Mr PRICE (6:37 PM) —I must confess that I have heard contributions from the honourable member for Gilmore in this place and often agreed with the points that she has made. However, I do not agree with her submission on the Australian Citizenship Bill 2005 and cognate bill.

Let me make a few points. All members of parliament attend a lot of citizenship ceremonies, and they are conducted by local councils. The person who usually conducts the citizenship ceremony is the mayor. We are being told that citizenship is a very important thing in our society. I absolutely agree. However, the first thing I would say to that is that, often in our society, we use money to measure the importance of a thing. It is an unfortunate trait; maybe it is a hedonistic trait, I do not know. But I am not aware of councils getting one dollar from the federal government for conducting these citizenship ceremonies.

I agree on the importance of Australian values: a fair go; this being a land of opportunity in which people can succeed; and that it does not matter what your colour is, what your race is or what your religion is. It is a land of opportunity where people, by dint of their own efforts, can succeed. I also hold mateship as being fundamental to Australian values.

However, when people become Australian citizens, they are not tested on their understanding of Australian values. This government will not invest in adequate courses so that people can learn English. I am a very proud member of this place and I am the son of a refugee. My mother came out here in 1938; she was 18 at the time. She is 90 now and she has the very faintest hint of an accent. But if we were trying to test my mother on English, I suspect she might have failed and never been able to become an Australian citizen. If we applied that test of speaking English to that whole wave of postwar migrants who contributed so much to this country, we know they would not get here today on the point system but under any English test they would probably fail.

I want to discuss this issue about assimilation and getting a sense of what it is to be Australian. I have seen communities wanting to preserve their culture, wanting to preserve their language and wanting to preserve their connection with their country, and I have always said I do not object to that; in fact, I commend it. But Mother Time works her magic and, if she does not do it with the generation that migrates, it is the next generation—and if it is not that one it is the second and the third generations. We can legislate as much as we like, but we will not stop Mother Time and the wonderful way she works.

We have gained so much from that massive post World War II migration. During World War II Australia had only six million people. All the strange smells and foods that we originally objected to when that mass of mostly European and southern European migrants came—the Italians and the Poles and the Yugoslavs; we called them Yugos and wogs and a whole range of things—we have quietly adapted to and adopted some of the things that they brought here.

I must admit that I admire their commitment to family; they are ferociously committed to family. They were so overwhelmed by the opportunities here—they might have come here as labourers or farmers or market gardeners or poultry farmers; I grew up in that part of Western Sydney that was called, probably in a derisive way, ‘little Malta’, but I was proud to be part of it—and they really wanted their children to succeed, really wanted them to do well at school. They wanted them to go on to university, and so many of their kids ended up with qualifications well beyond what their parents had.

I can remember getting into school buses and getting, because I grew up in ‘little Malta’, an overwhelming smell of garlic. I thought at the time it was most objectionable because in our home we did not use garlic. Like a lot of Australians—I suspect you, Mr Deputy Speaker Lindsay, and even the honourable member for Parramatta—I am addicted to garlic now. What Australian family would not cook spaghetti bolognaise? What Australian family would not—

Mr Barresi —I’ll teach you how to cook properly.

Mr PRICE —There you go.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Lindsay)—The federal member for Deakin is misleading the parliament.

Mr PRICE —Indeed! Mr Barresi draws my attention to the fact that we have a number of Italian members on both sides of the House. I was always very fond of the former member for Bowman, Mr Sciacca, when he was a member. But that is how successful they have been as migrants, and I say congratulations to them. I am not threatened by what they have brought to Australia. It has not affected my Australianness, but the magic about being Australian is that we have not only kept our core values but also absorbed some of the very worthwhile values that the migrants have brought to us.

I was talking about citizenship ceremonies. If this federal government and I believe that citizenship is so important, why aren’t we assisting councils in those important citizenship ceremonies? Speakers, including the member for Gilmore, have referred to those people at a citizenship ceremony who have been here for 20 or 30 years and have stepped forward. All too often, I must say, they are from the UK. In fact, the one group in our society which has been very backward in accepting Australian citizenship is migrants from the UK. They are the biggest group of migrants who have not become Australian citizens. They are permanent residents. Once, if you came from the UK, you did not have to take Australian citizenship. I am sure every member in the House has had an experience where someone has been on the rolls without being a citizen, moved, dropped off the roll and then they cannot get back on because they actually have to take citizenship when they fall off the rolls.

I can relate the case of a delightful lady who was a permanent resident but who has sadly passed on now: Mary Woods. Did she give me some when she came to the office! She was a little pocket battleship—a lovely person though, I want to say. She was outraged about it, absolutely defiant: there was no way she was going to take Australian citizenship. I am pleased that I persevered and talked to her, and I had the great pleasure of seeing Mary and Tom become Australian citizens. I think we should put more into our citizenship, not less.

The other thing that really grates on me is that the only thing I can do to establish my citizenship is to actually produce my birth certificate or a copy of my birth certificate. That is what determines the fact that I am an Australian citizen. The former minister for immigration, Mr Ruddock, said people can affirm their citizenship. Often the practice is now that those Australian citizens at a citizenship ceremony affirm it. Well, I do not like that. I think we should be even more flexible and allow Australian citizens who actually do not have a certificate of citizenship to undergo a ceremony and take an oath, as I would, to affirm—I cannot say renew, because they were born with it—their Australian citizenship and have one of those lovely citizenship certificates. I would proudly display mine. But under these proposals I am not allowed to.

The other thing is that people come here under different circumstances. I refer to my mother, when she came here. They paid to get out of Vienna, got forged documents and were able to bribe their way through the border guards. We would say in today’s language that they used people smugglers to get out of the country. But what about those people who are imprisoned by oppressive regimes? We have too many of them. In this new millennium, sadly we still have too many of them.

Other speakers have made the point that, under these proposed changes, if Nelson Mandela wanted to come to this country, he could never become an Australian citizen because he spent more than five years behind bars. In my view, he was improperly imprisoned, but you can run an argument it was by the law of the land, by a legal process. He was imprisoned for 26 years. But Nelson Mandela, should he wish to come into this country, would never be eligible for citizenship under this legislation. I think that that is an outrage because, as prominent as Nelson Mandela is, I am sure there are a whole host of citizens who have been victims of maladministration or poor government. We would not really call it a government; we would probably say a dictatorship, an oligarchy or whatever. But still today they are falsely imprisoning citizens or improperly, in my view, not giving them human rights. I think it is something that we need to look to.

The government announced that it intended to have citizens wait three years as permanent residents before they could take citizenship. It was done under the auspices of COAG and it was done for security reasons. The Labor Party supported it. We supported that policy as initially announced by Mr Hardgrave and then, I think, by the Prime Minister for a three-year wait. But this legislation has increased it to four years and we are offered no particular reason as to why it should be four years. It has not been referred to COAG, so we know it is not the state governments that have urged this upon the government. There is no security reason stated for it going from three to four years. If there is, please state it. It should be in the second reading speech, but it is not. I have some difficulty with it.

Initially in my electorate of Chifley, the highest NESB group was Maltese. I am delighted to say that it is actually Filipino—Filipinos now constitute the largest non-English-speaking group or migrant group in my electorate. They are just fabulous people. I have quite a variety of migrants in my electorate. When the Filipinos come here, they are so proud and grateful to be here. They wait their two years, as is the law at the moment, and then they are in there wanting to become Australian citizens. The Filipinos in particular are in there and they want to be Australian citizens. They make great citizens of Blacktown and they make great Australian citizens. They certainly recognise that this is a country of great opportunity, and their rate of homeownership is high. It is such a triumph for them when they buy that first home rather than renting it. Are they adopting Australian values? I think so. I cannot detect amongst them, or amongst any group for that matter, any reluctance. Ironically, for the electorate with the highest level of unemployment in New South Wales, I have a lot of Sudanese refugees—some might say a disproportionately high number of Sudanese refugees. They are terrific people.

Mr Barresi interjecting—

Mr PRICE —No, they are, really. They are so grateful to be here. Many of them do not initially understand the very basics of how to change a light bulb, operate the toilet or whatever, but they are very grateful to be here and, notwithstanding the fact that they are in an electorate with such high employment, they are very eager to get the skills and the ability to get the job. I would not say about that group of people that they are ungrateful.

In fact, I cannot think of any citizenship ceremony I have been to where at the ceremony or subsequently people have attacked Australia or Australian values. We do have some differences. I think the great privilege of being a federal member is that we are required as part of our job to get to know the different communities that are in our electorates and we tend to get a broader knowledge of them. We get an understanding of different religions. If we were just ordinary citizens, we might know our neighbours and we might know the people we work with or go to church with, but we would not know as wide a circle as we are privileged to know as members of parliament.

The shadow minister has moved a second reading amendment. I must say that I support it. We support extending the wait for citizenship to three years on the basis that this was an outcome of COAG, but we are not supporting extending it to four years. What is the reason we are not supporting it for four years? It is because the government has offered no explanation. It has not consulted with the Council of Australian Governments, COAG, on increasing it beyond the three years. It has offered no security reason for it. I also pointed out the situation that would apply to Nelson Mandela: because he was incarcerated not for five years but for 26 years, he could not become an Australian citizen. Of course there is the mostly rectified situation with the Maltese community—I am pleased to say that—but there are still some anomalies and we have pointed out in our second reading amendment that we hope that the government would pick up those anomalies and do a good job of tidying it all up.

I do not have a cultural cringe about being Australian; I am intensely proud of it. I think we have a fabulous country, but so do the people who come here. They think it is a fabulous country. They do not think we have a cultural cringe. They want to join us. They want to get in on the opportunity. I will conclude by saying that I strongly support the second reading amendment that we have moved, but we are not declining to give this bill a second reading.