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

I know from conversations in my community that many Australians are increasingly disturbed about the way that our country is being portrayed on social media and in the mainstream media. If you believe the news or your news feed, you'd think our country was defined by polarisation and division, but this is not the reality that the vast majority of Australians are living in their day-to-day lives. There are certainly groups of Australians with a whole range of motivations who now seek conflict with their fellow Australians instead of connection, people who are quick to condemn others and slow to listen and change themselves.

Social media platforms make money by training users to fight each other. They trick people into thinking that their differences are bigger than the things that unite us. While conflict has always been more likely to get a run on TV or in the papers than a good news story, a number of media outlets are now chasing financial viability by pursuing outrage as a business model. But, in our schools and in our workplaces, in our faith groups and in our sporting clubs—in our broader community—the overwhelming majority of Australians are proud of the country that modern Australia has become and thankful to live in the greatest country on earth.

As the Prime Minister has said, we need to turn the temperature down in this country, and when disagreements inevitably arise we need to engage in those disagreements respectfully. This is important. It's also particularly important in this context that we take the threat of violent extremism seriously and vigorously pursue the small numbers of extremists who have fallen into the rabbit hole of radicalisation. But I also think that it's important in the current climate to spend time cultivating the things that we have in common as Australians.

Australia is more than a nation of difference respecters. We're a nation bonded by shared identity and values, bonded by what one of our greatest authors, David Malouf, described as a community of experience or our common response to place, to land and to landscape in all its diverse forms over the continent, to the events that we call history, to the institutions that determine our relations to one another and through which we try to make a good and just society. Being Australian is about the ideas, values, customs, norms and behaviours that we share as a people and the stories and art that we value as expressions of this shared culture. Australian identity is an imagined community, an idea of what we have in common that we build together. Artists, authors, athletes, politicians, faith leaders, community leaders and volunteers, all Australians, build this together. Australian values—egalitarianism, a sense of humour, a love for nature and the great outdoors—aren't a cliché or empty rhetoric. They are lived every day in our communities, and they set our country apart in the world. We recognise them. We celebrate them. We feel connected when we see them embodied in other Australians.

My electorate is one of the most diverse in Australia, and I see Australians with heritages connected to every corner on earth embracing these values every day. I love modern Australia, and I'm proud of it. I love that we're home to the world's oldest continuous culture on earth and share in its deep knowledge of our country. I love that we're home to one of the oldest democracies on earth buttressed by the AEC and democracy sausages. I love the incredible diversity of our achievement. I love our K-pop stars; our African Australian track athletes; our armies of NIDA educated Hollywood stars; our favourite team, the Tillies; and our tech entrepreneurs building world-leading companies. I love Pat Cummins's seam and Alana King's drift. I love that in modern Australia we respond to bushfires in hard hats, Akubras and turbans side by side, looking out for people in need. I love that a Japanese bloke can spend two years walking across this country with a wheelbarrow safely and Australians of every conceivable background will go out of their way to look after him—Catman powered by Australia. I even love this parliament—a place where every sitting week Jews and Muslims play basketball with atheists and Christians under gumtrees just outside this building; a place where our PM grew up in public housing with a single mum and found a father figure in Tom Uren, one of Dunlop's thousand, perhaps the greatest ever embodiment of Australia's values. What an extraordinary country it is that could produce all of this.

We've built something special here in Australia, something better. Together, we've built a nation that isn't perfect. It's an ongoing project, and it's getting better over the long arc of history. We've made terrible mistakes as a country in the past, but we've not allowed ourselves to be defined by them or trapped by them. What a miracle it is that a country that federated in the cause of a white Australia policy became the most successful multicultural nation on earth. This is the real story of Australia, not the small numbers of people shouting at each other on the streets or on social media.

House adjourned at 20 : 00

See this speech in context