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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (25 June) . . Page.. 2119 ..

MS FOLLETT (continuing):

Apart from terms of abuse like "reffos", "new Australians" and a range of other epithets, those people were supremely disadvantaged - at least in the community which I grew up in, which was Canberra - by virtue of the fact that they did not have good English and there were very few programs, if any, to assist them to develop English. They were disadvantaged in the education system. They were disadvantaged in the job market. There was blatant discrimination against employing people with "a funny name". It is only in recent years that we have seen Australia turn into a more tolerant society - a society that is open to diversity and that prides itself on its multiculturalism. I think we should be very proud of the progress that we have made, as a society, in our treatment of people from diverse cultural backgrounds; but we should never lose sight of the fact that we were not always so praiseworthy and that we must always be conscious of the need to ensure that we have the right programs, the right education and the right opportunities for people to continue to embrace that cultural diversity.

Mr Speaker, I believe that it is time that Australia took in more refugees. We are a wealthy nation that can well afford to do more than other nations in terms of offering a home to people who are living in war-torn areas of the world or who are suffering persecution of the most brutal kind. I believe that the Federal Government needs to address the issue of how many refugees Australia should take. I also think we should keep in mind constantly the need to provide specific programs to assist refugees to overcome their disadvantage, which is massive, and to provide every opportunity for them to take a full and equal place in the community which they have now made their own.

Many refugees, for instance, have suffered the most appalling torture as part of their persecution. Most migrants to Australia and most people in our community will never require counselling for torture and that kind of trauma; but refugees do. It is an expensive service, because it must be conducted one-on-one, and it must be extended usually to the whole of the family that is involved. But there is, in my opinion, the greatest imperative for any caring government to continue to fund that torture rehabilitation service to the maximum extent that is required.

Many other refugees are, in effect, stateless persons. They have fled their own country without papers; they have no rights of return there, except often under pain of death, under pain of imprisonment or under pain of continued persecution and repression. So, many of them are, in effect, stateless persons. This was certainly the case with the refugees from China following the Tiananmen Square massacre. They came here with nothing. They were students here, and they had no rights and no prospect of return to China because of their stance in the democracy movement. So, Mr Speaker, it is essential, for those people to take an equal part in our society, that they be provided with the usual things that so many of us take for granted; for instance, the means to travel. To travel freely to other countries, they need a passport. Most of them do not have one. The provision we make for refugees to take out citizenship, to get passports to be able to move freely as do the rest of us, is another area where the Federal Government has to be ever-vigilant. There can be no cutting back on those kinds of programs without denying some very needy people the full human rights that the rest of us take for granted.

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