Keynote Speech 

Speech given by Dr James Jupp AM

Thursday 23 October

I have been asked by the organisers to open up issues in three areas which are I suppose fairly loosely related, but in some ways are really quite different. One which is difficult, is the first one I will start with. - which is who will replace the pioneers of ethnic community organisations? Clearly somebody has to if those organisations are to continue to exist. The second one, which I think is fairly easy, is what is in the best interests of Australia, permanent or long term temporary residence; and thirdly, how significant is the language question in the next census? That clearly relates to the first, because if languages are dying out as some doubtless will, then the organisations built on those languages and enrolling people to speak those languages have to consider what to do next – whether the organisation is to go out of existence as quite a few organisations do, or whether it is to conduct its affairs predominantly in English.

Now to look at the first question – ethnic community organisations. One of the problems here is that nobody, and I include myself, has ever fully surveyed the scope of ethnic community organisations in Australia. It is partly a matter of funding, the Government doesn’t give us any money any more to look at multiculturalism like it used to in the good old days, and partly I guess where there is a wide range of language capacities networking is necessary to find out what is going on. There is a whole range of different organisations and I think their future will vary a great deal. There is firstly what you might call the official organisations, that is organisations like FECCA and its affiliated ethnic community councils and to some extent the Migrant Resource Centres. Now their future depends on a number of factors, but most importantly on government funding. It seems to be that one of the problems here is that government funding is increasingly seen now as a way of buying compliance. I think this has been a problem for FECCA. It is certainly likely to be a problem for the Migrant Resource Centres in the future. If you look at the recent report on settlement, which Settlement Services in the Immigration Department produced very recently, you will find it stated quite clearly there that receipt of core funding suggests agreement with government policy, in other words not criticising government policy. That is I think a problem that those organisations are going to have to deal with. Are they going to become in effect spokespersons for government policies, in which case they are going to lose a lot of their support, or are they going to come out publicly on issues which they feel strongly about, in which case they are going to lose a lot of their money. I think that is quite a serious problem for what I call the official organisations. It has always seemed to me, and I have been saying this for years, that the future of such organisations depends very much on diversifying their sources of income. But if you are totally dependent on one official government source of income, you are likely increasingly to lose your liveliness and your importance in putting forward the views of your very varied constituency. So I think that is an issue that is certainly worth looking at.

Secondly, religious institutions are of course, extremely varied as has just been pointed out All the major religions in the world are organised here. In Australia they have buildings, they have clergy, they have followings, they have funds and all the rest of it. It seems to me that religious organisations will continue to prosper to the extent again that they can turnover their leadership and retain particularly their younger adherents. Indeed if you look at the Jewish religion in Australia for example, it has managed to sustain itself from quite small numbers for 200 years. I suppose one of the difficulties with some of the religious denominations is that they are very closely tied to one particular ethnic culture and one particular language and this applies I think to the smaller of the Orthodox churches. There again it seems to me that the Greek Orthodox religion at least, which has been established in Australia for a hundred years now, will not face that problem. What it will face, and what it has to come to terms with as in the United States, is a shift from the use of the Greek language to the use of the English language. That has already happened, and is already quite widespread in the United States.

Sporting Clubs of course continue as long as they can win a few games and get the crowds. Social clubs again can be very successful, or can fail, and we see this very clearly in Canberra where we have 23 ethnic social clubs with their own buildings, their own funds, their own following. Some of them have started to disappear, particularly those based on the smaller East European groups which came after the war where the problem of aging is particularly acute. Others, like the Hellenic Club for example in Canberra, are a multimillion dollar success. So there is a whole range of Clubs which are actually selling their premises and folding up. Three ethnic groups have done that fairly recently in Canberra but other clubs are going on and making lots of money and are doing extremely well. Again it’s a matter I think of broadening out, of having activities there for example, which are not specifically Greek in a narrow sense. So basically what I am saying here is that the problem for the ethnic community organisations is to balance their ethnicity with their role in society in general. This means making compromises which many of the older leaders who were immigrants who came from somewhere else are often reluctant to make. That means shifting into the use of English, expanding activities which are not specifically ethnic, broadening the organisation rather than narrowing.

The whole core of the question of replacing the pioneers is the shifting ethnic composition of Australia. Most of the ethnic community organisations that have pioneered multiculturalism and played a major role in ECCs, FECCA and all the rest of it, have historically been based on those who came after the Second World War, who are clearly dying out for obvious reasons. They are not being replaced. There is no significant immigration coming from Europe at all other than from some (but not all) parts of former Yugoslavia. Basically whether we talk about East European communities, whether we talk about West European Communities, people just are not coming. So the future of many Ethnic Community organisations does not depend on immigration, because it is not happening and it is not going to happen. It depends on the children and grandchildren of the established leadership, and it depends on broadening out the activities of the community to cater for those children, many of whom quite frankly do not want to sit around re-fighting the Second World War or talking about the good old days because they weren’t born. They know nothing about it, and I think that is a very serious dilemma for people who have committed themselves to ethnic community organisations, and see them in a sense changing into something else. But I believe that if they don’t change into something else then they will inevitably disappear and that is something you really have to seriously consider.

I would say by the way in reference to the English in Australia, the reason I am writing a book called The English in Australia is because no one has ever written a book called the English in Australia because we are the invisible people. We are also the largest ethnic group, we have no ethnic organisations and we really don’t like each other very much. So that again when you are looking at ethnic community groups, you can’t have a single model. You can’t have a single model because different cultures organise in different ways. The notion of a formal club with a committee and a chairman and all the rest of it is very European and is not necessarily the way that other ethnic communities are going to organise themselves. So I am certainly not suggesting we impose a single model, because that would be a disaster. That would be imposing the European model on people who don’t think in that way. And that’s true of religions too. Many non-Christian religions organise themselves in a totally different way, and this is true of the Islamic religion. The notion that there is some sort of Islamic Pope down there at Lakemba who can say you must all do this is absolute nonsense. It is totally inconsistent with the practices of the Islamic religion over the entire world.

Now I know this raises a lot of points which are maybe controversial, maybe even disturbing to the people who are now mostly elderly, who put so much effort into maintaining ethnic community organisations in Australia despite all the problems. I think what it suggests is structural approaches which some organisations have in fact done. It is very necessary to bring women into the leadership of ethnic community organisations and this is being done slowly but in some cases very slowly. Some cases, like in Filipino organisations for example, are predominantly run by women, but that is very exceptional. I think it is very necessary to ensure that a substantial part of the leadership of ethnic community organisations both large and small consists of women. It is also very necessary I think to ensure that young people have a say. The pioneers are going to really have to move over a little bit and make room for the younger people, whose definitions of ethnicity might be really rather different, particularly those born and brought up in Australia. Now of course when we come to Europeans, we are not even talking about children now, we are talking about people of 20, 30 or 40 who were born in Australia. So it is not just teenagers, it is a whole one or even two generations of people born and brought up in Australia with only a tenuous recollection from their parents or grandparents of what the old country used to be like at least 50 years ago.

Now the second question is I think much easier, what is in the best interests of Australia, permanent or long term temporary residence? I would take the word “or” out because we have both of them and they are not incompatible. In fact we have always had both of them because many of those who came to Australia as long term residents (it is particularly true of the English in fact) went back home. This is also true of the Italians, Greeks, Germans, Dutch – a lot of the Europeans who came here for permanent residence after the War and in the conditions of hardship and chaos after the Second World War, do actually plan to retire back home and do in fact retire back home. So the distinction between permanent residence and temporary residence is I think an artificial one. A lot of people do intend to return. Mind you a lot of people who intend to return don’t return. But a lot of people intend to return and do that, so we have always had people who come here "forever" and then go away again. In fact I did that myself and then I came back again. This is quite normal. But what has happened in recent years, very recent years in fact overwhelmingly under the Howard Government and only recently under them, is a shift away from permanent visas permanent resident visas, to temporary resident visas. I am not here talking about the special class of temporary visas for asylum seekers which in my opinion should be immediately abolished. I am not going to even argue about that one. But I am talking about much larger categories of students and temporary business residents. They make up a very large part of this temporary intake, and in the last two or three years that has been larger than the numbers coming in for permanent residence. In many ways these people are very advantageous to Australia. They are not the old guest workers that you used to have in Europe. They are not labourers without rights and skills. They are often considerably better educated and more skilled than the average Australian population. In other words they are adding value to the community. This is particularly relevant I think to the very large number of students brought into Australia. In fact the number of students brought into Australia is greater than the number of permanent residents brought into Australia. This university for example would not function if overseas students were limited, prohibited or found it much more difficult to come.

Generally speaking, although many people in universities would prefer to get all their money from the government, they are not going to get all their money from the government ever again. Generally speaking the tertiary education system in this country, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, could not function without overseas students. So in that sense it is very much in the interests of Australia and in the interests of tertiary education for them to come. And I think the same is largely true of temporary business and technical immigrants as well. Some of them might turn out to be crooks, in fact some of them do, but by and large a great majority of them are contributing to society in Australia. They don’t wish to remain here permanently and there is no reason why they should be put under obligations as they have in the past, to become citizens and to remain here for ever.

But I would mention one thing that does worry me about the balance between temporary and permanent. It does seem to me that there is sufficient slack in the system for us to be able to extend the family reunion category which has steadily been diminished and to extend the humanitarian category which has not responded to international crises at all for the last 12 or 15 years. It has remained exactly the same regardless of what is going on in the world. So I think we have to look at the permanent intake and we have to say well if you are going to take literally thousands of students, literally thousands of temporary business and literally also thousands of working holiday visitors, half of whom are British, then surely there must be enough room in the program to extend the right of people to bring in their families, which has been restricted, and also to create an emergency category, which we had before, and which the present government abolished, an emergency category which would allow you to deal with refugee crises as they arrive.

Now finally the language question in the next census. Well I didn’t know this, but apparently the Australian Bureau of Statistics in their wisdom might be talking about removing the language question from the next census. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has become more and more commercialised in recent years. It sells all its information now at exorbitant prices and basically they judge census questions by the number of people who are likely to purchase the answers. This is to me not a very good idea. We have had birth place questions in our censuses for 150 years which is a long time for most Western countries. We still have that and that is an extremely useful category. But as you will know if you have worked with these figures and with the organisations – birthplace does not necessarily tell you much about the people who come from those birthplaces. Particularly as we extend our immigration outwards from Europe towards Asia and Africa and the Pacific, you are getting people of one culture coming from different places. For example, you would not think that the majority of Hindus and the majority of Hindi speakers in Australia don’t come from India. They actually come from Fiji, so you really need two or three bits of information to find out where people are and who people are.

Now as far as the language question goes, it’s only been there since 1976. They made an awful mess of it in 1976 because they put all the Yugoslav languages down as Slovenian. This created great joy amongst the Slovenians but it wasn’t terribly well received by the Serbs, Croats and Macedonians who didn’t like it at all. But they got better. I was involved in preparing the last language question for the census. They really have made a serious effort to find even the smallest languages, even the Aboriginal languages many of which are very, very small indeed. I would hate to see that effort wasted because we have there a resource which is much better than that in practically any other country in the world and it would be, in my view, very foolish to throw it away.

Now what about some of the other reasons why it shouldn’t be thrown away. Firstly of course the entire settlement service and multicultural functions of government, both Commonwealth and State have every since the Galbally report in 1978 been based on language. Always based on language as one of the problems if you like facing new settlers. Now if you don’t have a language question you don’t know what languages are being used, you don’t know how many people have poor English. There is a great deal you don’t know and all those settlement services including the Adult Migrant English Program, including the Migrant Resource Centres, all the Commonwealth and State funded services which have been based on language very largely, not exclusively are going to lose that extremely important information. Increasingly Government Departments particularly State and Federal and in some areas local government have committed themselves under access and equity provisions to providing information in particular languages. Now if you don’t know what languages are being used in your area it makes it much more difficult to target the right people. I was reminded of this years ago when we were looking at settlement services. We went to Newcastle and the Newcastle MRC said please tell Immigration Department not to send us all these pamphlets in Turkish because there aren’t any Turks in Newcastle. They had a whole room full of Turkish pamphlets which nobody could read and nobody could want. So if we are going to encourage, which we should, information to be given both public and private information to be given in languages that people can understand, both the translating and interpreting service and through pamphlets and leaflets then we really need to know what languages to use, because some languages have become much more prominent in recent years, Persian is a good example of that. Persian was not a significant language 20 years ago, now it is. And we really need to know that and the census tells us that.

I also would have thought that the media and the advertising industry value this kind of information. They would in fact be the chief commercial users of it. The entire range of non-English language media really needs to know where its market is. Unless you know where the languages are spoken and how many people speak the language and where they come from, all of which you get from the census, then your marketing is much less effective. The advertising industry, or the more progressive parts of it, like to target particular groups in the languages which those people can understand. So just to conclude on that issue, I suggest that everybody involved in this area whether they are in government, or whether they are in ethnic organisations, whether they are in churches or whether they are in the media, fight tooth and nail to keep that language question in the census. Eventually they will win because we have had similar fights to that before and we have won them before.

Thank you.