Page 112 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2006
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The opposition is critical of the way that the government has handled some aspects of multicultural affairs; of course we are. We see the success of the Multicultural Festival growing each year, but that is not the area that we are concerned about. The Multicultural Festival is a very, very good example of how the multicultural community is going from strength to strength yearly. Certainly the food and dance spectacular we saw on Saturday—and anybody who was there for four or five hours would have been impressed—is getting better and better. To see Canberra city so alive was quite impressive.
Unfortunately I would have to say that the success of the community in running those events, regrettably, is despite the fact that some aspects of the way that the government is managing multicultural affairs are simply not well handled. There are a couple of examples that I would like to point out. The problems that I see lie in the government’s lack of ability to ensure that, at the ministerial level or on an official bureaucratic level, there is, for example, a broad enough, vibrant advisory council. This basically means that there is not an official direct line of communication between the multicultural community and the government, and that is a failing.
The government’s scrapping of MACMA has not served the multicultural community well at all. You need to have the leadership of the broader multicultural community in close contact with the minister and, sitting side by side, an advisory RMA on the day-to-day running of multicultural affairs. That capability has been diminished.
The serious repercussion of this is that the government has absolved its direct responsibility for multicultural affairs, in my view. Therefore, the management of multicultural affairs cannot be readily held accountable by the public or, for that matter, the opposition for any failings that occur in the multicultural portfolio. The fact that the ACT’s own ministerial advisory council was abolished shows that the Stanhope government would rather wash their hands of some of those harder aspects of ensuring the multicultural portfolio is well handled.
While they seek accolades for the positive multicultural achievements such as the festival, they do not, on the other side of the coin, want to accept responsibility for the more difficult aspects of multicultural affairs management, for example, accountability for the expenditure of funds. The Stanhope government wants its rights but not its responsibilities.
The government has claimed that the council was not working effectively due to internal tensions. That was extremely unfair. A lot more could have been done to ensure that MACMA was working effectively. I did not see evidence that MACMA had been sliding downhill over a couple of years and that the government had done everything it possibly could have done to reverse the concerns that MACMA was experiencing. If we had seen that, then I would agree with the government abolishing MACMA. But there is no evidence to suggest that that was the case.
The Stanhope government took the easy way out by disbanding the council altogether rather than working to resolve its problems. Mr Stanhope and his multicultural affairs minister, Mr Hargreaves, do not seem to have been able to deal with the tensions. There
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