Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to make a contribution to the debate today on the Australian Citizenship Legislation Amendment (Strengthening the Requirements for Australian Citizenship and Other Measures) Bill 2017. I do so as a representative—a very proud representative, I must say—of one of the most multicultural communities in the whole of this country. A lot of people will come into the chamber and make a contribution on this bill, and it is an incredibly important one, but I want to say that I am here today speaking on behalf of a community that will be directly affected by the changes made in this bill. Not only will they be affected; this bill reflects on the contribution so many people in my community have made to this country through decades and decades of hard work.

Labor is going to oppose this bill. I will go through some of the detailed reasons why we fundamentally object to some of the things that are being proposed. First I want to highlight how important the discussion about this piece of legislation is. People who spend a bit of time watching parliament at home can see members of parliament coming in and out of this House day after day, and we can get very excited and do a lot of huffing and puffing about details of bills that don't affect many people in the Australian community. This is not such a bill. This is not a bill that deals with benign questions. It is one that deals with the most fundamental of questions—that is: who are we as Australians?

This bill represents a fundamental departure; it represents a fundamental redrawing of the line between who is in the Australian community and who is out of the Australian community. I had thought that this was a question that would not give rise to fundamental differences of opinion across the chamber. I, in my naivety, believe that as Australians we are represented by values that we share. We've got a lot of young people in the gallery today. In their citizenship class they probably sit down and talk about the characteristics that define Australians. They probably talk about things like a belief in egalitarianism, a belief in Australian equality. We share this very important commitment to multiculturalism, reflecting that almost all of us in this country have travelled a long way, from a different country, to build a life here. There are things like our fundamental belief in fairness, in ditching all the airs and graces that probably troubled life back in the countries where many of us came from. But what joins all these features is that this is about values. When you ask the normal Australian in the street, 'What defines us as a community?' they are going to talk about Australian values. What we've learnt from this bill being put forward in the chamber is that those opposite have an entirely different idea of what it means to be Australian. This government believes that it's not your values that make you an Australian citizen but that it's something that seems to me to be fairly arbitrary—that is, how fancy your English skills are.

I make the point—and I will do so continually in my remarks today—that if these laws had been in place decades ago, many thousands of the people that I represent in this chamber would never have had the chance to become Australian citizens. I can say with absolutely certainty that our country would be so much poorer for losing the contribution of the people who make my community the extraordinary place that it is. The people that I represent make fine Australians, and everywhere I go, in every corner of my community, there are migrants who are doctors, who are lawyers, who are brilliant parents, who are teaching the next generation of Australians. There are people who are doing extraordinary and marvellous things.

See this speech in context