a great place,’ while at the same time senior media figures and senior people in the government are pointing vague fingers at people who are already here, saying, ‘What the bloody hell are you doing here? Go away!’ I think it is a very mixed message coming from the government, and one that is not helpful for building our nation into the future. If you want to be purely mercenary about it, it is also not helpful for those tourism campaigns or for increasing investment in Australia from other countries.

The Treasurer was criticising people—Muslims, obviously, because they are the key target of the year from the government’s point of view—who might want to believe in sharia law and saying: ‘You can only have one law. You can’t have sharia law and Australian law. If you want sharia law, go to Saudi Arabia or somewhere like that.’ I do not profess to be an expert on all details of Islam—indeed, I do not want to suggest I am an expert on any sort of religion, because I do not believe in any of them—but if you are singling out people and criticising them about issues like sharia law, you should at least have some idea of what it is about.

I draw the Treasurer’s attention—indeed, the public’s and the Senate’s attention—to an article in today’s Sydney Morning Herald by Irfan Yusef that details in fairly simple terms about sharia law. Sharia law does not mean everybody getting their hands cut off if they steal a loaf of bread or women who commit adultery being stoned to death. It is basically a set of legal principles based on certain values. And as probably should not be that surprising, it is a set of values that are not particularly different from a lot of the values contained in the Christian liturgies of the Old and New Testaments. I spoke the other night in this place about live exports and the fact that halal slaughtered meat is produced in Australia and able to be exported from Australia. Halal slaughtered meat, as I understand it, is just one part of sharia law, a legal principle with regard to the way Muslims should slaughter animals.

Of course, there are plenty of religions that have these sorts of rituals: the Jewish religion also has its beliefs and rituals about certain animals being suitable or not suitable for consumption—again, it is not something that I attest to. We are certainly not talking about putting that into the laws of the land for everybody to have to follow here. I think we need to pull these things back down to a proportionate level and recognise the reality of the words that are used and how they appear to Muslims and the people who know what sharia law means in essence. The vast majority of Australians from a white, Anglo-Celtic or Christian background do not have that innate understanding, but Muslims do. When they hear the words used by people like the Treasurer they perceive it according to the correct meaning, even if the rest of us do not. We must wonder why it is that the Treasurer is being so hostile about something that is so fundamental to their religious beliefs.

I would also like to emphasise that this suggestion that it is only Muslims who believe that God’s law should prevail and be supreme above all other laws, including the laws of the parliament, is a view held by only a very small number of people. But this view is not only held by a small group of Muslims. Indeed, in amongst the many emails I got during the RU486 debate from people claiming to be Christian, a percentage—only a small percentage, but a percentage—of those specifically said that we should not pass this law because it is against God’s law and God’s law must have supremacy over the laws of parliament. I got an email just the other day saying that parliamentary law could not take precedence over God’s law as outlined in the Bible. I am not criticising people for holding that view but, according to the Treasurer, people like that should be denied citizenship and should be pushed out of the country. Clearly there is a small group of people who hold the Christian faith who have a similar view that God’s law reigns supreme.

In this parliament we do not take that view. People can have their own religious beliefs, and we have a strong tradition of freedom of religion. Indeed, we have laws to back people’s rights to their own religious beliefs. But to single out Muslims as the only ones we need to worry about in this regard is clearly just targeting people for political purposes and displaying, I might say, a great degree of ignorance. It is particularly ironic given that this Treasurer, amongst others in the coalition, has made enormous efforts to build a support base amongst some of the fundamentalist Christians. Again, I do not complain about supporting freedom of religion but, when you are actively courting the votes of some people with extreme religious views, it is a bit rich to then suggest that another group with what might seem to be fundamentalist religious views is somehow un-Australian and not worthy or appropriate to be part of our nation.

The Treasurer has commented at length about his belief that certain people should be denied citizenship, that citizenship should be a very serious and important thing and that people should not just be taking it on with barely a thought or with the thought that it will just get them another passport. I broadly agree with his comments there. But the simple fact is that his own government has been rewriting the citizenship legislation for the last year or two. The citizenship bill has been in the parliament since the end of last year. It has been to a Senate committee and results from a long process. Nowhere along the whole process did anybody, let alone the Treasurer, put forward the suggestion that we need to insert these things into the citizenship legislation to make sure that these principles apply or that citizenship has this special value that he is going on about. That suggests to me that either the Treasurer does not have a clue what is happening in key legislative areas of his own government or that he is just a lot of hot air. He is sending out signals to people so they can all agree with how terrible things are, that we are giving citizenship to all these people that do not really care about it, but he is doing absolutely nothing at precisely the time the citizenship laws are being completely rewritten to ensure that those views are reflected in the laws put forward by his government for this parliament to pass.

I might say that I do not believe that we should have exceedingly strict prohibitions in citizenship laws—and I will debate that matter when the legislation comes before the parliament. I have not checked, but I would be very surprised if the Treasurer bothered to contribute in the debate on the citizenship bill when it was before the House of Representatives. He would rather just mouth off a few cheap-shot headlines for media grabs that single out and demonise a small group of the community. But he obviously did not want to make any constructive contributions to how we could put more value and meaning into Australian citizenship.

Let us not forget that over recent years the citizenship laws have been changed a number of times to open them up and make it easier to access Australian citizenship and to enable people to adopt Australian citizenship without losing another citizenship—to enable Australians to be dual citizens. Before people get the wrong idea, I will say that this is a process I support. I strongly support our opening up our sense of citizenship, enabling Australians to connect with other nations around the world. It presents a bit of a paradox and juxtaposition, potentially, but I think the benefits of enabling that to happen far outweigh any negatives. But the fact is you cannot, as a member of government, make these big, hairy chested, patriotic, nationalistic statements about having that unique commitment to Australia when you take up citizenship—a strong, passionate belief in Australia first and foremost and all that stuff.

We would generally like to think that is so, but the fact is that if you are a dual citizen then you are a dual citizen, or a triple citizen in some cases. Unless the Treasurer is suggesting that what I believe to be the very positive reform of the last decade or so be reversed, then it is simply a fact that people will share their commitment across more than one nation. I think that is good from a global perspective, but it obviously means that you are not going to have all people, on becoming Australian citizens, immediately adopting an entire, total, passionate, 100 per cent, flag-waving commitment to the Australian nation above all others. That is a fact of the modern world.

Contributions such as that from the Treasurer devalue the meaning of citizenship, because they make Australians believe that it is already being devalued in the way that it operates, and I do not think it is. We can always improve things, and I certainly believe we should be doing more to educate children—and, indeed, adult society—about Australian history. That is another recent statement of the Prime Minister that I very strongly support. We should learn more about our history. We should learn more about citizenship—what it means and what its rights, obligations and responsibilities are. But I do not believe that the Australian people should be given the impression by the Treasurer or anybody else that there is a whole range of people taking out Australian citizenship at the moment and thinking of it as just another piece of paper of no great significance to toss in the bottom draw. That is devaluing the importance of citizenship for the many people who take it up. It is not compulsory. People choose to take it up, and almost always they do so for strong reasons.

I was interested in the comments by the Prime Minister the other day about how he and many Australians find it confronting when Muslim women wear the burka. I can understand that. On the face of it, that is a reasonable statement. Many people do find that a little bit confronting. They certainly find it alien. But you have to wonder why we are always singling out Muslims at the moment. A lot of Australians also find it very confronting when they are continually subjected to the reverse, which is women in advertising and magazines wearing virtually nothing at all being displayed as some sort of sexual objects for men to ogle over. I am not saying that that should not happen or should be banned or censored. In noting that, it is perhaps not surprising that some women may want to take the reverse approach and de-emphasise physical appearance. To some extent, that is one of the reasons behind women who choose to wear the veil or cover themselves up more significantly.

We need to recognise that all of us in this country come from very diverse backgrounds. It is appropriate to talk openly about what things we find unusual or confronting, but do not do that alone. Do not single out the same group in the community all of the time, particularly when they are already very clearly under attack and being singled out in a negative way. If you are going to mention a negative aspect, I think we should apply it across the board. We should recognise that it manifests itself in many parts of the community in people from all sorts of backgrounds. We should also always acknowledge the positive contribution. Multiculturalism, as Mr Abbott said in his contribution, is the only pathway forward for a safe and secure future for Australia. I just wish this government would get its act together to present a clear vision about how that can best be enacted.