Rowan Holzberger (Forde, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I appreciate this opportunity to talk today about the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. As a white guy in society, this is one thing I can say I have never personally experienced—maybe a little bit as a kid with the name of Holzberger, but it's nothing compared to a story that I want to tell in a second about somebody very close to me and the experiences that she had growing up in the 1970s in Australia.

I would like to respond to a couple of things that were brought up while I was present during this session. The member for Swan talked about Australia being a country that values not having a well-established hierarchy. Whenever I'm trying to explain Australian politics to people, I refer them to that video of former prime minister Scott Morrison trying to hold a press conference out the front of somebody's house. You may be familiar with it. It was when the guy came out and said: 'Oi! What are you doing? Get off my lawn. I've just reseeded it.' The former prime minister had to apologise as he shuffled back with the media gaggle behind him. I think there is no better description of what Australian politics and Australian society is than that short clip. A young Afghan friend of mine told me about how, when the Afghan community saw that video, they were horrified that it could happen. They were horrified for the guy's safety. If that person had said that in Afghanistan, then he would have been carted off for some serious re-education. In Australia we value that equality.

The other thing that I want to reflect on is the member for Warringah's comments regarding institutional racism. Racism is not just words, slights or offensive comments. It is where laws lead to that discrimination. Obviously, the biggest example is where this day comes from, where the laws related to apartheid resulted in the Sharpeville massacre. In Australia, more practically, they result in, as the member for Warringah pointed out, disproportionately high—jeez, what an understatement that is—incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It's also in the access that migrant communities have to government services, such as the NDIS. It's pretty obvious, when you look at the numbers, that there are barriers to multicultural communities' participating in the NDIS or in aged care. Even though these are not designed to be like this, this is the end result. There is no way that you could describe them other than as being institutional problems.

Where I think racism is at its most destructive, on a personal level, is when people treat you differently because of the colour of your skin or where you've come from or your name or whatever. I haven't discussed this with her, so I don't want to say who it is—if you could hear her words, you would cry. Her father was an African man who came out to Australia on an educational program to do a degree in the seventies and met a white Australian woman, so she was born an African Australian dark-skinned girl in Australia in the 1970s. From her earliest memories, she encountered racism. The stories that she told about being excluded in the playground conjured up an image for me of this little girl being bullied and excluded as a five-year-old. If you could hear it from her, it would break your heart. At the heart of this is remembering the truly corrosive nature of racism on an individual and also the dehumanising that it does to the abuser as well. At the heart of this, there are individuals to be considered.

In Forde, the seat that I have the great privilege of representing, you've got the oldest continuous culture in the world, the Indigenous culture, that has been there for tens of thousands of years. You've got communities like mine with the name of Holzberger, where my ancestors got off the ship somewhere around the 1870s and set up to work around Beenleigh, where they set up thriving cane farming and dairy and timber businesses. Also you have in Logan in the northern Gold Coast one of the most multicultural communities in the world. The local mayor, Jon Raven, always makes a joke that there's only one city with more cultures in it than Logan, and that is a little place you might have heard of called New York. We are one of the most diverse and vibrant communities that you could hope to find. Forde very much is, to me, ancient Australia and old Australia and modern Australia. It is that community that I think of today when I talk about eliminating racial discrimination.

I think there is a lot of division in Australia today. In many ways, I tend to think that, though you see the rise of One Nation, at its heart, it is not because Australia is a fundamentally racist country. I think that most of the division that we see comes about from the economics that governments have got wrong over the last couple of decades. I think it's been an agenda of privatisation and economic rationalism. It has been a failure to build public housing. It has been a failure to share equitably the wealth which Australia has undoubtedly created over the last couple of decades. To refer back to the member for Swan, that's where people see a threat to our egalitarian society—that Australia, which prided itself on egalitarianism, sees such economic challenges. That's where I think the true heart of division is because in the hearts of Australians is a very welcoming and very accepting people.

There's one thing, and I would like to take issue with this one. It's when people say that Australia is a Judeo-Christian culture. I went looking for the Obama quote, which I can't find. That might be good for two reasons. One is that whatever I say and however I say it are going to be nowhere near as eloquent as Obama. So you're not going to be able to compare it. You may be surprised! The other is that I can pass it off as my own quote because, if I couldn't find it, there's a chance you're not to be to find it anyway. Whatever he said really inspires me to say this, which is that what makes Australia exceptional is not that we haven't had flaws; it's that we are a country which has emerged out of the enlightenment based on science and reason.

While religion had an enormous civilising impact and acted as a cradle for knowledge and while the social justice aspect of the Judeo-Christian tradition is so powerful, it is a fact that Australia is a country that believes fundamentally in human rights. If you can apply those human rights across laws, across systems, across institutions, if you can always keep in mind that you've got another human being on the end of the conversation or the Facebook comment that you're going to make—that is how I think that we that we wipe out racial discrimination. Today is both a commemoration of a massacre and a celebration of a future.

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