Page 180 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 February 2016
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Early this week out at St John’s, people were gathering to call on the federal government to provide a welcome and let the refugees—the children and families who are being forced back to Nauru and Manus Island—stay and were offering sanctuary for those families. It was really lovely to join them in that call as well. That was a really good example for me, and we see it every day, everywhere we go—in our schools, in our shopping centres and in our workplaces.
Canberra has been a community where people going about their lives actively work to make sure that other people feel welcome, that they feel valued, where their difference is respected and where they get to experience equality. We see this from the diversity that thrives in our workplaces, our schools and our sporting clubs. We see this from refugees living amongst us who have called Canberra home for longer than I have been alive. We saw this last year when over 260,000 of us enjoyed the hundreds of stalls and events that made for a successful Multicultural Festival, and we will see it again this weekend at the festival’s 20th celebration.
The benefits of our community making Canberra a truly inclusive and welcoming space are enormous and, as a community, we all need to take responsibility for making inclusion a real thing. When we talk about inclusion in Canberra, we are referring to the inclusion of residents from nearly 200 different countries, with over a quarter of Canberra’s total population born overseas. The value and joy that cultural diversity brings to our lives is eclipsed only by a collective pride in the contributions our new friends, neighbours and colleagues make to the strength and vigour of Canberra’s social, cultural and economic life, that is, we are proud not only of our collective diversity; we are proud of the individual parts and achievements that make this diversity.
There is no better example of this than our official declaration of Canberra as a refugee welcome zone, the first, sadly, but hopefully not the last state or territory jurisdiction to do so. The ACT government did not do this alone. We were able to make this declaration with the support of a vast number of community groups who now call Canberra home. Our declaration builds on many existing government initiatives to support an inclusive community by providing accessible and responsible services for all Canberrans.
At the core of the government’s current strategy to promote harmony and nurture an environment where we can share knowledge of the various cultural traditions practised in Canberra is the One Canberra Reference Group report which contains a number of practical initiatives drawn from the One Canberra symposium
Members may recall that the One Canberra symposium held on 30 October 2014 followed several meetings held between the then ACT Minister for Multicultural Affairs, Joy Burch, and local faith leaders. The symposium was organised to speak with community leaders about what we could do to strengthen our social cohesion and how we could gain a better understanding of other faiths and cultures in our community by building closer links with the people who practise those faiths and cultures.
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