Page 2261 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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would I expect to have information from those agencies about the activities of people in the Tamil community, for example, raising funds for the Tamil Tigers.
Mr Pratt: If potential criminal activity is affecting the community you might be briefed.
MR HARGREAVES: Mr Pratt talks about potential criminal activity and I accept what he says. But we know that when it comes to fund-raising activities by people in the Tamil community in support of the Tamil Tigers it, too, is an illegal activity. Quite frankly, it is outside my range of responsibilities. Naturally enough, I take an interest, but I do not go seeking information from the proper authorities. I like to keep in touch with the communities themselves and to glean whatever information I can about that to see whether it will have an effect on those communities.
I leave policing and security matters to the proper authorities. To be quite honest, it is beyond my level of competence to deal with them. I hope that I have been able to respond to Mr Pratt’s concerns. There is another related issue, an initiative of the Chief Minister, about which I am sure Mr Pratt would like to be made aware. On the Chief Minister’s initiative I created the Muslim Advisory Council. Curiously enough, the membership of the Muslim Advisory Council includes members of the Islamic faith from both camps.
I have had meetings with the council seeking resolutions to the problems that it has. I recognise and pay respect to the fact that essentially we are talking about a factional issue in the context of a religious environment and we must be particularly sensitive. We do not have the right, and nobody has the right, to march into the Muslim community and demand resolution. However, we can provide opportunities for mediation and conflict management. I have offered those services to the community; indeed, I have offered myself as a mediator in those events.
In one very long Muslim Advisory Council meeting we discussed these issues in depth, and I congratulate the members of that council on putting some deep-seated feelings on the table. I thank them for their honesty and their contributions. I thought we had found a solution, but when we have something as deeply steeped in emotion and religious feeling as this we cannot expect an easy or a quick resolution. These problems will be resolved over time, people will fall and falter but we will be there to assist them in finding a solution.
The Muslim community knows that this government—I hope that I can speak on behalf of Mr Pratt as well—stands ready to give whatever assistance it can to ensure that this community is at one with the rest of Canberra. I say that with all sincerity. I would just like to correct the record and Mr Pratt with respect to the Ministerial Advisory Council on Multicultural Affairs. It was not a ministerial council on multicultural affairs; it was the Chief Minister’s council on multicultural affairs and there is a big difference.
In the days when the Chief Minister was Minister for Multicultural Affairs he had a particularly busy workload and that prevented him from meeting individually with the 90-odd communities we have with a regularity that satisfied him. So he asked me to
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