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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3809 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

I claim both personal experience and professional training in this area, and I feel it very profoundly. I think that we very easily lose sight of that depth of personal experience that each person who comes to Australia and has to learn English has gone through. Each person has had to make the transition. It is a living death for many and we have grossly underestimated that difficulty.

It took until the late 1950s, early 1960s, before some of our own policy-makers started to understand what was happening. It took the children of the migrants to get into the public sector, to get into the policy-making sector, to join ethnic communities councils. It took the children, for whom it was a lot easier to learn the language, to stand up and say, "Hang on a minute; this is not fair. These people have come here to work for this country. These people are helping to shape Australia. The very least you can do is offer translation and support. The very least you can do is offer English". I remind members that in the 1950s learning English was at six o'clock in the morning on the radio. I know hundreds upon hundreds of migrants for whom that was English. My uncle learnt English from crossword puzzles and a dictionary. Those days changed because Australia is a welcoming and open country, and because each of us has learnt along the way that we are simply not talking about picking up a case and dumping it. We are talking about human beings who are making the most profound adjustment that an adult can make, and that is a living death for many, as Shakespeare put it so well; but, as the other linguists put it, they are losing their very being and having to create a new one, and for an adult that is no joke.

So the language courses started to come. The early English courses for children were developed only in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The thorough ESL programs, the languages in the workplaces, began only in the early 1980s. Sixteen years ago I was involved in the first multicultural programs on radio and the battle for SBS began. This is what we are fighting for - the right of these services to be maintained. Words are wonderful. There is no question that we can all be tolerant, fair, and caring and sharing, but our country will be judged on how we maintain these very essential services that make the difference for a worker going into a factory and losing their hand because no-one has thought to tell them in their own language that that machine is dangerous. These are the transitions that we have made between the rush of migrants in the 1950s and now.

In the last 40 years the growth in Australia has been extraordinary in its acceptance of diverse cultures, in its capacity to support them and the services that it has to offer. It has been extraordinary in the level of understanding that we now bring to the treatment of our indigenous people, and how we expected them to move to English as if it could be done just at the flick of the fingers. We now understand these things that these writers put so eloquently. We are dealing with something which is very profound and extremely difficult. In my opinion, every person who creates a new English with a vowel at the end of every word, with an intonation in the wrong place, with the stress on the wrong syllable, ought to have a medal because it is such an extraordinary transition. This is what we are celebrating; that we have built a country around these people who are willing to do that and work for Australia. They do not deserve the sort of scorn that has been poured on them by ignorant, misunderstanding people.

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