Page 541 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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wongs don’t make a white” in terms of the White Australia Policy which was established, I think, in the early 1890s.
Malcolm Fraser started a significant migration into the country of Vietnamese people, and I think that was a noble and honourable thing to do. They were our allies in a war where we went to their aid. That war was lost and Vietnam was reunified. Maybe it was a war that should never have happened, but there you go—it did and it lasted 30 years. Malcolm Fraser opened our doors to assist our former allies to come to Australia—and what a magnificent contribution they have made. So many students at our universities are of Vietnamese extraction and so many have done so well in the professions. They have brought a rich culture to Australia. It was sad to see Gough Whitlam refer to them as “Asian Balts”; I doubt very much if he would do that again now.
We have a very rich, diverse culture here in Canberra. It is the envy of the rest of Australia and the world and I commend Mr Pratt’s amendment to the substantive motion.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (3.24): I should say at the outset that I will not be supporting the amendment. I will be supporting the original motion and now I would like to explain why. Everybody knows that the Greens are passionate supporters of multiculturalism, but we are concerned at some of the ways that people interpret that idea. It is important to reiterate that no-one is multicultural. More accurately, the idea of multicultural is about the way we all live together, not about who we are as individuals. Too often someone who has a Greek background, for example, or who has a black skin or who comes from Singapore is described as multicultural, although indigenous people in the country, I hasten to observe, are not described as multicultural. Somehow when we use that word “multicultural” we are leaving out indigenous people.
Indeed, the issue of indigenous cultures, and how important they are and must remain for us to live together and develop as a nation with real cultural connections between us, and our extraordinary failure to do that over the past 200 years, underpins any debate we might have about national identity, multiculturalism or any selection of values that we wish to claim as our own.
I noted in Mr Pratt’s speech this morning that, while he used the word “multicultural” quite frequently, he refrained from using the word “multiculturalism”. So I can only assume that multicultural is okay but multiculturalism is not. But of course culture is not just about ethnicity. There are significant cultural differences between rural and city Australians, for example, and there can be grander differences within ethnicities than between them. There are issues of class, gender, upbringing, income, geography and age. There are all these ways in which we differ from each other. No-one is multicultural, but we all have cultures and we all need to understand our own culture and learn to understand others.
Furthermore, culture is a process. It is not a concrete immovable thing; it exists in how we do things and who we do them with—what we eat, how we work, what we work at, the spirit we bring to our relationships and how we play together. So what we need from multiculturalism is not merely a celebration of cultural plurality but
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