Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Citizenship has in many ways been taken for granted in Australia in the past, and it is quite good to get some debate about what citizenship means in Australia, what its value is and how people become citizens of Australia. The current act, in subsection 21(2), sets out the general eligibility for citizenship, which is that applicants must understand the nature of application for citizenship, must possess a basic knowledge of the English language and must have an adequate knowledge of the responsibilities and privileges of Australian citizenship. After many decades of accepting the current form of assessing them—which is basically by a personal interview—the current government has decided that, whereas those aims are worthy, we need to change the way in which they are assessed. The government wants to change the personal interview to a test. In my travels around the country, there has been quite a large measure of support—including by many migrants, who have a deep understanding of Australian culture and want to display that knowledge—for some perhaps more rigorous form of testing for citizenship. However, the government has not set out very clearly the reasons why it has gone to the particular form of testing that it has, what it hopes to achieve or what it regards as the criteria for citizenship.

Most of the questions that I have asked have revolved around what has been happening in testing overseas—in particular, in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands but also in the United States of America and Canada. Whether this merits support will depend on the implementation of the testing. Although there are some claims that overseas testing has been examined in detail and that the Australian testing will be modelled on it, as I see it there are some very important differences between the proposed Australian system and the overseas systems. Whereas the proposed Australian system has very limited exemptions in areas like physical and mental disability or age and some flexibility where there is a literacy problem, other countries have a much more flexible system—for example, in the United States applicants have the ability to take the knowledge component of the test in the language of their choice. Not only is that not the proposed system for the Australian test but the literature around citizenship—the resource booklets and so forth—will be printed only in English and not in any other language. Prospective citizens will thus need to have a fairly good grasp of English before they even start on the process and before they can read about what the government regards as Australian values and the Australian way of life. I have concerns about that. What it will mean in fact is that various migrant groups will spend their resources on producing booklets in different languages, and prospective citizens will probably have to pay for some training in how to do the test or pay for booklets that describe it. This is one area in which the Australian test is more rigorous than the overseas test which it is modelled on.

The other particular problem that I have is that there is no doubt that this change in the regime of citizenship will affect people who have come in as refugees and humanitarian entrants far more than it will affect other groups. The great bulk of migrants to Australia come in under a works skills program of some description or are students, and they need to pass an English language test before they even get their visa. They achieve a level of functional English before they even come into Australia, so if they get a permanent visa once they are here and decide to apply for citizenship then obviously they will have a particular level of English that will facilitate their citizenship application. However, refugees and humanitarian entrants do not necessarily have that English language facility. They also often have considerable problems with literacy or have had problems with schooling in their past and need to make up a lot of ground. Many of them also suffer from trauma. They may have difficulty in accessing English classes and in dealing with the bureaucracy involved here. They are other particular problems that I have.

This is a group which would be most anxious to take up citizenship, to get an Australian passport, to have their right to be in this country regularised in that way. That has indeed been proved in the rate of take-up of citizenship among that group of refugee and humanitarian entrants. Many of that group are very anxious to get Australian passports to be able to travel back to their country of origin to see friendas and relatives, with the security of knowing that they will be able to return to their citizenship in Australia. It aslo assists them often in getting a job or accessing the ability to bring relatives over. So this is one group that I have great concerns about. I will very closely follow what happens to their rate of uptake of citizenship, their ability to pass the test in future and whether there will be any deterrents in the new system. I hope that the Department of Immigration and Citizenship will keep very good records of those results. We have heard from the department that the countries on which the test is modelled have not undertaken comprehensive reviews. If this is done in Australia, it will provide a good service not only to the multicultural community here but also, presumably, to those overseas. I hope and expect that very good records will be kept about who passes and fails, what the rates are and any changes in the take-up of citizenship.

The third area where I have concerns, and this has been expressed by many of the speakers, is with the English language training. The booklets will be produced in English and facility in English is obviously critical to passing the test. It has been mentioned by other speakers that the Adult Migrant English Program is quite limited in many ways. For most eligible people the program will only provide 510 hours of English training and slightly more for people who are assessed as being in more need because of their particular literacy or low education problems. The trouble with the AMEP course is that for many people it is not sufficiently flexible to enable them to take up even their 510 hours, and this is shown in departmental statistics. Only something like 10 or 12 per cent of participants in the program successfully complete it with the required certificate in functional English.

The very people who have the most need for the program to get their citizenship tend to be those who have the most difficulty in accessing AMEP. As I understand it, there are a couple of major reasons for that. One reason is that people tend to grab a job if they can get one. It makes it difficult for those eligible for the program—and they tend to be from the refugee and humanitarian entry group—to keep up their job, their home responsibilities and their English language training. Another major reason is that for women at home, people who are ill and people in remote areas, the program is not sufficiently flexible. For example, people have difficulty accessing child care for some programs and in remote communities there may not be enough people to form a class, so people end up not completing the course.

There are some people who will always have difficulty in acquiring another language. We saw that with the wave of immigrants who came here after World War II. Some of those people picked up English very quickly while others, often because they were women at home with little exposure to other English speakers, never really acquired the full facility of the language and to this day require help with translating from their children. I am concerned that those kinds of people will from now on be excluded from citizenship. I expect that as the department and the minister monitor this program they will tend to make adjustments to ensure that people are not unduly disadvantaged in the acquisition of citizenship. I can think of examples, such as the wife at home who might not be able to acquire the English language. While her husband and children acquire citizenship, she may be the only one left out. The Labor Party policy of improving the funding and the flexibility of AMEP is the answer in this instance. Our policy is about education and giving people the proper opportunity to study the language and really assist them to participate in that citizenship. That is something that we all want to see. We all want to see people acquire English language skills, the dominant language in our country, so that they can access in full the advantages that Australia can give.

I urge the government to review the program well and to be flexible in its implementation, and I urge them to look at the AMEP program to see whether more funding can be provided. One of the things about this proposed new test is the significant funding involved: the cost will be $123 million over a five-year period. The fee will go up from $120 to $240, so there are significant costs involved for both the government and those who need to take the citizenship test before they can apply for citizenship. That is why it is important that we make sure this test achieves its aims, and that it does so fairly and correctly. That kind of money could be well spent on providing good programs for migrants to this country—for instance, assisting youth to integrate into schools and into our society and so on. So the significant costs involved mean that we should be fairly rigorous in monitoring the outcome of the new system.

In participating in the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs inquiry I was a bit dismayed to hear that there is still no sight of the resource booklet upon which the test questions will be based and that the values statement, the booklet, to which the Secretary to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship said there had been very limited departmental input, will be produced within the minister’s office. As I understand it, there has been no input from FECCA in this process. We are still waiting for some kind of indication of what will be in the booklet. But, more than that, there will not be an opportunity for FECCA or any of the other groups involved in multicultural life in this country to have any kind of say as to what is in that booklet.

I think that relying on a value judgement of the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and the government to decide what are Australian values and what is Australian life, without reference to groups in the wider community—not only to the multicultural groups but to other groups that might want to have a say about what Australian values are and what represents our way of life—is not a good way to proceed. I think that is particularly poor policy and practice from the government. In its haste to implement this policy, and probably because this is an election year, the government is skipping a very essential part of the process of developing a good system that it can defend with confidence.

I support the foreshadowed Labor Party amendment to this bill and the recommendation that there be a review of the operation of the new test so that we can properly assess that it is fair to all Australians, so that it will not be a blemish on our recent proud record of welcoming people from all races and cultures to our country. The Prime Minister has very often said that the Australian people are very generous in offering refugees sanctuary in our country, and I like to think that that is indeed the case: that Australians are generous and do support the principles of fairness, that they will give people a chance to settle in our country even though they may not be perfect in their English or in their understanding of our way and that they will accept the enthusiasm of migrants to be Australian and to get on with life and make a success of it at its face value. I think that should be supported by the people in this country.