Page 149 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 16 February 2011
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be opportunistic on this matter, especially after a festival showcasing the proud pluralistic heritage of our city.
In short, we are one community, Mr Hargreaves; we are one community. In the true spirit of belonging, there is no us and them. You seem to imply that they are different to us. We have one community; there is no us and them; there is only us. This is a point that the Stanhope government has sorely missed. Commenting on the festival in 2009, Ms Burch noted:
It offers opportunities for cultures that are many thousands of years old to share with us their food, song and cultures that have diversified and changed over time. They bring that to us in our contemporary society.
If the government is sincere about us being an international city that celebrates diversity and acceptance, why is Ms Burch alluding to an “us and they” view of Canberrans? Clearly by “they” she is referring to members of our community whom she defines as not contemporaneously Australian or not like her. In true ACT Labor style, nine months after her statement, the Stanhope government promotes her to be the Minister for Multicultural Affairs.
This motion is mired in subliminal jingoist political correctness by which the means have destroyed the end goal of a truly pluralist society. We live today in a world that is multicultural and multi-religious and where there are more of us living in the same geographically defined space with a plethora of different values, perceptions, experiences, wealth and the like. It is through engaging with these differences through everyday contact and the exchanging of ideas and experiences that we indirectly moderate each other’s behaviours towards being respectful and accepting.
What Mr Hargreaves and ACT Labor fail to grasp, or cannot find the words to articulate, is that it is through constant contact and exchange that people of different backgrounds develop a sense of trust and respect. Just go back to the fact that the ACT government cut the Multicultural Festival from 10 days to 2½ days. The reason for that was a budget blow-out that should not have happened in the first place. But the budget blow-out then impacted on people of hundreds of nationalities having to cut all of their celebrations into this compacted 2½-day period. If you have a look at the situation that occurred over the last two weeks, most of the festival activities had been going on for a week and a half before the actual festival that we had for 2½ days.
Greater diversity in a society where all belong and have an equal share in the deserts of our city’s achievements is something that we must applaud and strive for. The success of events like the Multicultural Festival is mainly due to Canberrans themselves and not solely because of the Stanhope government, as Mr Hargreaves would like us to think. What is being proposed in Mr Hargreaves’s motion is the mythical notion that the present multicultural success of our community is credited on the back of overt ACT Labor manipulation. That is preposterous. What this motion fails to recognise is the common identity that we all share as Canberrans, and it is because of this that we are able to be an accepting community, Mr Hargreaves. It is because of this that events like the Multicultural Festival enjoy wide acceptance.
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