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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3810 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

I am very happy to support this motion, but I do not want to lose within that the basic humanity of what we are talking about, the depth of the transition that we are asking for, the complexity of what we are doing, and then the challenge to us in government and opposition to provide the right sort of services that value this richness and make it grow and give back to the country in terms of multilingual services. I will finish with an excellent poem which is called The Official Measure. In poetry it tries to say what happens to a person and then a nation and a country when this transition is not recognised and rewarded. This is the poem called The Official Measure:

I predict a general collection

where the goodness of the few walks in the streets

and cries unheard like the Baptist in the wilderness

I predict that every town in Sweden

will organise bazaars, funfairs, communal activities

in order to buy back the lost words for the poet

in order to return to the immigrant poets

the words they have lost

in the labyrinth of adjustment

in the sea of assimilation

Who will be able to prevent us from becoming

shadows without bodies

Who will be able to prevent us from writing

with gall instead of ink

Who will be able to prevent our songs

from urging revolt

The people without language

The people who cannot talk

gather within them gunpowder instead of words

Who would be able to prevent our songs

from lighting the fuse.

MR DE DOMENICO (Minister for Urban Services) (9.58): Mr Speaker, I would like to make a small contribution to the debate. I was impressed by what Ms McRae had to say. If we can work on a lot of other issues in that way, I think a lot of people will be very proud of this place. As someone who was not born in this country and was one of the migrants who came here in the middle 1950s, I am delighted that we are getting to this stage now, albeit it has taken us 40 years. I was one of those people who were fortunate - at that stage I thought unfortunate - to be brought into a place where we could

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