Madeleine King (Brand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to express my concern to the parliament about the remarks earlier this week of the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, Mr Peter Dutton. I was surprised and saddened when in question time on Monday the minister himself questioned the wisdom of the immigration program of the 1970s and 1980s on the basis of the crimes committed by a minuscule proportion of the grandchildren of immigrants who were fleeing the civil war in Lebanon. It was an unthinking and, frankly, offensive thing to say in the Parliament of Australia, where we are all supposed to be leaders in the community, and ministers, I believe, have a particular obligation to lead and do their best to set an example as to how we as people living in Australia should treat and speak about others living in this diverse community.

At the time the minister made these comments, joining us in the parliament was a delegation from the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, ASEAN. It included representatives from Vietnam and Cambodia. I can only imagine with deep sadness what our Vietnamese and Cambodian friends took away with them from these reckless words. I am not going to condemn the minister in this place. My only hope is that he was careless and appallingly unaware of the meaning and effect of his words that used a very small group of 22 people charged with terrorist related matters—and charged only, I might add; the court process is yet to go forward—to clearly imply that Australians with Lebanese heritage should now have the immigration of their families to this nation, decades ago, called into question.

I want to speak briefly on what I believe to be a regressive turn of events in the WA media. In Western Australia we have been fortunate to largely have avoided the culture of radio talkback figures that regularly stoke simmering pots of prejudice and discrimination. While we have an active radio talkback community on commercial and ABC broadcasts, it has not reached the fever pitch we sometimes witness and hear about on the eastern seaboard. Up until a couple of weeks ago, we also did not have Andrew Bolt taking new pride of place in the daily newspaper, which is the only Western Australian daily newspaper. The West Australian has great journalists, and I have had the pleasure to meet some of them and to work with them. I regularly read their work. Andrew Probyn provides some of the best political analysis in the nation, and indeed was awarded the Federal Parliamentary Press Gallery Journalist of the Year award earlier this year for his work in revealing the Turnbull government's plans to privatise important parts of the Medicare system. Along with his colleague Nick Butterly, Andrew also won this award in 2015. Phoebe Warne, Shane Wright, Stephen Bevis and my old friend and music editor Simon Collins all work with many other journalists to provide Western Australians with good and balanced daily newspaper articles.

I think this might be at an end, and I am sad about it. Bolt now receives a semiregular full page in The West Australian to put his opinions about. No-one else gets this privilege in our monopoly daily newspaper market. No Western Australia based commentator gets anything like this kind of opportunity. But I am not raising the Bolt appearance for parochial purposes. I take great issue with the nasty tone of his opinion piece and the misleading assertions he makes in relation to the Lebanese community in Australia. My colleagues in the east, I know, have sadly had to read this awful stuff for many years. We in the west have not had to see it so regularly every day in our daily news. In fact, I do not think I had read a Bolt piece until he first started appearing in The West Australian. Sadly for readers of this great newspaper, that has all changed, and the good work of its hardworking journalists is, in my view, degraded by the appearance of these pieces which are, after all, just ranty personal opinion works and not any form of investigative or balanced journalism. To be honest, I would like to cancel my subscription to The West Australian, but I cannot. I cannot ignore what is being said, no matter how much I disagree with and repudiate it.

I urge those in my community of Brand, and in communities across Australia, to resist the temptation to be fearful of those around you that have different backgrounds. Please do not be hoodwinked by charlatans, these empty vessels making all their noise that seeks to sow discontent, worry and fear in our communities. They do this by labelling some of your neighbours as somehow not worthy to share in what Australia is and by implying that they do not contribute to what Australia is. Immigrants and descendants of immigrants to this nation—and, after all, each of us that are not Indigenous are immigrants of some sort—all contribute to Australia and always have. Migration and the successful sharing of cultures in this multicultural nation is, in my firm view, one of the cornerstones on which this nation has been built. Multiculturalism joins the rule of law, the continual pursuit of liberal democracy, and a remarkable and persistent belief in equality. Long may these cornerstones hold this country up, and let us not live in fear of our own communities.