Page 319 - Week 01 - Thursday, 14 February 2008
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of a lesson in that regard. I was very impressed. Mr Pratt is right: they had cellos, a double bass, violins, violas, French horns, saxophones, clarinet—a range of instruments—and they were delightful. Tonight, they will be joined by a choir and some other players. I think that altogether it will be about 50-strong.
I would like to extend my congratulations to the ambassador, as well as to the Ambassador for the People’s Republic of China for the spectacular that that embassy facilitated, and also the American city of Newark, New Jersey for sending us the St James Choir. It is interesting that our international reputation is such that people want to send us these groups. Mr Pratt is quite correct: the Al Nour wal Al Amal blind orchestra performed before the Chancellor in Vienna, and also went to Japan and performed before the Emperor of Japan, which a lot of people might not be aware of.
Coming to what Mr Pratt was saying in congratulating the forum, I would like to extend my congratulations to the Director of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, Nic Manikis, because he has worked with so many organisations in trying to knit them together as a community. A lot of his work, and the work that Sam Wong and his committee have done over the last 12 or 18 months, has resulted in the emergence of another peak group. I believe that that peak group is now at the point where we can start talking about devolution. I have spoken about this before, when we discussed the issue about the multicultural council, the multicultural forum and the whole thing being in disarray. We took the stuff back, we took the money back, and I said we would project fund. Indeed, Mr Pratt and I had a conversation in my office about where we were headed, I wanted to devolve it back to the communities because the communities almost had the ability at that stage to do it themselves.
The vehicle for testing this, and then doing it, will be a summit. It will be remembered that we had a summit before; we are now far enough down the track that we need to revise it. I am of the view—and the conversation is happening in my department—that we will not control the summit this year; we will get the multicultural community to put the summit on. We will, of course, resource it, just as we did last time, but mine will not be the guiding hand, as it was last time. We will allow and empower the community to do it themselves. I am hoping we can then go back to the stage where the communities can be resourced and assisted by government instead of being led by government.
The original strategy that I had, to take things back and then provide a framework for the multicultural community to work within, has been achieved. I wanted it to be devolved partially out to the community, which we did in the last round of funding. That has been achieved. I think we are now at the stage, which will be shown towards the end of the year, where the communities should be able to do that themselves. I am not sure of the exact dates; we are talking about July-August or somewhere around there, because it takes a little bit of time to get the thing underway.
Dr Foskey seemed to have a cynical view about this sort of thing. She thought it involved this year being an election year. It is in the time frame that Mr Pratt and I talked about when we talked about the devolution of powers. In fact, it is now a matter of us going out there and engaging more. What better example is there of their doing their own thing than the multicultural festival that has just occurred. We must remember, too, that the forum, under Sam Wong’s leadership, was responsible for the
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