Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 12 Hansard (19 November) . . Page.. 3811 ..

MR DE DOMENICO (continuing):

speak Arabic, Italian, French, Greek, Spanish and Maltese, but not English. I can recall how ashamed I was even to dare to speak anything but English on the train in Melbourne with my parents for fear of being ridiculed by other persons on that train who could speak only one language - that being English, of a kind.

In those days you were welcomed with open arms in this country if you assimilated. Assimilation meant that you had to forget all about your ethnic groups, your culture and your language and take on board the culture, language and habits of the country that welcomed you with open arms, so to speak. It is a very different thing now, though, thank God. They went a step further after that. After about 10 years, assimilation was gone and the word that was then bandied round was "integration". Integration meant blending your culture with the host country culture, which is supposedly the best culture around. If you did, well done. You got a pat on the back and you were more than welcome. I was still called words like wog, dago, plonko, and everything else. I was called wog because I happened to be under five foot three inches. I was then, and I still am. I was called dago because I did not look Anglo-Saxon, and plonko because we happened to drink red wine. I had the added disadvantage of being Catholic as well, and, after a while, I also barracked for Collingwood; so I could not win at all. Gone are those days, thank God - or are they?

Then there was another thing called multiculturalism. I take my hat off to a guy who is still running around in Canberra, Al Grassby, who really put multiculturalism on the map by doing and saying what he did from time to time, albeit flamboyantly according to some and funny and fantastic according to others. I was fortunate enough to work with a Victorian Minister called Walter Jona in the 1970s and was very proud to be able to announce that the then Victorian Government, the Hamer Government, was the first government, State or Federal, Liberal or Labor or Callithumpian, to give statutory recognition to the word "multiculturalism" by means of a piece of legislation. It was the Immigration and Ethnic Affairs Act of 1977, I think it was, in Victoria, and it happened to talk about a thing called multiculturalism. I still think that, even though a lot of people talked about multiculturalism, not too many people realised what it was. To me, multiculturalism is treating every person, of whatever race, colour, creed, kind, height or whatever, as a human being. Usually, if you treat people like human beings, they treat you the same way. If we could always treat ourselves as human beings in this place and in other places, I think the world would be a lot better.

I was very moved by what Ms McRae had to say because I still remember what my mother and father speak like right at this minute. I can remember my mother first coming to Canberra and saying what a wonderful place "Manooka" was. To her it will always be "Manooka", never Manuka, because that is the way she pronounces it. She could never pronounce Sir William McMahon's name. It was always Billy "MacMahone", because that is the way she was taught. It was never a lounge suite; it was a lounge "suit". How funny is this language called English. I can still remember my mother working in a factory making Astor television sets. She learnt Greek because she happened to be working next to a Greek lady. The Greek lady could not speak English and neither could my mother. My mother could speak a little bit of Greek and she ended up speaking Greek fluently.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .