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

I rise today to congratulate the Victorian government on its recent apology to the descendants of nearly 20,000 Chinese-Australian goldminers who were forced to walk 500 kilometres from South Australia to Victoria to avoid the imposition of racially discriminatory poll taxes in the 19th century. The Victorian Premier made this apology at a parliamentary reception for the participants in the Great Walk, a 20-day re-enactment of this journey organised by the Chinese Community Council of Australia Victorian Chapter. The event, I am pleased to say, culminated on its last day with a visit to the Heavenly Queen Temple in Footscray, in my electorate.

Apologies of this kind are not empty gestures. They are not hollow words. They are an important part of the never-ending task of building the imagined community of our nation and of defining what it means to be Australian. Racially discriminatory policies like the poll tax were designed to exclude members of our community from being part of the Australian identity. Using powerful symbols like the Great Walk and this apology to recognise these past injustices is an important way of rejecting this misguided history and of saying to Chinese Australians that the Australia that rejected them in centuries past is not the Australia that we live in and celebrate today. In this way, recognising past injustices binds previously excluded groups into the Australian national identity. It makes us a stronger nation by bringing us together.

In this respect, it is valuable to reflect on the fact that, while the size of the Chinese-born population in Australia today is around the same as it was in the gold rush era—around two per cent of the population—the experience of Asian Australians living in our nation today has been transformed over the past 150 years. During Australia's history, Chinese Australians have had to endure a series of racial injustices. They were frequently the targets of racially motivated violence like the infamous Lambing Flat attack, and they were the primary target of the greatest racial injustice of all, the White Australia policy, the first substantive legislation passed by this parliament—all in the name of excluding them from this nation.

Despite this, Chinese Australians have made major contributions to our national story. A Queensland stockman and cane cutter, Billy Sing, was the greatest Allied sniper in the Gallipoli campaign, and a 17-year-old Melbourne boy, John Wing, anonymously wrote to the International Olympic Committee suggesting that competing athletes should march together in the closing ceremony of the Melbourne Olympics, creating a new Olympic tradition and sealing the games' reputation as the Friendly Games—all while the supposedly egalitarian nation in which they lived refused to acknowledge them as equal members.

The Victorian government statement follows similar apologies for past practices in New Zealand, Canada, California, the US Senate and the US House of Representatives. In this respect, I echo the call of the member for Greenway, Michelle Rowland, for 'a statement by the Australian government of acknowledgement, recognition and regret for past discrimination and injustice towards Chinese Australians'. So I congratulate the Victorian Premier and the organisers of the Great Walk for their outstanding patriotism and for their contribution to the continued job of building the Australian national identity.