Penny Wong, Senator for South Australia
First Speech 21/8/2002 It is an extraordinary privilege and honour to stand here today in this
place and to have the opportunity to speak in this chamber. To be a member
of the parliament of this country is almost beyond my comprehension.
I start by acknowledging the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the
fact that we stand on their land. I congratulate you, Mr President, on
your election as our President and I also congratulate those newly elected
senators with whom I take office. At the outset, I wish to acknowledge
the contribution of the two outgoing South Australian senators, Rosemary
Crowley and Chris Schacht. Both have made enormous contributions as Labor
representatives. I particularly want to thank former Senator Rosemary
Crowley for her support of me over the years and when I sought preselection
as her replacement.
My thoughts this morning were of my late paternal grandmother or Poh
Poh as I called her in her language. She was a diminutive woman with an
indomitable spirit. A Chinese woman of the Hakka or guest people, she
was my grandfather's second wife. When the war came to Malaysia, she and
the rest of the family were in Sandakan, a name that many who fought in
Australia's defence will be familiar with. Most of the family died during
the war and she was left alone to care for my father and his siblings
in unspeakable circumstances, which she did through extraordinary determination
and a will to survive. She was barely literate; she was humble and compassionate
but the strongest person I have ever known. Her name was Madam Lai Fung
Shim and that her grand-daughter is here today would have been a source
of pride but probably some consternation to her. How much the world can
change in two generations.
Perhaps this family history is why I place such an emphasis on the need
for compassion. What lies at the heart of any truly civilised society?
Surely it must be compassion. Compassion must be that underlying principle,
that core value at the heart of our collective consciousness. If not compassion,
then what? Economic efficiency? Or the imposition of some subjective moral
code, defined by some and imposed on the many?
To call for compassion is not a plea for some bleeding-heart view of
the world or a retreat to weak or populist government. Nor is it to shirk
the responsibility of leadership to make hard decisions when these are
called for. But it is to assert that those with power should act with
compassion for those who have less, and that the experience of those who
are marginalised cannot be bypassed, ignored or minimised as it so often
is. Compassion is what underscores our relationships with one another,
and it is compassion which enables us to come to a place of community
even in our diversity. Yet this country in recent times has been sadly
lacking in compassion.
Let us reclaim the phrase `one nation.' I seek a nation that is truly
one nation, one in which all Australians can share regardless of race
or gender, or other attribute, regardless of where they live and where
difference is not a basis for exclusion. We do not live in such a country.
We are not yet truly one nation. But it is the task of political leaders
to build one.
We are a nation in which where you live determines your likelihood of
success, where disadvantage has become more entrenched, where the poor
are getting poorer and where this government fails to act to bring real
opportunities to those who have few. The shared dream of an egalitarian
Australia is increasingly becoming a myth. Income distribution over the
last decade is characterised by a disappearing middle, but there are increasing
numbers of low- and high-income earners.
There is a widening gap between poor and rich Australia. There are many
reasons for this phenomenon. One driving force is the increasing openness
of our economy to the world. Much has been written and said about globalisation.
We are part of a globalised economy, for better or for worse, and that
will not change. This presents us with both enormous opportunities and
enormous challenges. The shape of our country in the decades to come will
be largely determined by how we deal with the changes brought by globalisation.
We must ensure that the benefits are shared. We must equip Australians
better for this new world. Allowing the marketplace to determine the outcome
will simply entrench disadvantage and exacerbate existing inequalities.
This will undermine the fabric of the Australian community.
One thing my father always told me was this: `They can take everything
away from you but they can't take your education.' For him the opportunity
to study that he was given, particularly the Colombo Plan scholarship
to Australia, defined his life. It gave him opportunities he would never
otherwise have had and enabled him to climb out of the poverty he experienced
as a child in Malaysia. It is a large part of how I come to be here today.
We know that, when a child is born in this country, that child's access
to learning opportunities and how much schooling his or her parents have
are factors that will have an enormous impact on the child's future. Why,
then, do we find it acceptable as a community to remove resources from
our public schools and give them to wealthier private schools?
Another dimension of the increasing inequality in this country is a spatial
one. Inequality can be increasingly described on a regional basis. By
`regions' I do not only mean rural areas; I am also referring to metropolitan
areas—those areas in our cities and outer metropolitan areas which
are vulnerable and disadvantaged. One commentator has described these
areas as `islands largely outside the main traffic routes of economic
growth'. I say government has to redirect the traffic.
Look to my own state of South Australia. Over 70 per cent of the labour
force in certain suburbs to the north and north-west of Adelaide have
no post-school qualifications. Many of these areas have disproportionately
high levels of low-income families, and in some areas youth unemployment
is in excess of 30 per cent. Why do we think that this is acceptable?
We must bring a regional focus to our work. We must look to better ways
of providing support to communities that are struggling. An adequate social
welfare system is a baseline policy only—something we must have to
provide a social and financial floor, a level below which we consider
it is unacceptable to allow people to slide. It is not a substitute for
policies of opportunity.
At the last election Labor enunciated a plan for education priority zones.
This targeted particular areas of educational disadvantage, recognising
that educational opportunities are so important to future outcomes. We
must build on this initiative. We must develop ways of delivering economic
assistance with a regional dimension. Let us not forget that one of the
early acts of this government was to scrap the bulk of the Commonwealth's
regional development responsibilities. The then minister Mr Sharp justified
this decision on the basis that there was no `clear rationale or constitutional
basis for Commonwealth involvement' in this area. I say that there is.
It is the responsibility of the national government to truly govern for
all Australians regardless of where they live. We should identify economic
priority zones—communities which are vulnerable or struggling, in
which the opportunities for work and education are unacceptably limited.
It is not enough simply to dismiss these communities as `lazy' or criticise
the number of families on welfare. We should provide additional resources
to these communities, to their schools and to their young people. And
we should ensure that there is a regional dimension to our industry development
policies.
Our cities are not homogenous, nor is there equality of opportunity between
different metropolitan areas. You cannot govern with a `one size fits
all' approach. Bringing a more regionally focused dimension to economic
policy is fundamentally an issue of equity. It is a Labor agenda.
I seek a nation that is truly one nation, one in which all Australians
can share, regardless of race. Instead, I believe we are in danger of
being swamped by prejudice. Let us speak openly and honestly about race
in this country, about what last year's election signified and about where
we are now. Let us speak openly about the damage that has been done and
let us do it without being subject to the dismissive and disrespectful
taunts about political correctness. In recent years there has been much
preaching from the current Prime Minister about political correctness,
that we have had too much of it. Instead now we have a climate in which
someone who speaks out about injustice, prejudice or discrimination is
dismissed as simply being politically correct. Compassion has been delegitimised—instead
it is seen as elitism. It is as if we have developed a new orthodoxy,
one in which it is correct to defend racism but incorrect to defend tolerance.
We have a new political correctness.
When I and many others speak of the way this government engenders division
and not unity, we do not do so because it is politically correct. We do
so because we believe it, because we see it and because it saddens us.
We say that what has been done and said is wrong, not because we ascribe
to some obscure elitist moral code but because we believe it is harmful
to our community. Prejudice and distrust cannot build a community but
they can tear one apart.
Australia is a country of vast distances and open spaces and many different
environments. It is no less diverse in its peoples than in its landscape.
This diversity can be an aspect of our shared identity or it can be the
fault line around which our community fractures.
In the decades since the arrival of Europeans to this land, race has
been a rather uncomfortable topic for us—first, in the subjugation
of the Aboriginal peoples of this land, and later in how we dealt with
the various waves of migrants to our shores. We all know that we had the
White Australia Policy until the late 1960s, with bipartisan support.
We have also had a rather uneasy relationship with Asia for much of the
postwar period. Phrases such as `the yellow peril' and `two Wongs don't
make a white' exemplify the darker tendencies of our history. Over the
years this relationship has matured as our selfperception has broadened,
but this aspect of our history can still resonate today.
My mother's family can trace its origins back to my ancestor Samuel Chapman,
one of the original settlers in South Australia, who arrived on the Cygnet
in 1836. However, I came here from Malaysia as a child in 1977. It was
a hard time, to leave a familiar place and come to somewhere where you
and your family were seen as so different. Racial abuse was not unusual.
It used to lead me to wonder, `How long do you have to be here and how
much do you have to love this country before you are accepted?'
Over the years since that time, we saw our community move forward and
come together and start to engender a national identity that was truly
inclusive. Critical to this was the then Prime Minister Paul Keating's
articulation of our place in the Asia-Pacific region. Equally powerful
were his discussions of Kokoda and the fall of Singapore as being among
the defining moments in our nation's history—moments when we came
to realise the limitations of the protection offered by the mother country,
Britain; historical moments which remind us how inextricably linked we
are with the region in which we live.
I remember returning from Malaysia after visiting my family there during
this time. When the aeroplane wheels hit the tarmac, I recall feeling
like this really was my country—not just in my heart, but that I
was included, that our national identity was for me as well. Nationhood
is so much about a shared history and a belief in a shared future.
How different Australia is today. Never forget that it was this current
Prime Minister who called for a reduction in Asian immigration in 1988.
He said that the pace of Asian immigration was a cause for concern. You
might take that to mean that those Asians who were here in 1988 are welcome,
but not necessarily all of those who have arrived since. The Prime Minister
premised his arguments on the grounds of social cohesion. You have to
ask what effect his own comments had on social cohesion. I know how it
felt for me and my family and many like us during this time.
Then there was Pauline Hanson, who said we were in danger of being overrun
by Asians. And what did the Prime Minister do? Did he as the Prime Minister
show that moral leadership which was called for? When asked to comment
on whether Aboriginal and Asian Australians should be protected from people
like Pauline Hanson, the Prime Minister said:
Well, are you saying that somebody shouldn't be allowed to say what she
said? I would say in a country such as Australia people should be allowed
to say that.
What sort of message does this send to our community? That it is acceptable
to rail against people who look different? That these sorts of comments
are no different from any other sort of political commentary? Leadership
was called for, not to deny freedom of speech but to assert the harm in
what she said. Leadership was called for, but it was not provided.
Then there was the Wik legislation, and the government's claims that
people's backyards and homes could be threatened by native title. We saw
our Prime Minister on national television, holding up a map of Australia
to show just how much of Australia the Aboriginal people already had rights
over. And then there was the Tampa. Who can forget that most enduring
image of last year's election campaign, that photograph of the Prime Minister,
in sober black and white, attempting to look statesmanlike, with the slogan:
`We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which
they come.' This is the statement which epitomises Prime Minister Howard's
vision for this country. This is the core of what he offered us at the
last election. It is a statement of self-evident fact. It is not a policy
statement. Of course we decide who comes to this country. So why say it?
The only reason that you would is because you wanted to strike a chord
of discord, because you wanted to foster division.
Then there is the `children overboard' affair, where the Australian people
were lied to about the actions of asylum seekers. Despite the relevant
minister being informed that the reports of children being thrown overboard
were incorrect, this government failed to correct the record. What motivates
a government to do such a thing? What underlies this litany of divisive
politicking is a lack of compassion, a lack of compassion for the other,
for those who might be adversely affected.
There may be some who will say I am being too critical. I ask them this.
When has your Prime Minister, John Howard, done or said something that
made you feel proud to be Australian? When can you point to a time when
he exercised his leadership to bring Australians together? Contrast this
with what we saw at the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games in Sydney—the
black elder and the young girl, the sense of optimism and togetherness
felt by all, how it felt in our hearts when we sang, `I am, you are, we
are Australian'.
I believe that the vast majority of Australians are good-hearted people.
We have a sense of fairness and a commonsense approach to the world. This
keeps us grounded. I also believe the factors which most weigh on social
cohesion are economic hardship and political leadership. People do not
share if they do not have their fair share. Nor do they listen if they
are not listened to. So we must work to create a nation where there is
a fair share for all. We must listen and discuss, not lecture. But we
must never again go down the path that was shown to us last year, where
the fault lines within our community were opened up for base political
purposes. Let us hold on to that shared belief, that common purpose that
arises at certain moments in our history. Let us truly be one nation.
As I said at the outset, it is an extraordinary honour to be in this
place. You only get here with the support of many. The first acknowledgment
I make is of course to those people in South Australia who chose to support
the Labor Party at the last election. They put me here, and it is them
I represent. I thank the members of the South Australian branch of the
party who saw fit to preselect me. I am grateful for and humbled by their
support. I hope I can justify the faith they have shown in me. I want
to make special mention of a few: Mark Butler, Ian Hunter, Patrick Conlon,
Jay Weatherill, Stephanie Key, Senator Nick Bolkus, Susan Close, Steve
Georganas and Steven May. I also thank the many trade unions that chose
to support me. It might be unfashionable to be a trade unionist these
days, but I wear that badge with pride. I especially thank the Liquor,
Hospitality and Miscellaneous Workers Union; the Australian Workers Union;
the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union; the Australian Services
Union; and the United Firefighters Union for their support. I am honoured
that unions representing working Australians in such a diverse range of
occupations chose to support me.
My family and friends have always been a great source of support to me.
Many are here today to share this experience. I thank them for being here,
for their love and support until now and in the future. To my father,
I wish you could have been here, but know that you taught me many things
that I can draw on, now and tomorrow. To my mother, your intellect, mischievousness,
sense of humour and unfailing love sustain me. I want to make special
mention of my younger brother Toby, who turned 30 on the day I was elected
to this place, and died 10 days later. Your life and death ensure that
I shall never forget what it is like for those who are truly marginalised.
Finally, I thank Dascia, Courtney and Rohan, without whose love and support
I would never have considered standing for preselection, and without whom
I would not be here today. Thank you, fellow senators, and thank you,
Mr President.
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