News

19 August 2024

Thank you mister Speaker, to the minister for immigration and multicultural affairs,

The Multicultural Framework Review is a generational reform agenda requiring a whole-of-government and community approach that will position Australia to realise its full potential as a nation made up of many cultures, faiths and lived experiences.

We often rightly call out antisemitism and islamophobia, but too rarely racism, and especially racist policy.

The review called on the government and all citizens to actively combat racism, which is still experienced by far too many.

How important is it to ensure policies do not prejudice or lead to vilification of minority groups?

Thank you very much mister Speaker, and I thank the member for Warringah for the question.

The Multicultural framework is an important document following a long period of consultation, and I pay tribute to the Minister for Skills for all the work that he did in making sure that we have that available for Australia.

It starts with a simple view that we are better together. That’s the simplicity of it. That the fact that we need, quite properly, to have rules about making sure that everybody is safe, does not disqualify us from also making sure people feel welcome.

And so you have a series of issues. One, is the messages that the government sends in having a multicultural framework at all is an important thing. Secondly some of the funding measures that have been decided on in the flow from that give particularly some of emerging communities a better capacity is important work as well. And effectively you end up with three sorts of events: some events where people get to celebrate their heritage, other events where it’s all one big celebration and we all get to celebrate together, and other opportunities to learn from each other, and to understand each other’s stories, you need to thread through all of those.

But the other part of it, which is, we’ve spoken about the way we talk, you referred to racism, very much in the context of the recommendations from the director general of ASIO, and that’s important. It’s also a conversation that really did begin long before now, and if there’s one thing that I hope we have now resolved, I hope we have put away the arguments that we had to deal with for nine long years of being told that we have to lower our protections against racial hate speech. And those comments were made by some people who are now very senior critics. It was the leader of the opposition who wanted those protections lowered and said, “they don’t want, the Australian people don’t want to have officials out of Canberra jamming some sort of language code down their throat”. That was the response to hate speech. Senator Pattinson said, “if it was up to me, we’d put an 18c repeal bill every day of the week, until it passes.” The now Shadow Minister for Defence, said “that’s why we have defamation law, we don’t need 18c to sort these issues out”

And I put to those who are in a similar position to me, and to the Member for Warringah, neither you nor me, member for Warringah, will experience racism at any point in our lives in Australia, but our neighbours will, and our friends will. And words can be bullets, and it might seem like a great way for some people to get at headline, none of us should underestimate the harm it does not just to those individuals, but to the fabric of the nation.