27-April-2006
Speeches, Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Community
Speech to the Sydney Institute, Sydney
27th April 2006
[check against delivery]
A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of speaking to two hundred students at Melbourne High School on the topic of national identity and cultural diversity.
Melbourne High School is an excellent Government school, with entry based on academic achievement, drawing students from across Melbourne. Over the years the school has nurtured many future leaders of our community.
Glancing up at the School’s Honour Board in their assembly hall I was struck by the powerful story it told.
Our rich history of migration jumped out from the names listed through the last sixty years — Jews fleeing the Holocaust in the 40’s, Italians and Greeks in the 50’s and 60’s, Indo Chinese in the 70’s and 80’s, Eastern Europeans and those from the Sub Continent in the 90’s and through this century, and finally names from the Horn of Africa appearing over the last couple of years.
The appearance on the Honour Board of the children of so many migrants, from so many backgrounds, is not only testament to the success and aspiration of those arriving, but also reminds us of the extent of migration in the context of Australia’s history.
Around 60 per cent of the students each year at Melbourne High School have had at least one parent born overseas.
It reflects the fact that today 43 per cent of our population are first or second generation Australians.
That Honour Board also graphically reminded me how Australia, and the Australian character, has been developed by waves of migration; how this diversity has given greater breadth and depth to our unique national identity.
There are many ways to describe the Australian character. For me, a few key phrases sum it up — these include our irreverence, our sense of fairness, our sense of freedom and our willingness to cheer for the underdog.
Anyone who saw the recent Commonwealth Games knows what I mean. Sure, an Aussie crowd will roar for a winner, but they will also roar for anyone with the sheer guts to try.
Just ask Errol Duncan, the athlete from St Helena who came in 8 seconds short of an hour after the Tanzanian winner of the men’s marathon.
The courage and success of migrants over the years in starting with nothing, yet integrating and making good, has reinforced that admiration we have for the underdog.
Australians have always been a compassionate people — we are one of a handful of countries in the world who have taken in refugees every year for the last 55 years. But successive waves of migration have made us more understanding and accepting.
Immigrants from Europe have added a passion to Australia’s traditional laconic national character and dry wit. It is an intriguing added dimension.
While Australians have always been known as hard working people, each new wave of migration has reinvigorated Australia’s work ethic.
Think of the achievements of the European migrants who came following the Second World War, and the Indo Chinese who came after them. Through hard work to achieve personal success, they have achieved success for Australia. Along the way they have helped to reinforce national traits such as the strong work ethic.
Their industry and diverse language skills have provided an invaluable resource that has given us a competitive advantage in doing business with the world.
For example, the Halal food trade alone is worth $4 billion annually — as big as our wool export industry, and growing massively.
These achievements have been possible because we have been hugely successful at integrating people from diverse backgrounds because, in the main, we have embraced and drawn from the wealth of that diversity, and we are all the richer for it.
Australians long ago came to realise that persistent plurality is here to stay.
And so we became very good at bringing people to our shores and helping them to integrate into our society. It’s a great strength.
It is always important to leverage our strengths. As a nation, we should use this strength to draw confidence and boldness from it.
With each new wave of migration, there have been some challenges. That’s just human nature. We are all naturally wary of difference until we understand it.
But I suspect that overall, Australians hold an essential admiration for the courage that migrants have shown to travel to a far flung country to make this place their home.
My teenage years were spent in Reservoir, in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, where in the 60’s there was a very significant Italian population who’d arrived as one of the big migration waves after the end of WWII.
These new migrants went through many of the same things that new migrants are facing now.
I had many mates who were young Italians, born in Australia with migrant parents, and I watched them, 40 years ago, go through the same sorts of issues that the children of migrants are faced with now.
So as I travel around Australia with my responsibilities talking to young Muslims, I’m seeing the same thing that I saw in Reservoir 40 years ago where young men and women suffered the frustration, the isolation, the confusion and sometimes the anger as they tried to reconcile the culture of their parents inside the home, with the culture they were confronting outside the home – within the broader Australian community.
And I saw it every day – I saw it at school on the football field, in shops, at parties and wherever. But the thing is it worked out; in the end it worked out.
There were lots of frustrations, lots of anger, there were things that should never have been said – there was discrimination, all of these things because Australians felt edgy about the arrival of these people from Italy and Greece. But as a community we worked through it.
As we worked together, studied together, played sport together, socialised together, you’d start to see mutual respect grow; you’d see recognition of the strengths and new perspectives they brought. And the process of recognition was mutual. The respect was mutual. And we succeeded.
Since those times, Reservoir, and Australia, have gone through many changes. Different communities have made Australia home. In Reservoir the Italians were followed by the Indo Chinese, the Eastern Europeans and now there is a significant Muslim population, who are facing many of the same issues as my Italian mates.
So, we must do what we’ve done before.
Overwhelmingly, people of Muslim faith have come to Australia from over 128 countries for the sake of their children, for education and opportunity, for a better life.
But that quest for a better life has been seriously confounded by the evil acts of global terrorists.
These evil acts have generated widespread anxiety across the broader Australian community including, it must be said, the Muslim communities.
In its wake, Muslim communities in Australia have been stigmatised unfairly. That’s the way of the world, it is unfortunate, but we’ve got to deal with it and manage it.
We’ve stared down fear and suspicion many, many times in the past, we’ve filled knowledge gaps, we have persevered, we’ve helped the waves of migrants effectively integrate, but above all we’ve practised mutual respect – and mutual respect is at the heart of a society that is at ease with itself.
Once you reach that state you can then go forward in a very constructive way.
To this end, much can be gained by seeking to put ourselves in one another’s shoes.
This means, for Australian Muslims, putting themselves in the shoes of the rest of the Australian community, most of whom are filled with anxiety and uncertainty about how to deal with the reality of random terrorist acts, ostensibly in the name of Islam.
And for the rest of the Australian community, this means putting themselves in the shoes of the 300,000 Australian Muslims, 120,000 of whom were born in Australia, most of whom are filled with a sense of alienation and helplessness about how to deal with the reality of random terrorist acts, by people purporting to be acting in the name of Islam.
In the end, helping Australian Muslims become integrated and connected to the mainstream community is the best way to prevent extremists getting a toehold in Australia.
To that end, one of the most important factors is Muslims taking the lead, Muslims assuming primary responsibility.
I have spent a significant amount of time meeting the Muslim communities. And what I’m hearing from the youth is that they often feel disconnected. Disconnected from their own community, and disconnected from the mainstream Australian community. The situation must be addressed urgently.
The challenge for the Australian Muslim community is to find a way to keep their youth connected. It means finding the synergies between Islam and Australian values and lifestyle, and making their religion relevant for young Australian Muslims.
Now I understand that’s a challenge for many of the older Muslim generation, but it’s one that’s got to be met. It means recognising, for example, that many young Australian Muslims only speak English. So, religious leaders will have to deliver much or all of their sermons in English. This means training home grown Imams in Australia.
Local training of Imams would be greatly assisted by the creation of a world class Institute of Islamic Studies, established within a prominent Australian university.
Such an institute would attract eminent, moderate Islamic scholars who would provide an authoritative community reference point; scholars capable of expanding the circle of reference for the impressionable — those young Muslims questioning their identity, challenged by the question of “who am I?”
Australia can provide a bridge between the West and many of those countries in the region with large Muslim populations.
It will also help to put Islam into an Australian context. Many Muslim young people have grown up in Australia and some of the teachings of Islam and the customs of some Islamic countries have no relevance for them. Or that’s what I’m hearing from them.
I am currently exploring possibilities for establishing an Institute of Islamic Studies in Australia.
For our part, the challenge, for government and the broader community, is to help support the Muslim community to become fully integrated through education, employment and involvement with mainstream community activities.
These are the priorities that will be pursued. This will minimise the possibility of an environment being created in which extremists can cultivate recruits.
Education, whether vocational or academic, is central to allowing these young people to taste the freedom and opportunities of Australia.
Employment is central to fostering understanding and fulfilment. When you work side by side with people on a daily basis, you grow in understanding, appreciation and tolerance of one another. And you build a sense of worth and identity.
Aligned with these two important imperatives is mainstream community involvement — whether it be through sports, arts, civic organisations, such as the scouts or the guides, or other community based organisations.
Such involvement leads to the type of integration which gives people a clear sense of identity, and builds understanding and self respect.
I will be working with some key Australian organisations, such as Surf Life Saving Australia, Royal Life Saving Australia, the Australian Sports Commission, the National Rugby League and Australian Football League, the Australia Council for the Arts as well as the Guides and Scouts to help create avenues for young Muslim Australians to fully participate in, and contribute to, the broader community. To truly integrate.
In his Australia Day speech, the Prime Minister said that “…there is no institution or code that lays down a test of Australianness. Such is the nature of our free society”. Of course he is right. People are ‘Australian’ in very different ways.
Being very effective at integration, as distinct from assimilation, is an approach which has helped us successfully combine people from over 200 countries into one family, with one overriding culture — yet a family made up of a very diverse and rich set of communities drawn together by common values.
Values such as our respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual, our commitment to the rule of law, our commitment to the equality of men and women and the spirit of the fair go, of tolerance and compassion to those in need.
They’re the sort of key values that I think draw people to the Australia to which we are all in one way or another committed.
Focussing on these common values in successfully integrating people from diverse backgrounds will become increasingly important as Australia faces not only the threat of global terrorism, but also the other defining challenge of our time, the rapid ageing of our population.
Recently the Commonwealth Department of Employment and Workplace Relations released a report which found that in five years time in Australia, there will be 195,000 more jobs than people to fill them, and these shortages in workers will be spread unevenly across industries and occupations.
This threatening situation is explained by a very strong economy and an OECD report which estimates that between now and 2025, the number of people in the retirement age bracket across the OECD countries will increase by 70 million people whereas, over the same period, only five million people across the whole OECD group of countries will move into the working age bracket.
To deal with this challenge, to protect and grow our quality of life, will require retaining existing labour, and harnessing and attracting new sources of labour.
This will require policy initiatives across many government portfolios, including skilled migration.
And all OECD countries will be in the same boat, all of them competing vigorously to retain their skilled workforce.
The experience we have had in effectively integrating people from the four corners of the globe will be put further to the test. We will need to become even better at welcoming and integrating people from diverse backgrounds into our Australian family.
For future new citizens to quickly and effectively integrate into our Australian family, to fully realise their potential and ambitions, it is essential that they learn the national language of English, and learn something about our history and heritage, and make a commitment to the common values I talked about earlier.
Over the past fifteen years, various studies have shown that English language comes up as the strongest determinant of people’s success in getting good jobs, lasting jobs.
Nine out of ten applicants for skilled migration who spoke English fluently were likely to be employed within six months of arrival.
People have raised with me, that because a functional level of English is fundamental to quick and effective integration into our community; it should be a formal requirement for Citizenship.
They are concerned that, for those currently seeking Australian Citizenship, the assessment of basic English competency is highly subjective, resulting in some people taking the pledge with little understanding or capacity to communicate in basic English — leaving both Australian society and the individual poorly served.
For these reasons people have suggested that those seeking to take out citizenship should pass a compulsory test, a test which ensures that applicants have a functional level of English language skill, and a general knowledge of Australian values and customs.
They have a strong belief that a citizenship test will help people understand the society they have chosen to be part of; help them be more aware of their roles, their responsibilities, their rights; that it will demonstrate their commitment to Australia.
It is asserted that a citizenship test which requires a functional grasp of English, and a general understanding of Australian values, customs, systems, laws and history, will help people integrate more successfully into our community. It is in their interest, and in the community’s interest.
From my point of view, successful integration is overwhelming in the interests of migrants and the broader community.
For this reason, I am prepared to have a serious look, over the next couple of months, at the merits of introducing a compulsory citizenship test.
As a nation, we have a proud history of moulding a dynamic, stable and strong community from a diversity of cultures and long standing Australian values.
The twin challenges of global terrorism and the ageing population requires us to surpass this effort and become even more skilled at integrating an increasingly diverse population.