THE HON TONY BURKE MP

SHADOW MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT AND WATER

SHADOW MINISTER FOR CITIZENSHIP AND MULTICULTURAL AUSTRALIA

SHADOW MINISTER FOR THE ARTS

MEMBER FOR WATSON 

SPEECH BY THE HON TONY BURKE TO MULTICULTURAL COMMUNITIES COUNCIL OF NSW SYDNEY

21 September 2016

(Translation of this article appears in Arabic section)

It is great to be back at the state parliament. It’s more than a decade since I was a member here, and to hear Peter acknowledging the Gadigal people of the Eora nation is something that I used to hear each day as Parliament began. And it is a reminder that there are only two sorts of Australian stories: an Indigenous story that goes back to the first sunrise, and for everybody else, a story that involves a journey here as well.

I’m going to begin with a quote. I hardly ever use quotes in speeches, today I’m going to use two. And the first one I’m going to use very badly, and I’ll explain why in a moment.

“…And if the Muslim religion was tolerated they would assemble together through every quarter, not so much from a desire of praying, as to recite the miseries and injustices of their punishment, the hardships they suffer, and to enflame one another’s minds with some wild scheme of revenge.” End quote.

Those words have in fact never been uttered. But if you delete the word Muslim and insert the word Catholic, they were uttered by Reverend Samuel Marsden in 1907. They were uttered following the Vinegar Hill rebellion, immediately after which Mass was banned in this country. And out of that history, it should give us a dose of reality, but also a note of caution. The argument that there have always been groups in Australia that the majority, or parts of the majority or a vocal minority would marginalise or demonise on the basis of their faith or ethnicity is not new. We also, in acknowledging that it is not new, must never fall into the trap of meaning therefore it must be endured. We must not allow that argument that says, yep it’s happened to Indigenous Australians, it’s happened to the Irish, it’s happened to the Greeks and Vietnamese, it’s now happening to the people of Islamic faith therefore it’s ever thus. We must not allow the conclusion of that argument to be therefore let’s just endure it. The conclusion of the argument must be therefore we have the evidence as to how wrong it is and why it must not be tolerated.

The challenge and the reality of today’s gathering is that multicultural Australia is in the spotlight. And we know why. Following the last election a view has been allowed to emerge that there is a growing force that is represented in the One Nation vote that happened in the last election. Allow me before I deal with the issues at hand just to deal with the simple mathematics of what happened at the last election. The One Nation vote at the last election was smaller than what it was in 2001. In 2001, with a bigger vote, One Nation returned no senators. No one got elected for that party in 2001, even though their vote was bigger than what it was at the last election. At the last election we had the combination of a double dissolution, with a change for the first time in the way the senate vote was to be counted. And instead of getting zero representatives, One Nation ended up with four. Now, that means they ended up with a stronger voice in the Parliament. But it does not mean that they are a stronger representative of the Australian community than they were in 2001. We mustn’t conflate the increase in Parliamentary representation with the strength, or lack thereof, of support for that group among the Australian community. Their vote was bigger in 2001 back when they received no Parliamentary representation. The double dissolution, combined with the change in the voting system, is the reason they’ve gone from zero to 4.

That gives us a new reality though. It gives us the reality that, simply by virtue of being in Parliament, the volume gets cranked right up. And that means a few things. One, it means people who hear and feel words as bullets will feel marginalised in a way that would not have otherwise occurred. And secondly, it means the challenge of making sure we explain, live, breathe and cherish multicultural Australia is more important than ever.

In saying this, I want to deal with three things. What are we dealing with, what are we defending, and where does this lead? What are we dealing with – there will be a million attempts to rationalise the One Nation vote. I’m concerned by a number of columns that have appeared in online pieces and some in print, over the last few weeks, where people who themselves will never be the targets of racism, have provided advice to members of parliament that effectively says ‘let’s not be too mean back, when we hear people expound hate. Let’s be gentle and calm with our approach’. Without acknowledging the flip side – that if someone is being marginalised by hate speech, what do they hear if the rest of the parliamentary system then refused to stand up for them? And we cannot, we simply cannot have a situation where people are being given a platform in the Australian parliament to marginalise others, and the smart response is somehow that every other Member of Parliament is meant to go strangely quiet. We owe it, to the people who are being marginalised by hate speech, that they hear loud and clear that they are not alone, and that they hear loud and clear that multicultural Australia and modern Australia are the same thing. I will never see a situation where there is a tactical judgement, a strategic judgement made that says we just need to go quiet. We must not. And the consequences of leaving individuals who’ve been targeted feeling isolated are dreadful – dreadful for them and dreadful for us, as a modern multicultural nation. We also must not allow the argument to somehow get contorted to the point where the person peddling the abuse is somehow seen as the victim. Where the person peddling racial abuse is being described as the silent majority when in fact that individual constitutes a very, very loud minority.

These need to be the principles that we work through. But against all of it, the challenge then comes to us over the next few years, that the spotlight is on multiculturalism, the spotlight is on multicultural Australia. Any spotlight casts a very long shadow. And we need to be clear as to what we’re defending and what we’re not, and also I think to acknowledge where we can make a multicultural society stronger than it currently is. Because we should never pretend that the journey of multicultural Australia has reached its conclusion and we only need to defend where we’re currently up to.

All analogies are imperfect. An analogy that presents people as food is probably shocking, but it’s the best I’ve got so bear with me. I have always seen the different forms of how societies work as best described in the preparation of a meal. If you keep all of the ingredients separate, you effectively have a segregation model. If you throw all of the ingredients in a blender, and you get some sort of puree or soup where everything’s identical come out the other end, you have an assimilation model. And if you throw the ingredients together, and have a salad where every ingredient keeps its individual identity but together you have a flavour like no other, there you have an integrated model for multicultural Australia. And that, I believe, is what we’re defending.

In doing so, I also think we need to acknowledge where we’ve done it well and where probably we’ve largely, at the moment, fallen short and need to complete the story. The areas where we’ve done it pretty well is we have found a way of making sure that for most people there is space for them to be able to celebrate and own their heritage as part of the Australian story. Where I believe we’ve fallen short is in the next bit of making sure that the richness of that story is shared directly and understood directly by the rest of the nation.

Sydney, for example is one of the only major cities in Australia that does not have a centre dedicated to multicultural arts. We don’t have a place in Sydney dedicated to people being able to go along and hear all the stories from each other. That part of the multicultural story is something where I’ve had, over the years, such a privileged window on. I’ve held this portfolio previously in Opposition; I’ve held this portfolio as the Minister in Government. The doors of people’s stories and journeys have always been opened to me. But too often I’ve been one of the only people of my heritage who’s had the opportunity to be there, to celebrate it, and to be part of it.

The concept here, and it’s something that I often refer to at citizenship ceremonies, is from the moment that someone becomes an Australian, their story, their journey, becomes part of Australia’s story. And while that’s important for people to feel in their understand of their own place in a multicultural nation, I want us to be better at working out how we find the window and the space for that to be shared. Basically, we’ve got over the threshold of sharing it with food. But with music, with culture, with film, with festivals and faith, we still can go much further than where we’ve gone so far.

I want to conclude with that question of where does this lead. And it goes to our identity as a nation. I have for eight years been quoting a speech I didn’t have a copy of. And I’ve been paraphrasing it. You might remember, eight years ago there was a forum held in Canberra known as 2020. About a thousand people got together. And at the opening ceremony of that 2020 forum, a young woman stood up and spoke about her mixed heritage that involved both a mixed heritage from the Torres Strait Islands, and a Japanese heritage. And so often she was being asked to choose between the two. And she put the perspective of why can’t both of those heritages, why wasn’t she allowed to own both, and as an Australian, why didn’t everybody share in that ownership with her. I found her today, Sana Nakata is no longer a young student standing up and speaking at conferences, she’s now a PhD and an academic at the University of Melbourne. She doesn’t have a copy of the speech either but she sent me an email, and I want to share some parts of it with you.

“…Australia is the wrestling of a difficult past against an often challenging present with a shared hope for a greater future. We are not a country divided into two irreconcilable, separate, hateful halves; we are a country that grapples with itself, that challenges our past and our present.

We are not one country because we all agree with each other. We are not one country because we are all the same. We are one country because this uncomfortable beginning binds us. And I passionately believe that we should be bound to it without fear.”

In the next three years, Australians are going to be asking “who are we?” They’re going to be forced to face that question for a bad reason. Because they’re going to hear hate speech wanting to define us as something other than who we are. If we can make sure that we are proudly giving people the opportunity not to engage in a nation – and I hate this word – not to engage in a nation where we ‘tolerate’ each other, but to engage in a nation where we understand, share, include and celebrate the stories that make up the 24 million of us, then we will emerge from this debate as a stronger and more vibrant multicultural Australia than how we began.