Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The year 2015 marks the 40th anniversary of the Racial Discrimination Act and, in the midst of a national debate about the rights and responsibilities of Australian citizenship, it is a timely anniversary to reflect upon. Australian citizenship is the core of one of Australia's greatest policy success stories: the Australian model of multiculturalism, a model that, in general, respects and protects the rights of Australians to celebrate their ethnic heritage while at the same time emphasising that this liberty is coupled with the unifying and overarching obligations that we all have as citizens of a liberal democracy. As a result, we are a stronger and more prosperous nation because of our social diversity and we are a safer and more secure society because of our national unity.

We have come a long way on the issue of race in this country. As I speak in this chamber, a boy from Beaudesert in Queensland and the son of a Filipino migrant to this country, Jason Day, is battling against the best golf players of the world in the final round of the US Open. When my ancestor was a member of the Queensland parliament in the 1860s, that chamber passed a series of racist laws designed to discriminate against Asian residents of that state. One of the first orders of business of this parliament after Federation was to formalise these discriminatory laws at the federal level through what was to become known as the White Australia policy. For much of our history, our nation did not want people like Jason Day to be a part of it—yet today much of the nation will be sneaking into work late after having stayed home to cheer him on as the pride of this country.

So what has changed in this time? We have. We have made Australian multiculturalism work by working at it. We asked migrants to our country to buy into the Australian bargain. We respect cultural diversity where it is not inconsistent with the fundamental values of liberal democracy and in turn we expect that all Australians work to become invested in our nation's democratic, economic and social life.

Protection from racial discrimination, as enshrined in the Racial Discrimination Act, is a part of this bargain. When passed in 1975, the Racial Discrimination Act made it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the basis of their race in a whole range of areas, including employment, housing and the provision of goods and services. In effect, it made it unlawful to deny the full benefits of Australian citizenship and the benefits of equal treatment on the basis of race. This is a principle that, if anything, has become even more important in the increasingly diverse nation that we live in today. It is particularly important to ensuring the social cohesion that is so necessary for our response to the growing threat of violent extremism in our community. This change was not simply about protecting minorities from overt discrimination, but more broadly at dismantling the institutional racism that pervaded Australian society during the White Australia policy and ensuring that it could never return.

Despite this, after decades of the act being an essential part the legal framework safeguarding our flourishing multicultural and tolerant society, the act still continues under attack from sections in the conservative side of politics. The member for Dawson, a strident critic of the racial hate provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act, recently made an extraordinary attack on Australian multiculturalism in this chamber claiming that:

Today's multiculturalism means that the world view and the beliefs that spawn practices like honour killings, child brides or sharia law must be accepted, because they are seen as legitimate values within a particular culture.

With respect, if the member for Dawson believes this, he simply has not been paying attention. The very success of Australian multiculturalism is founded on a rejection of this kind of relativism. These practices that are talked about by the member for Dawson are not accepted in Australia. That is why, in the vanishingly small number of cases where they occur, our legal system does and should respond firmly. It is disingenuous in the extreme to imply that extreme and unlawful practices of this kind are representative of the broader experience of Australian multiculturalism. While I congratulate the member for Herbert for calling out his colleague for the comments at the time, the silence from other members has been deafening. Australian multiculturalism works because we work at it. This is an ongoing obligation on all members of this House.

These politically motivated attacks on this act, and the Human Rights Commission that oversees it, are concerted efforts from sections of the conservative side of politics to undermine legislation that protects minorities and our social cohesion—the very model of Australian multiculturalism. Even today, sections of the Liberal Party are seeking to repeal parts of the act. On 25 March 2014, the Abbott government announced it planned to water down the act be removing the section 18C hate speech provisions from the legislation, opening the door to racial vilification in Australia.

This section of the act was introduced during the Keating government in response to an increase in reports of racially motivated verbal and physical attacks against Asian-Australians in the 1990s—Australians like Jason Day's family and like my own family. It was then, and remains today, a crucial part of the Australian model of multiculturalism. We should remember what makes it work and we should continue to work at it in this chamber.

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