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

As a member of parliament, I go to plenty of citizenship ceremonies. In my part of the world, they are very big affairs. Since I was elected, I have had a practice of starting each ceremony with an acknowledgement of country, paying my respects to elders past and present of the First Australians of my region of Australia, the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin nation. I tell those assembled that it is particularly important to make an acknowledgement of country at a citizenship ceremony because it is a reminder to all of us that, unless you are a First Australian, we are all migrants to this land.

As Victoria's former Premier Steve Bracks used to say, 'There's nothing more Australian than being a migrant.' You can feel this in the room at a citizenship ceremony. There is more passion for Australia in these town halls, in these community centres, pound for pound, than you will find at a Boxing Day test. Indeed, one that I was at just last month featured an individual live streaming the ceremony to his relatives on the other side of the world. I viewed the broadcast and I could see a crowded room of people watching this young man make the decision to become an Australian citizen. Indeed, it is rare you will get through an Australian citizenship ceremony without someone being in tears.

In my experience, people who have chosen to make Australia their home have a much keener appreciation of what our country offers its citizens, of what our country means than those who are born into it. As a result, I know they feel a much greater sense of obligation to their country of choice. I have seen how much Australian citizenship means to people coming to our country. That is why I am angry that the Australian Prime Minister is now seeking to use Australian citizenship as a political tool. That is why, along with all members of the Australian Labor Party, I will be fighting this divisive, un-Australian bill in the parliament and in the Australian community.

This bill makes a number of changes to the process of obtaining Australian citizenship. The Turnbull government says that Australian immigrants should sign up to Australian values and respect Australian laws before they get citizenship. That is fair enough. Indeed, every new Australian has to do that now. Here is the current citizenship pledge, a pledge all prospective citizens make before receiving citizenship:

From this time forward, I pledge my loyalty to Australia and its people, whose democratic beliefs I share, whose rights and liberties I respect, and whose laws I will uphold and obey.

Every Australian citizen already pledges this during their citizenship ceremonies. Our current citizenship laws already allow the government to put forward any questions about Australia, which includes any aspect of Australia including our values as part of this process. The provisions of the bill before the House simply are not needed. The only practical effect the provisions of this bill would have in this regard would be to delay the time before which prospective Australian citizens can formally commit themselves to these values. If we believe making such a statement of commitment to Australian values is important, and I do, shouldn't we want people to do this sooner rather than later? These provisions in this bill are a cheap political distraction, nothing more.

The bill makes changes to English language requirements for prospective Australian citizens. It is fair enough to ask people coming to Australia to learn English when they arrive and for the government to support them to do so. It helps them participate as a citizen in our democracy and helps them get work in the economy. Government should always do whatever is within its means to help people living in our society to learn English. But, as acclaimed author and celebrated voice of Melbourne's Alice Pung has so beautifully written, it does not define people's ability to make a contribution to our nation. Alice wrote:

I think my parents have a fair idea of what a shared sacrifice for the common good means. They worked all the time when I was growing up. My father started a small watch shop and, as his business grew, he was able to give more jobs to more people. My mother worked from home, Aussie-battler-style, in the back shed.

As an outworker, she spent almost 20 years in the darkness of that shed. Most of the money she earned went into our education, so that I would have the opportunity to become a lawyer, teach at university and write books. Without knowing much English, our parents pledged their loyalty to Australia and its people the only way they knew how — through decades of tunnel-vision hard work, so that we are now doctors, teachers, dentists, speech pathologists, social workers, researchers and Rhodes scholars.

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People tell me that migrants like myself are successful because we have made it to the outside world. But I am only here because someone invested in my education. Someone spent all their pay on a good school for me. Someone gave me space to write a book even though they would never be able to understand how important that was, because they had never read a book in their lives.

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I was lucky enough to be born here. I would be accepted as one of the educated, professional migrant Australians of which the country can be proud, while my mother would be regarded as a foreign outcast. As an Australian, I am not sure I could ever be proud of citizenship on such terms.

Plenty of members of parliament would fall into this category. Indeed, there are members of my family who cannot speak English. I wonder how those on the opposite side of this House who fall into that category can look these family members in the eye while also voting for the bill.

While English is undoubtedly an advantage to helping new migrants to Australia integrate and developing their economic and civic agency, we should be careful about using it as a black-and-white test of whether someone is able to make a contribution to our nation. But, again, the test that people need to pass today to receive Australian citizenship is in English. You already need to be able to speak conversational English in order to pass it. What we are talking about in this bill today is the level of English we require, and setting the bar for Australian citizenship at a university level of English just isn't right. It demeans the contribution of millions of Australians to our nation. This provision isn't just an insult to prospective Australians either. It's an insult to all Australians who don't have university-level qualifications. It says that in the snobbiest Australia imagined by the coalition if you can't read, write and speak English at a university level they don't want you here.

Despite the minister's dissembling, the standard of English attainment required to pass this test is very high. Many will struggle to pass it. Misty Adoniou, Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESL at the University of Canberra, has written about her personal experience preparing students for this test. She writes:

I prepared students for the IELTS test when I lived and taught in Greece. They needed a score of 6 to get into Foundation courses in British universities. It wasn’t an easy test and sometimes it took them more than one try to succeed.

My students were middle class, living comfortably at home with mum and dad. They had been to school all their lives and were highly competent readers and writers in their mother tongue of Greek.

They had been learning English at school since Grade 4, and doing private English tuition after school for even longer. Essentially they had been preparing for their IELTS test for at least 8 years.

They were not 40-year-old women whose lives as refugees has meant they have never been to school, and cannot read and write in their mother tongue.

Neither were they adjusting to a new culture, trying to find affordable accommodation and a job while simultaneously dealing with post-traumatic stress and the challenge of settling their teenage children into a brand new world.

As Labor's shadow minister for citizenship and multicultural Australia, the member for Watson, has noted, there are a large number of people who will never pass this test. Are we then to have an underclass of not-quite Australians living in our country, people who will always be here but never have to pledge allegiance to Australia and who will never be told that they truly belong? It is abhorrent, and not the egalitarian Australia that I grew up in.

In a similar vein, the extended residence requirements of this bill—requirements that will force some people living in our community to wait four years as a permanent resident on top of however many years they may already have been living in Australia on a temporary visa—will serve only to divide and marginalise people in our community. If asking people to pledge their allegiance to Australia and its values is a good thing, let people do it as soon as possible. Don't create arbitrary hurdles to someone's ability to make a commitment to our nation. This can only serve to alienate people from our country, to exclude them from the society that we are asking them to commit to.

The Minister for Immigration and Border Protection says these changes are about national security, but no national security agencies have asked for them. Labor is absolutely committed to keeping Australia and all Australians safe, and we have consistently demonstrated our bipartisan commitment to do so through the work of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. But the proposals in this bill have not been through the PJCIS, nor have they come from the Australian Federal Police, nor ASIO, nor our state counterterrorism authorities. That's no surprise, given that these tests will be applied to people who by definition will have been living in Australia for at least four years. People who are applying for citizenship will by definition already be permanent residents and have undergone rigorous character and security checks in order to come here in the first place. If they are a security risk, they should not be living here at all. Is the government suggesting that these people only become a security risk after they obtain citizenship? If so, how will denying them citizenship address this risk? If it thinks this whole class of people were security risks before they became citizens, what is it doing about them before they apply for citizenship? The security arguments for this bill are plainly a nonsense. It is all about tarring all prospective migrants to our nation with the slander that they are a national risk to Australia. This isn't a national security assessment; it's a political smear. The impetus for this bill came not from national security agencies but from a report by a Liberal senator. Its pursuit in this parliament comes from a power grab by an ambitious conservative minister in the face of a weak Prime Minister—a Prime Minister who is willing to allow Australian citizenship, the foundation of our democracy and our civil society, to be used in a political game to temporarily prop up his leadership.

The shameful political nature of the provisions in this bill are clear for all to see from the shameful process that produced this bill. The government spent months talking about this bill without providing a full briefing to the Labor Party about its contents, without providing any public detail about its provisions and all the while demanding that the Labor Party endorse it sight unseen. It ran a sham community consultation process and then refused to release the findings, sweeping the bill's flaws and the community's concerns under the mat. Given this, Labor has made it clear that this bill now requires detailed consideration in this parliament. The Senate committee process should be empowered to fully inquire into the detail of this bill, and experts and community stakeholders should be given the forum they deserve to share their concerns about this bill.

I'm proud to represent a diverse migrant community in this parliament. Two-thirds of the constituents in my electorate were either born overseas or have a parent born overseas, and this is the story of my family, too. I like to tell people that Footscray, in Melbourne's west, is like Australia's welcoming mat. Over the past hundred years we have welcomed wave after wave of new arrivals to this country; it is their first stop when they arrive in Australia. We have seen the Irish, the Maltese, the Greeks, the Italians, the Polish, the Turkish, the Lebanese, the Vietnamese, the Filipino, the Chinese and now the Indians, the Sudanese, the Eritreans and the Ethiopians. They come to Melbourne's west on their first stop to becoming members of the Australian community. Whilst some have only paused for long enough to get their bearings and to get established in this country before moving on to put down roots in other parts of our nation, the presence of each generation has left sedimentary layers that shape our community to this day. Across Australia, these waves of migration have shaped our national identity across the generations.

For a shamefully long period in our early history, the waves of immigration that made Australia the vibrant, diverse nation it is today—the nation we all celebrate—were distorted by a different English language test. The 50-word dictation test that for many decades underpinned the Immigration Restriction Act—the white Australia policy—is looked back on as a shameful period in our history. We have come a long way as a parliament and, indeed, as a nation since those days, but we should not be under any illusions. Bills like the one before the parliament today and policies like the ones we debate in the parliament today will define the kind of nation that we are and the kind of nation that we will become in the future.

What we are debating in the parliament today is whether Australian citizenship will be something that brings us together as a nation—an inclusive concept that makes us stronger as a community and as a country—or whether Australian citizenship will be used as a tool to divide our community and to exclude members of our society from having a shared stake in the future of our country. I know the kind of Australia that I have grown up in. I know the kind of Australia that I want my children to grow up in. It is an Australia where citizenship remains a common touchstone—something that we all share and revere as a symbol of our shared values and our shared ambitions as a nation. I will do everything that I can in this parliament to protect that for the future, and that is why I will be voting against this bill.

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