Page 257 - Week 01 - Thursday, 16 February 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.50): First of all, I should say that I have not been as lucky as many of the people here in that I do not have the same ease of attending events in the multicultural festival, which is sad. Perhaps one day, when my daughter grows up and leaves home, I will be better able to go to things for pleasure, whereas at the moment I have to prioritise meetings over pleasure. That is the way it is. I have been over to the Theo Notaras Centre and had a look at an exhibition there. I am continually salivating over the events that I am missing.
From where I stand, then, hearing all about it, seeing the publicity, talking to people, I am very much aware that the multicultural festival is a success. I participated in the Actew event on Sunday. It is an excellent idea that that is now placed in the middle of the city, instead of Commonwealth Park, because it means that people who did not even know they were at an event like that suddenly find themselves walking through a number of displays and finding out about community groups they did not know existed. Certainly on the Greens stall, that was a very positive thing for us.
I want to say that often when we talk about multiculturalism, we talk as though multiculturalism is about other cultures, not about our culture. It reminds me of an exercise that a teacher I had at ANU called Jindy Pettman used to do with beginning students in her subject, which is globalism and the politics of identity, in which she asked everyone to talk about what they saw as their ethnicity. There was this tendency for people from our—and I look around; yes, I speak for most of us here—Anglo-Saxon or northern European backgrounds often not to recognise that we have an ethnicity as well. My apologies to those people who do not come from that background, because of course you cannot tell ethnic identify just from looking at people. So it is important that we realise that we are not just talking about other people when we talk about ethnic communities; we are talking about ourselves as well.
When we have our ordinary festivals and our ordinary events that are not multicultural, then they need to be inclusive of all the different communities that we have in the ACT as well. While acknowledging the great success of the multicultural festival and the number of people who are involved, I am also very keen that it happen in the suburbs as well, that it is not just something that you come to the centre of Canberra for and that the little events are as important as the big events.
I do not believe that we can be complacent about the harmony that we have in our community because there are a lot of things going on outside our little town which influence our little town and seek to destabilise that harmony. I am not going to repeat my speech of yesterday in relation to my motion, but I believe that we need to be constantly keeping that harmony alive, that having a festival once a year, while very important, is not going to do it for us and that we need a community development approach which does not go just into helping ethnic communities, including our own, but which maintains diversity and cultural practices and involves bringing communities together and mixing them up, through putting age groups together, interest groups together—keep mixing us up—because that is how we are going to maintain the community that we keep boasting about where conflict is unknown or, at least, kept to a minimum. Thank you, Ms Porter, for putting this on the discussion list today.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .