John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have said in this chamber before that Australia is a country where many cultures make a single nation, a nation where we all share a fierce loyalty to Australia and a common pride in Australian values: those values of a fair go, of not judging a book by its cover, of lending a hand and standing together. Those values are once again under threat from Mr Howard. The Prime Minister who told us that no Australian should have to choose between their history and their geography is now telling our fellow Australians that we will only accept them if we erase their childhoods, erase their grandparents, erase their past.

I will pass over the irony of the Prime Minister who leads the most un-Australian government that we have ever had actually advising anyone at all on what Australian values are. Mr Howard’s values are about a widening gap between rich and poor, about the invasion of another country based on a lie, about distorting our Australian democracy by using taxpayers’ funds to pay for massive advertising campaigns designed to manipulate voter opinion. They are Mr Howard’s values.

But I just cannot pass over the Prime Minister using the rights of Australian women as an excuse to attack part of our community. The position of women in fundamentalist Islamic states and the distinctive clothing of many Muslim women have led to the cheap and easy equating of Islamic faith with discrimination against women. This is a longstanding excuse for colonialism, which Gayatri Spivak famously described as ‘white men saving brown women from brown men.’ Here in Australia the behaviour of teenagers who practise gangster rap moves rather than religion is used to smear entire ethnic groups. When Mr Howard says that migrants ‘must be fully prepared to embrace Australian attitudes towards women’, that is the dog whistle he is blowing.

Ask yourself the question: what exactly are these attitudes? What exactly are the Australian attitudes towards women that migrants seeking to integrate and to fit in ought to adopt? There is no doubt that Australian women are full and equal citizens of our nation. There is no doubt that Australian women ought to be treated as the full and equal citizens they are. But there is also no doubt that far too often in places around our country that basic standard of decent behaviour has not been met.

There are workplaces, as we all know, where women have been harassed, underpaid and ignored when it comes to promotion. There are community organisations where women’s participation is limited to an auxiliary role. There are religious institutions where women are forbidden to play an equal part, banned from leadership and relegated to subservience. The Australian Bureau of Statistics found in 1996 that 23 per cent of women who had ever been married or in a de facto relationship had experienced violence in the relationship. Mr Howard, who claims ‘Australians ... do not tolerate women being treated in an inferior fashion to men’, has presided over a blow-out in the gender wage gap. In 1996 it was an average of $230 but today women earn on average $308 a week less than their male counterparts. Women’s total wages average just 66 per cent of male total earnings. Does this go to prove that John Howard is fundamentally un-Australian?

We still have a situation in Australia where 60 per cent of minimum wage workers are women although less than 45 per cent of the workforce are women. We still have a situation where women in our defence forces continue to suffer victimisation, bullying or harassment. In my view, it is long past the day where anyone can credibly argue that women’s unequal position in Australian society is due to the unequal distribution of talents and abilities. It is not credible to argue that. There is no gender bar, as we know, on intelligence; there is no chromosomal qualification for talent.

It is clear that women are not being treated, in the Prime Minister’s words, ‘fairly and equally and in the same fashion as men.’ So where should we look for the cause? Should we blame the less than one per cent of the Australian population who are Muslim migrants? Or should we look at ourselves: our workplaces, our streets, our homes, or perhaps senators might even care to look at our parliament. It is easy to find scapegoats in members of our community who look different. It is comfortable to pretend that the flaws in our society are all the fault of others: the different, the foreign, the strangely dressed. But if Australia falls into the easy comfort the Prime Minister advocates of blaming our problems on his latest bogeyman, not only will we do a grave injustice to those members of the community we make into scapegoats, we will actually fail to solve the problems themselves.

Australians of faith deserve better from their Prime Minister than to be demonised for their religion. And Australians who suffer discrimination deserve better from their Prime Minister than to have their real problems blamed on imaginary hobgoblins.