or
Join Now!
|
|
Home/Government/Politics
|
| Forum |
Ask A Question |
Question Board |
FAQs |
Search |
Return to Question Board
| Question Details |
Asked By |
Asked On |
| A balanced view on multiculturism and immigration from a "liberal"? |
paraclete |
11/01/06 |
Silver lining to Hilaly furore
By Chris Hurford
November 02, 2006 12:00am
Article from: The Australian
THE Australian people have rightly been up in arms over Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly's outrageous remarks about women and jihadists. But for all the fretting and wailing, there could be a positive side to the past week's events.
They may encourage political leaders to toughen our settlement policies and redefine multiculturalism. For too long, some uninformed commentators have preached diversity and tolerance at the expense of integration and social cohesion. That must change.
But first to Hilaly. The provocative sheik was clearly an unsuitable immigrant to this country. He came here in 1982 on a visitor's visa, which did not require an interview. A Liberal minister allowed him to stay on an extension to a temporary visa. But Hilaly should have been sent back to Egypt, where he could have applied for a visa. If proper procedures, including an interview with immigration officials, were enforced, Hilaly would probably have been denied entry.
In 1983 Bob Hawke was elected prime minister and my Labor predecessor wrongly allowed Hilaly another extension. But when I became the minister in 1985, I decided not to approve Hilaly's application for permanent residence or to renew his temporary visa. After all, he had a lengthy history of inflaming divisions in his community. He had made little effort to settle here, including by improving his ability to speak the English language. And he had persisted in offending, for instance, Jewish Australians in his sermons, in which he chose to get involved in the Middle East conflict, one of a number of old-world discords we discouraged from being imported into our society.
In the past week, columnists and politicians have speculated about who was right and who was wrong, and have sought to drive wedges between me and former colleagues. Paul Keating and Leo McLeay, the argument goes, undid all my good work and let their petty political interests override the national interest. To be fair, my former colleagues merely acted as any member of parliament would in the circumstances. Looking after one's constituents by introducing them to the minister is hardly a sin in public life. I do not know whether they went to Hawke behind my back. Nor do I know who made the decision to grant temporary visa extensions to Hilaly after I left the portfolio in 1987, before one successor unwisely granted Hilaly permanent residence in 1990. By then I had long gone to New York as consul-general.
What I do know is that Hawke removed my excellent head of department, Bill McKinnon, sending him to New Zealand as high commissioner a couple of months before moving me into another portfolio in March 1987. Hawke did not consult me about the McKinnon move. He told me that he wanted me in a more senior portfolio, community services, being vacated by Labor's deputy leader in the Senate, Don Grimes.
I believe the reason for these moves, and for the mistakes made because of them, are found in the then prevalent conventional wisdom that so-called ethnic leaders were complaining about the settlement policies I was pursuing and McKinnon was implementing.
The accepted wisdom was generated by a false belief that there were votes in paying homage to self-chosen ethnic leaders and continuing to muddy the real meaning of multiculturalism. My intuition told me they were wrong. And the vote in the republican referendum of 1999, in which significant groups of ethnic minorities supported the constitutional monarchy, (regrettably) confirmed that intuition: that ethnic leaders, with their personal agendas, were not representative of the vast majority of immigrants, who merely yearn to make a contribution to an Australian culture that they respect. But that was then. What to do now?
Well, for starters, we are in dire need of better settlement policies. That word settlement is jargon that describes policies devoted to integrating migrants into our society. It is very important that we, too, are happy about their settling here. After all, we need migrants to help address our economic and defence vulnerabilities.
We've made some awful settlement mistakes over the years.
One of the biggest was settling migrants in those enormous camps that spawned many of the ghettos in our mainland capital cities. After I took over the immigration portfolio, we closed many oversized camps. But the damage had been done. Some of that damage can be seen in the western Sydney area of Lakemba. There are too many in that Muslim community with inadequate education and training, and too many of them are underemployed or unemployed.
Another mistake is a more recent one: a development in the 20 years since I stopped minding that difficult portfolio. There has been a retreat from interviewing toughly and with good judgment those from overseas who apply to come here; but we must choose only those who are assessed as likely to integrate well. Furthermore, we have retreated from sending home more readily those who do not make the grade before being given permanent residence. They and we would be better off if that tougher approach were reinstated.
One of the reasons for the damaging retreat from applying the old toughness and good judgment has been the disgraceful outsourcing of so much of the administration to private-sector immigration agents. Since my day, this sadly has been adopted by Labor and Liberals alike. This policy is not only very unfair to poorer applicants, who cannot afford the large fees, but abandons so many of the necessary checks that need to be made to ensure that only people who are suitable come here.
Our leaders also need to define multiculturalism more appropriately. Of course, many of us want to feel a warm inner glow when considering our achievement of settling people with the cultures of 140 separate nations. That multicultural settlement has been aided by government programs aimed at helping newcomers to recognise that we respect their cultures and want them to feel at home here while pursuing chosen aspects of their former way of life, provided their contribution to our culture conforms with our core Western values.
By these measures they have settled better and more quickly, and have learned English more readily. Alas, some, particularly in the academic class, have gone over the top and converted the adjective multicultural into a noun, multiculturalism. They have left the impression that separate development of these cultures should be an objective of policy. But does separate development ring a bell with you? South African apartheid, perhaps? This has never been the objective of our policy, nor should it be. We are not, nor should we be, a nation of many cultures. We are a multiracial nation that strongly celebrates core Western cultural values of liberal democracy.
If the Hilaly episode helps us to toughen our settlement policies and turns us to developing a cohesion in our one-Australian culture, then there has been a silver lining to this dark cloud. A solution to the Lakemba problem will result only if we recognise our mistakes of the past. We also need to do a better job of encouraging Muslim integration into our and way of life.
Chris Hurford was a federal Labor MP for the seat of Adelaide from 1969 to 1987 and immigration minister in the Hawke Labor government from 1985 to 1987.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
I'm sure you can see parallels in this in the immigration problems of many countries today. Let's hope the lessons can be learned without repeating the mistakes of the past?
|
|
Your Options |
Additional Options are only visible when you login! !
|
|
|
|
