Page 546 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
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start saying, “We should endorse particular words. Indeed, we should admonish any government that chooses not to use those words.”
I expected a bit more vim and vigour in the argument. Clearly, the motion was framed to target changes to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and was designed to admonish the federal government in particular. But that was not apparent during the debate this morning. I think the attack has evaporated over time because there was never a need for an attack in the first place.
The true father of multiculturalism in this country, Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, has said that perhaps it is time we moved on. The man who introduced the word multiculturalism to the lexicon, who in the late sixties advised the Labor Party and then the Liberal Party, has said that the word has reached its use-by date.
I think it is really quite dangerous to start setting words in stone. Forty years ago the word “gay” meant to be happy. It is now widely used by the homosexual community. “Sick” when I was a child meant you were trying to get mum to give you a day off school. Today, if you are “fully sick”, you are really cool. John Hargreaves—there he is over there—is fully sick. We could get into the lingo.
But when parliaments start to endorse words, it is going to a level of political correctness that I think is dangerous. Look at the way we have used words that describe those that follow Mohammed. They used to be Moslems, then they were Muslims and now we talk about Islamists. These words are integrated into the language.
The word “terrific” comes from the word “terrify”. It used to mean to be scared. Now the word terrific, like sick, means something totally different. The English language is one of the great languages of the world. It is not rigid; it evolves. The dictionary grows every year, and we have to be very careful.
Mr Hargreaves: You can do better than this, Brendan.
MR SMYTH: I want Mr Hargreaves to listen very closely to what Professor Zubrzycki said.
Mr Hargreaves: What is the name of the book?
MR SMYTH: The book is called Australian Citizenship: See You in Australia by Brian Galligan and Winsome Roberts, published by Allen and Unwin. It is a scholarly tome that those opposite obviously have not consulted. The authors say:
While multiculturalism was largely subsumed by the notion of cultural diversity, the word itself was now questioned by its original architects. Zubrzycki, who had given the term its fullest ideological rendering and embellished it in numerous reports, now dismissed it as ambiguous and pompous. Speaking at the 1995 Global Cultural Diversity conference, Zubrzycki admitted that the introduction of the term “multiculturalism” to Australia was “almost accidental” and an “on-the-spot” decision of a politician who thought it would be a suitable tag for a range of policies dealing with migrants. He questioned whether it was still necessary to use “the clumsy, pompous word ‘multiculturalism’ to celebrate the
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