Page 2758 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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That is the level of commitment that Dominic Mico and his band of people have to this multicultural festival. If Dominic Mico has one failing, it is that the loves his community more than he loves himself. He is often stressing out and having strokes and heart attacks. I can tell you that, thanks to Dominic Mico, we are going to get a great festival this year.
The creation of the Muslim Advisory Council confirms that it is that particular community that is under attack at the moment. May I take my second 10 minutes, Mr Deputy Speaker? I will be as brief as I can.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Go ahead, Mr Hargreaves.
MR HARGREAVES: I want to take a quick look at the history of multiculturalism in this country. Of course, indigenous Australians have been badly dealt with, but I will debate that at another time. In the gold rush era of the 1850s it was the Chinese people’s turn. Not too far from here, at Young, then known as Lambing Flat, the Chinese massacre took place. That was their turn. In the 1960s it was the southern Europeans. When the Snowy hydro was being built, Cooma was the most multicultural place in the country.
But let me tell you, at about the same time, in Perth, the Slavs were getting a flogging. The Italians and the Greeks were getting “wog” floggings in Melbourne. When I was a kid in Melbourne in the 1960s, racism was rife. Let me tell you, it was not only white people having a go at everybody else. The Greeks and the Turks sitting next to each other on Sydney Road hated each other because of race. They do not do that in this town.
But at the moment it is the turn of the Muslims, and we have to stand up. We have actually woken the sleeping giant of multiculturalism in this town. Now is an opportunity for we leaders in this place, we people of courage in this place to stand up with a vulnerable group of our community and say, “We will not put up with this.” I am sure, Mr Deputy Speaker, that you join absolutely and wholeheartedly with me in standing up for these folks.
We need to make sure that we have tabs on what is happening at the political level within the Muslim community, as well as with their ordinary folks. We can tap into the Maltese and we can tap into the Cypriots. But at the moment, as you well know, the Muslim community is not exactly a unified exercise in its own right. For the next 12 months or so we need advice from the Muslim leaders, from the Muslims from Pakistan, from Afghanistan, from Iran, from Iraq and wherever we can get them from. We know, for example, that the Muslim community from Fiji think differently and have a different approach from the Muslim community from Pakistan. We know that those issues are being played out in the mosques of Australia, as well as of Canberra. So we need to keep a tab on that, and that is why I need to have a particularly close conversation.
On the national scale, things are not really good either. The national action plan that is being forced on the states by the federal government has a little piece in it. Let me say that a lot of it I love, but there are a couple of little pieces in there that I have problems with—for instance, the insistence that Muslim clerics be taught about Australian values and Australian cultures. But there is no insistence that fundamentalist Christians—for
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