One of the assertions made in the piece is that Mr Rudd “is known to prefer Australia’s representatives abroad speak the local language”, an attribute which Mr Borrowman apparently doesn’t possess. (UPDATE: (27/5)  According to this piece, Mr Borrowman actually does speak German, which suggests the Prime Minister stopped his appointment for other reasons, and even more concerning, publicly fibbed about it).

Leaving aside whether or not Mr Rudd should be directly intervening in ambassadorial appointments, speaking the local language seems like a reasonable thing to aim for in an ambassador, although it should only be one of a number of factors to take into account – it would be crazy to make it a compulsory prerequisite.

But I was very taken aback by the statement in the article that “severe budget cuts over successive years have left only about a quarter of diplomats speaking a foreign language.”

I work a lot in the fields of migration and multiculturalism.  I have the limitation of being monolingual, and I am continually reminded of the benefits of speaking multiple languages. I often wonder why Australia doesn’t seem to be able to make better use of the many talents of migrants and refugees – one of which is the multilingual abilities and understandings of other cultures which so many of them possess.

Not everybody is suited to be an ambassador, but if the statistic that only a quarter of our diplomats speak a language other than English is true, it is hard to see how our diplomatic service is being as effective as it could be.  Given that Australia is one of the most multicultural nations on Earth, it is an advantage we should be making much better use of.

UPDATE: As noted above, an article the following day states that Mr Borrowman does speak German.  This makes the allegations that Mr Rudd vetoed the appointment due to personal animosity towards Mr Borrowman more plausible.

It also appears the Prime Minister has rather blatantly lied about the issue. The article says:

Mr Rudd, asked yesterday why he stopped the appointment, said his preference was “to have people in positions who spoke the language well”.

“I am just saying it is general philosophy and I think you know me well that when it comes to foreign diplomatic appointments I do place priority on languages, as does the minister and last time I looked at Germany they speak German.”

My main aim originally in noting this issue was to make the point that we should be doing more to value and encourage multi-lingualism, rather than to buy into a diplomatic spat around Prime Ministerial micro-management.  But if this is another case of flagrant fibbing when caught out, the circumstances surrounding this matter does merit closer attention.

This comment is undoubtedly true, and I would add that such understanding is also essential in improving the prospects of regional stability and developing more cooperative approaches to environmental and social challenges in our region.

The Business Alliance for Asia Literacy is hardly the first group to argue that improving the understanding of Asian languages, culture and history would be beneficial to Australia.  However, the trends in this area in recent times have not been very positive.

On the same day The Age article appeared, The Australian reported that “Victoria University has dropped all its language courses except Vietnamese, while intensifying remedial English courses.”

You can hardly blame a University for not offering a course if there is little demand for it from students. But one benefit of Australia’s large and diverse migration intake, including a very high number of international students, is that a majority of these people are already fluent in different cultures and in languages other than English.

Many of these are Asian languages and cultures, so when they further strengthen their English language skills – which is where Victoria University is devoting more of their resources – it achieves many of the same goals the Business Alliance for Asia Literacy is calling for, just in reverse order.

Bringing more people of Asian background into Australia doesn’t negate the benefits of better educating other Australians about the languages and culture of our region.  But it is an indication that Australia is becoming more Asia-literate than might be assumed, as well as a reminder of the benefits of making better use of the skills and talents that migrants, including students, bring with them.

Anh Cao becomes the first Vietnamese-American in US Congress, rounding off an election which delivered a few other results demonstrating the racial and cultural diversity of the USA.  Despite being a Republican, his election will probably also help rather than hinder efforts to get comprehensive immigration reform measures passed through the Congress – a big task but one which will be important for Barack Obama and the Democrats if they want to retain the levels of support they currently have from Hispanic Americans in particular.  There will be some on the Republican side who are likely to support this – probably including John McCain – but also some of the small number of the ‘new guard’ of Republicans, of which Mr Cao has just become the newest.

I was reading through the transcript of a speech Mr Rudd gave recently at the Ethnic Business Awards in Sydney, which I thought wasn’t too bad.  I was especially struck by the words about multiculturalism which he used to close his speech.  I have heard some questions raised about whether or not the new government is genuinely committed to multiculturalism, so it was good to read his positive words on the topic for that reason alone. But I also thought the words he chose were quite eloquent.

Of course, as the PM acknowledged, they were not his own words, but rather those of Joseph Assaf, a migrant from Lebanon who has written a book called “In Someone Else’s Shoes”.  Perhaps it shows the benefits of using other peoples’ words after all.  In any case, like the PM, I also think they are eloquent words.

“Multiculturalism is not a passing fancy. It is not a hobby. It is not a Government policy. It is not a nice thing to do or a marketing opportunity.

“Equally, diversity is not a choice. It is not an option. It is not a public relations exercise or an employee relations program. In Australia diversity is a fact of life and multiculturalism is a way of life. May it ever be so.”

I haven’t read the book yet, but from the things I’ve read about it, it looks like a thought-provoking read.

According to the American Muslim Alliance, only nine Muslims were serving in state legislatures nationwide before Tuesday’s elections, and only one of them is a woman. There are two Muslim members of Congress — Democrats Keith Ellison of Minnesota and Andre Carson of Indiana.

Lawyer and community activist Rashida Tlaib, the daughter of Palestinian immigrants who never attended high school, becomes the first Muslim woman ever to serve in the Michigan Legislature. She said she wouldn’t have run but for the repeated urging of her Jewish boss and predecessor, outgoing Democratic state Rep. Steve Tobocman.

“In my heart, I was more of a social worker than anything,” said Tlaib, 32. She said her top priorities will be immigrant rights and pollution, a major issue to her constituents who are surrounded by oil refineries and factories.

The eldest of 14 children of a retired Ford Motor Co. worker and his wife, she was the first in her family to earn a high school diploma. She went on to finish college and law school while helping raise 13 siblings.

Her mother was born in Beit Ur El Foka, near the West Bank city of Ramallah. Her father was born in Beit Hanina, a Jerusalem suburb.

The Michigan Legislature’s first known Muslim member was James Karoub. Born in Highland Park to an imam and his wife who came from what now is Lebanon, Karoub served three terms in the state House in the 1960s.

Tuesday’s election also brought another new Arab-American to the state House, Republican Justin Amash of Cascade in conservative western Michigan. He is Christian and the son of a Palestinian-born father and Syrian-born mother. His Democratic opponent, Albert Abbasse, also is Arab-American.

Meanwhile, US ethnic media outlet China Press reports that Carol Liu, elected senator of California’s 21st District, became the first Asian Woman senator in the United States. Liu was born in Berkeley and grew up in Oakland, CA. Her mother is a fifth generation Chinese immigrant and her father moved to the United States from China after the Second World War.

This provision obviously means no migrant has ever served as President (or Vice President) of the USA. However, it is open to people who are the child of a migrant. But for a country of migrants, the proportion of people who fit this category is quite small. Barack Obama will be the 43rd person to hold the office of  President, but according to this Wiki site, he will be only the seventh to have a parent who was not born a US citizen.  As is almost universally known, Obama’s father was Kenyan.  Only six previous Presidents had an immigrant parent – Obama will be the first since Herbert Hoover was elected in 1929.  Only one President, Andrew Jackson, had two immigrant parents.  (h/t ILW)

Given the global interest in Obama’s success and the inevitability the USA will no longer have a majority white-European population within the next few decades, it is worth looking beyond the mainstream media to the views of some of the ethnic news media in the USA.

This link goes to some snapshot responses from a range of media to a few key questions. When it came to the question “What is the most pressing change that your community wants to see happen?” many mirrored the mainstream media in highlighting the need to fix economy, as well as the partly related issue of fixing immigration policy.

(* The discriminatory prohibition on who can become US President is nothing compared to the bizarre constraints on who can become Australia’s Head of State, but that’s an issue for another post)

By global standards, both New Zealand and Australia have a very high proportion of their population who were born in another country.  In 2006, 22.9 percent of people usually living in New Zealand were born overseas, compared with 23.9 in Australia.  This figure is only increasing slowly in Australia, while in New Zealand, it has risen from 17.5 per cent just ten years ago, suggesting they could well overtake Australia on this measure in the next few years. As with Australia, the percentage of overseas born people in New Zealand from Asian countries is now close to the percentage from the UK and Ireland.

As I mentioned in a previous post, there are two Asian born MPs among the 226 members of the two house of parliament in Australia.  New Zealand only has the one house of Parliament, which normally consists of 120 seats.  In reporting on the ethnic campaign launches of the two major parties, the New Zealand Herald predicts the election “will probably result in Labour and National having three Asian MPs each”.

The Nationals already have a Chinese born MP in Pansy Wong, who was first elected in 1996.  At this election, the party is also hoping to provide New Zealand’s first ethnic Korean and Sikh MPs.
Candidates for the Labour Party with credible chances of being elected include ones with Chinese and Fiji-Indian heritage, joining Pakistan-born Muslim MP Ashraf Choudhary. New Zealand’s current Governor-General, Anand Satyanand, has Fiji-Indian heritage.

New Zealand has of course done far better than Australia when it comes to having Indigenous people as Members of Parliament, helped by but not solely due to having a number of seats set aside specifically for Maori.

I knew it had done better having women in positions of high office too, but I didn’t know that in 2005, according to Wikipedia at least, it became

the only country in the world in which all the highest offices in the land have been occupied simultaneously by women: Queen Elizabeth II, Governor-General Dame Silvia Cartwright, Prime Minister Helen Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives Margaret Wilson and Chief Justice Dame Sian Elias were all in office between March 2005 and August 2006. New Zealand’s largest listed company, Telecom New Zealand, had a woman – Theresa Gattung – as its CEO at the time.

Labor’s Nick Lalich, who has already served as Mayor of Fairfield, was born in Egypt after his parents fled Yugoslavia near the end of World War II, and came to Australia when he was three years old.

Liberal candidate Dai Le came to Australia at age eleven, after she and her family spent three years in a refugee camp after fleeing Vietnam at the end of the war.

Our Parliaments will naturally tend to lag a bit behind when it comes to reflecting the reality of our cultural diversity, but the more this gap can be bridged the better.  Migrants – and even more so refugees – have experiences that most Australian born people haven’t had; especially those whose ancestors migrated here a few generations ago. We can all benefit from being more exposed to those perspectives. 

People with a southern and eastern European heritage have started to make their way into senior political positions – as the outgoing member for Lakemba and former Premier Morris Iemma demonstrates – but as yet there are not many of Asian heritage.

Encouraging the involvement of people from diverse cultural and religious backgrounds in political processes is a key way to improve integration.  There are some significant barriers to this – many of them cultural, some of them structural.  The Constitutional bar on dual citizens running for federal Parliament is an obvious one, but the non-participatory nature of party politics and the tendency of major parties to play it safe when it comes to winnable seats also play their part.

This article from Slate details the (partly unintended) impacts of Ireland’s migration and citizenry laws, which enabled “Rotimi Adebari, a Nigerian refugee who arrived in Ireland in 2000, to become the mayor of Portlaoise, a commuter town outside Dublin, even though he’s not (yet) an Irish citizen.”

According to the Australian Parliament House website, currently 31 of our 226 federal MPs were born overseas.  Of course you can be an Australian born overseas, just as you can be born in Australia and not necessarily be eligible to become a citizen, so nation of birth is not a perfect indicator. But it’s not too bad a guide.  15 of those 31 were born in the UK or New Zealand, and only 2 were born in Asia. 

I can’t finish an article like this without noting that none of the 226 representatives in the federal Parliament are Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders.  107 years since Federation and we are still yet to see the first Indigenous person elected to the House of Representatives, with only two being elected to the Senate over that period.

He expressed concern that “in the past decade, at the national political level, we regressed in our acceptance of social diversity” and outlined “the logic of the policy of multiculturalism”:

The overall integration of people from different nationalities is evidence of the success of a multicultural policy that was about greater choice rather than coercion.

Georgiou noted that “the Rudd Government’s position on multiculturalism is also opaque and the Opposition has yet to define its policy.”

Not surprisingly, he gave his own prescription:

It’s time for a reaffirmation by our political leaders of a commitment to multiculturalism.  At the policy level, stronger action is necessary to realise the aim of equality of opportunity for all, an aim to which successive governments of all major parties have been committed. I believe that the Government should establish an independent statutory body to research and advise on issues of multiculturalism and migrants and refugees. It should report directly to the Prime Minister.

I saw the Coalition’s new shadow immigration minister. Dr Sharman Stone, speak last week at a conference of the Migration Institute of Australia.  She has only held the position for a few weeks, and her party’s Leader is equally new to the top job, so it is too early to expect a whole fresh policy approach to have emerged.  Even though Dr Stone’s speech was fairly light on detail, there was nothing in it which was particularly inconsistent with what Petro Georgiou is calling for.

She indicated her regional electorate of Murray was amongst the most ethincally diverse non-metropolitan area in the nation and was very clear that many regional areas needed continuing skilled and semi-skilled migration.  She also gave her support for not reducing the current level of our refugee and humanitarian program.

While Labor’s Immigration Minister Chris Evans has been getting started on the major task of modernising and improving our migration laws and systems, and there a few positive early signs, I haven’t seen much of an indication at Prime Ministerial level about a wider commitment to revitalising and fulfiling the potential of our country’s cultural diversity. Malcolm Turnbull could do worse than having a chat to the very experienced and practical Petro Georgiou. It is a key area where the Coalition can show it has moved on from the Howard era.

PS: You can read the full speech that Petro Georgiou’s article was based on at the Australians All website.