Mr ZAHRA (9:14 PM) —In rising to speak to the Migration Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 2) 1999, let me state from the outset that I am not afraid to have a talk in this chamber about racism. It is one of those terms which has been bandied around this chamber, and there have been accusations of racism cast across this chamber on more than one occasion. It is a debate which Australia needs to have. It is a discussion which we as a nation need to have so that we can better understand the issues involved in matters relating to race and identity. I have cause from time to time to visit a great centre of ethnic diversity, that being Richmond, one of the greater suburbs in the fine city of Melbourne. This suburb in many ways describes the migrant experience, at least in part, in Australia. For many years, at least during the 1940s and 1950s, Richmond was dominated by the Greek community. My father tells me stories of how for years and years people would say that Richmond was an enclave of Greece.

Right across Richmond, whether it be in Bridge Road or in Swan Street, there would be shops which would have Greek writing on the front of them, and people of Greek origin would congregate there, speaking their own language comfortably amongst friends. Many people at the time, my father tells me, would say, `Those Greeks, they never mix. They will never mix, they just stick to their own. They form ghettoes. They do not associate with everyone else. We don't want them mixing with us.' It is bitterly ironic that so many people echo that debate now when we see new migrant communities emerging in areas around the inner city, like Richmond, Fitzroy and Brunswick, where some of these new migrants, in particular the Vietnamese community, have quite a few shops next to each other in a number of streets. Some people still, 50 years on, parrot exactly the same arguments which were used to try to denigrate the Greeks when they came to Australia all those years ago.

Of course, the Greek community have been one of the great success stories of Australian immigration. Those Greeks who did have all of those shops and who did congregate and live their lives around Richmond during that time have now gone on to become wonderful Australian citizens and to raise great families here. They have happily formed a vibrant part of Australian culture. Those people now live not only in Richmond but right across Melbourne and right across Australia. They fit very comfortably into Australian life. The previous speaker referred to Pauline Hanson, at least by inference. It is interesting to note that those arguments are 50 years old. They were irrelevant then and they are even more irrelevant today.

I want to reflect, at least for little while, on another great example of multiculturalism in Australia, that being the Latrobe Valley in my electorate. In so many ways, I am a product of that push towards multiculturalism in the Latrobe Valley which took place throughout the 1950s and 1960s. I think most people in this chamber would appreciate that I am from a Maltese family. Both my mother and my father are Maltese, and in fact I was born in Malta all those years ago in 1973. In many ways like the Snowy Mountains project, we had a massive infrastructure undertaking in the Latrobe Valley. Migrants came from every corner of the globe to the Latrobe Valley to contribute to building the massive power generation assets which we all take for granted today. We had people who came from Greece, from Italy, from Malta, from the Ukraine, from the Baltic States, from Ireland, from Wales and from everywhere that you could imagine. These people made an enormous contribution. There are some great Latrobe Valley migrant stories which are told from that period.

An Italian migrant to whom I spoke only last year told me that he stepped onto the boat in Italy when he was just 14 years old. I think in those days the boat trip from Italy to Port Melbourne was at least 2½ months. This 14-year-old boy, after a 2½ month boat trip by himself, met his brother at Port Melbourne, found his way to the Latrobe Valley and went straight to work. These are amazing things for people to countenance today, yet that was just one typical story—a great and courageous story—of people from that period. There are so many other stories which convey just as much courage and dash on behalf of those people who took that great journey years ago.

They did not come here to Australia to not contribute. The thing that I always find in speaking to migrants from different parts of the world is that they came here because they wanted to make a better life for themselves and a better life for their families. They wanted to build a life here which they could not have in the country from which they came. It was a difficult decision for so many of these families to make: a heart-wrenching decision to leave their families, many of whom have been there for literally thousands of years, to come to Australia to build a new life. In those days you did not have the telecommunications or the Internet or any of those things which you have today; the only thing you could do was to write a letter—and you would be lucky if it got there in two months time. It is important for us to acknowledge in this House the hardship which those people went through because it was a hardship they endured in order for them to build a better life for their families.

One of the stories so many migrants who came to the Latrobe Valley during that period always tell me is of how peaceful it was amongst people from different migrant backgrounds. We had people coming to a smallish place in the Latrobe Valley who were from different backgrounds and who, not that long before, had been fighting on different sides in World War II. Yet there was almost no violence, almost no antagonism, and very little in the way of racial denigration or abuse relating to the side that any person's family had been on during the war. I think this has a lot to do with the fact that, when they came to the Latrobe Valley, all of these migrants came there to work. They did not come to make trouble or cause any sort of disturbance amongst the people. They came because there was work to do, and they wanted a part of that work so that they could build the life they hoped for for their families. There was no shortage of work for them to do in the Latrobe Valley, and the massive assets we have in the Latrobe Valley today are testament to the amount of work they did.

There are a thousand other great stories of hardship and of success built around that period in the Latrobe Valley. Even today we see many of the products of their hard work and of their coming together as communities within the Latrobe Valley. We have wonderful institutions like the Italo-Australian Club in Morwell, the Latrobe Valley Maltese-Australian Association, Club Astoria and, more recently, the Commonwealth funded Gippsland Migrant Resource Centre. All these clubs were formed with the intention of people coming together within Australia, sharing their lives together and making friends, not in a way that would exclude them from participating in Australian culture but rather in a way that would encourage them to be comfortable and confident enough to participate fully in Australian culture. This is the point of difference that I want to draw the attention of the House to. We often hear criticism of ethnic groups, people from different backgrounds, for coming together in different areas. We often hear the criticism that these people should somehow run about and roam in the country as some sort of group of nomadic workers to meet the whim of any agriculturalist or grazier who happens to want some itinerant workers. It is pretty understandable that, when people from different backgrounds, especially those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, come to a new country one of the first things they will look for is someone who speaks the language they speak and someone who understands the customs and traditions that they are used to. This is not an unnatural thing for them to want to do. There are still quite a few people who believe and who say that these people should be somehow forced to assimilate with Australian culture, whatever that means in their mind. I say to them that they do not understand and they should soften their hearts a little and try to find some understanding of what these people genuinely experience.

I often think of how hard it might have been for those people who came to the Latrobe Valley all those years ago, those people with the courage and dash to actually make that trip. When they arrived at Port Melbourne after the three-month boat trip, that was not the end of their trouble—as if it were not enough. Many of those people came from countries no more than 50 or 100 km long. So they had just sailed all the way around the world, arrived in Australia and, in the case of those who drove to the Latrobe Valley, driven for around five hours on pretty rough old track, as it was in those days. They drove for about five hours on mostly unsealed road through the wilderness and through the forest and arrived in the beautiful Latrobe Valley. I do not know what those people must have been thinking. They must have been thinking that they were arriving at the very ends of the earth. And yet those people stuck it out and did not despair despite how far and isolated they were from their families and loved ones. I admire their courage because, surely, without courage, a trip like that would simply not have been possible. When they did arrive in the Latrobe Valley, they quickly realised that their way to success was to work. The way to build the life they wanted was to build it through work; their industry and their labour.

That is why we have so many success stories in the Latrobe Valley of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds who have built a real life for themselves and their families. There are people from Italian backgrounds who run successful engineering contracting businesses. Di Fabro Constructions, which built the great southern stand at the MCG, is a Latrobe Valley based firm established by two Italian brothers who arrived off a boat in Australia in 1950. There is a place of some significance in the Latrobe Valley called the Ridge, which was an old migrant workers camp. The story goes that their tent was the first one up on that migrant workers camp called the Ridge all those years ago. So we have plenty to look back on in the Latrobe Valley, and we are fond of saying that, whilst Australia has just discovered the word `multiculturalism', we in the Latrobe Valley have been practising multiculturalism for some 50 years.

I do not want to confine my remarks to that glorious period of post World War II migration in the Latrobe Valley. It is important to consider what more recent migrants have to deal with. In particular, we have quite a few Bosnian refugees, who arrived in the Latrobe Valley after having experienced awful traumas in their countries—traumas more horrible than you or I could possibly imagine. I have been heartened to see the warm embrace given by the Latrobe Valley community to these people, recognising, as we do, the awful situation they have come from. I have been particularly moved in recent times to see the sensitivity that a lot of the students and staff at Lowanna College, which is the public secondary school in Moe, have shown to a number of students there from Bosnian refugee families. Such is the case as well with the Filipino community in the Latrobe Valley, who are one of our most recent ethnic community groups. Again, these people have fitted very quickly into the Latrobe Valley scene. I do not think there is an event I go to where I do not get to enjoy some of that magnificent Filipino cooking, which the women in particular insist that I eat every time they see me. It has been a very quick transition for these very hospitable people, the Filipinos, finding their way into the Latrobe Valley culture.

When people talk about new migrants, they often make the mistake of characterising them as either boat people or some type of person who might not make a great contribution and who will probably be a burden as opposed to a wonderful contributor to Australian culture. From time to time, when I get asked questions about migration, I enjoy explaining to people some of the experiences in my electorate. There are at least a dozen doctors that I know of in my constituency who are from non-English-speaking backgrounds. They make a wonderful contribution. I have to say that in many cases I admire their earthiness and their feet on the ground approach to the way they conduct their medicine. It is often in stark contrast to some of the stodginess which is associated with the professional classes and the medical profession.

As you would know, Madam Deputy Speaker Crosio, we have a wonderful university in my electorate—Monash University's Gippsland campus. You do not have to travel too far at Monash University, Gippsland, to experience the great gift that it has been given in terms of the many academics who are from non-English-speaking backgrounds and who are making a magnificent contribution there in terms of the professional studies which they conduct. I know that we as a community benefit from having them there. Our students benefit from having people from all across the world at Monash University, Gippsland, talking about their experiences in places like India, Sri Lanka or Africa and just speaking with the worldliness which perhaps even as recently as 10 or 15 years ago we simply would not have found at a regionally based university. We thank those people for coming to us and we thank them for the contribution they are making.

One of the terms in this whole debate which most annoys me is the word `tolerance'. I often hear people saying, `We need to be tolerant. We should exercise tolerance.' It is a term which makes my skin crawl. What does `tolerant' mean? It seems to me to mean that, hopefully, if we summon all of our goodwill and everything, we should just be able to tolerate one another, as if that is the best that we as a nation can possibly hope to achieve. Two people can sit next to each other on a tram—a lady from a Muslim background who might be wearing a headdress, and a farmer perhaps even from my constituency—and they can just tolerate each other; they can only just stop themselves hitting each other. I think our language is all wrong. We should be talking about celebrating our cultural diversity because surely this is what is our great strength as a nation. We truly are a nation full of different cultures and full of people who have contributed to Australia as a result of the different culture that they bring to our nation. Yet time and again we talk about Australia's great reputation as a tolerant nation. I do not ever want us to be a tolerant nation. I do not want the best that we could ever be to be the scene of that farmer from my electorate and maybe a lady from a Muslim background—perhaps from Brunswick in Melbourne—just managing to put up with each other for 15 minutes on a tram on Sydney Road. I do not want that to be the best that Australia could ever hope to be.

We need to be seriously a country that celebrates its cultural diversity. We need to be seriously a nation that enjoys and appreciates every minute where we come across new cultures, where we come across people who bring new knowledge from different nations. We need to be a nation that is not afraid of new things. In 1950, we were a nation that was not afraid of new things. We were a nation that was prepared to open its doors to the world and say, `Come and join us. We would welcome you here.' Yet we still hear some of those same old arguments. (Time expired)