Page 543 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 14 March 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
beyond the local community association or take them further. I would have thought that this year or even last year we could have seen some exciting work that explored perhaps the common heritage of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. The time would seem to be right for that work.
I have got to say that I enjoyed many aspects of the multicultural festival, and particularly the fringe because in a way it did allow for that spontaneity of new acts. Perhaps we could look at a project about bored youth—in East Timor, the South Pacific and parts of Sydney, for example. I do not know if ideas like these are what the existing team would want for our most substantial festival here in the national capital, but I do not believe it is resourced or envisioned to reach that far; nor do I feel it has the independence from the bureaucracy to act as swiftly as one needs to in the arts world.
Perhaps the tragedy of our age, exacerbated by the last decade of conservative politics at the federal level and too much complacency at state and territory levels, is that multiculturalism, which is a process—not just a label—has not been able to evolve to its next stage. It keeps being talked about in terms of national loyalty, which is loyalty to the constructed idea of the nation, and that has been made the beacon rather than the healthy, tolerant, diverse and welcoming society that the Greens would want.
The Greens see the next stage, as I have explained, as moving from tolerance and celebration of diverse cultures—that is, multiculturalism as we see it—to greater interaction between these cultures, which I believe would be a natural evolution. Multiculturalism is not set in time; it is something that I believe is part of a process moving onwards to that better inclusive society. This is not equivalent to the federal government’s spin of integration, where in fact we see some communities feeling more alienated than they have in decades.
So it is a pity that we have to stand here and defend multiculturalism from bigots. It is a word that had its place in our culture, and it was a right place and a politically correct term that all parties adhered to. But now I believe we have gone way backwards. We should not have to defend it; we should let it evolve as it could. We need cultural projects that move us forward in all sorts of ways and that explore how we connect and give us tools to support and work with each other. That is something that our multicultural festival does have the potential to be, and in some ways it is, but to do that I believe it needs more resources and possibly more independence and more ability to act as a festival sort of commission, because we do need to move fast in the arts community.
MS PORTER (Ginninderra) (3.34): Mr Speaker, I rise to support Ms MacDonald’s motion, and I will not be supporting Mr Pratt’s amendment. We often hear that we should tolerate those who come from backgrounds that are culturally and linguistically different from our own. This is a view that I reject. Tolerance indicates that we are prepared to put up with something, to just let it happen because we cannot be bothered to do anything about it, or are just willing to let it wash over us and get on with other things that are more important to us.
I suggest that we no longer just tolerate people who have come here from distant shores, and I take Dr Foskey’s point about our indigenous people as well; I do believe
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .