Mr TANNER (10:18 PM) —I wish to rise tonight on a matter of considerable concern to many of my constituents, particularly the very substantial number of constituents in my electorate who are of non-English speaking background and also the many others who support a decent, tolerant, multicultural society. We do have a growing debate in our community about these issues, a debate which I am only too happy to be engaged in. But there has to be some honesty, some decency, in this debate.

I wish to raise some comments with respect to a book that has recently been published and which received a lot of publicity, a book called Among the Barbarians written by journalist Paul Sheehan. Given the way that some of these issues are treated in the debate, I cannot give you a full and detailed account of my true views of this book. The way this debate tends to go is that those expressions themselves would be seen as a badge of honour for people peddling those views. I will try to use even more restrained language than usual in putting my views.

This book is very poorly researched. It is a classic example of pop journalism from somebody who has reached a conclusion long before he has made any attempt to examine the evidence and then trawled through every last corner he could to find any shred of indication that his prejudiced view is in fact correct and then put this up as some sort of conclusive evidence that we have a so-called multicultural industry full of rorts, an immigration system full of rorts and that the whole society is suffering severely and adversely as a result. I will give you a couple of examples.

He says, for example, that Ros Kelly lost her ministry as a result of rorting of the grant in aid program, which is a program to assist particularly newly arrived migrant communities. Anybody who was here at that time will recall that Ros Kelly had nothing to do with the grant in aid program and that the program she was administering had absolutely nothing to do with multiculturalism or, indeed, the immigration process.

He also states that the immigration system is full of rorts and cites continually as evidence for this a Sydney academic Richard Basham whose evidence includes such highly scientific and researched statements to support his claim that the immigration system is full of rorts as `Everyone knows it'. That is the quality of the evidence that is put forward in this book to demonstrate some of those absolutely sweeping assertions and statements that are totally unsupported by any serious evidence in the book.

He draws all sorts of innuendoes from particular circumstances to suggest that in some way where you have people of non-English speaking background involved in a situation that means therefore that that is the cause of the situation. One example is a union ballot fraud case with respect to the Postal Workers Union in New South Wales, which happened to involve, amongst some Anglos, some people of Asian background with membership of the union. He does not state it explicitly, but the meaning is very clear in the book, the implication is very clear, that the reason there was a problem was that there was Asian background membership of that union. That is the implication in the book. It is very unfortunate that that sort of view is being peddled and, indeed, being treated seriously by supposedly quality newspapers which put forward this sort of material with out actually seriously looking at the book and analysing what the nature of this so-called evidence is and how substantial it actually is.

Things like crime statistics are put forward. The overrepresentation of people from particular ethnic groups in our prisons is advanced as some sort of indication that they are presumably more prone to commit crimes. What he does not look at is the actual class distribution of people—for example, new migrants from Vietnamese or Turkish backgrounds. He does not look at underrepresentation of people from a Turkish background owning Mercedes Benz, for example, to illustrate the point that one of the reasons there will be an overrepresentation of some groups is that you have an overrepresentation of people in lower socioeconomic groups who are more prone to be involved in crime.

It is a book that I would not recommend to honourable members. I think it is highly unfortunate that the debate about immigration and multiculturalism in our society is being conducted on this basis. It has quotes in it that are in effect things like, `This person has an Asian wife, therefore he cannot have racist views,' which is the modern day equivalent of, `Some of my best friends are Jewish.' That is the level at which this book deals with these issues. I think that is very unfortunate. I welcome serious debate about multiculturalism in this community. I welcome serious analysis and serious research. Unfortunately, this book does not deliver any of those.