Monash Alumni > Alumni Events > Leading Ideas

Neville Roach address at Monash University Leading Ideas Forum, March 19, 2002:

Listen to Neville Roach's address and the question/answer session.
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I acknowledge the Wurundjiri nation, the original owners of the land on which we are gathered. The title of today's talk is all about migrants and refugees and I do plan to stick to my subject. However, when we discuss migration issues, it is esssential that we never forget the enormous and continuing suffering and loss that modern migration has inflicted on Australia's original population. No matter what population, immigration and settlement policies we develop, and whether they relate to the Australian-born or the migrant, and whether the latter enter Australia under the skilled, family or humanitarian streams or as Asylum seekers, they must all have as their moral foundation genuine and lasting Reconciliation. When I refer to Reconciliation, I include both symbolic and practical Reconciliation, including an agreement between the collective Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities. Such an agreement will give moral legitimacy to the Australian nation and a sound basis on which to seek and accept future migrants and visitors, knowing that at last, all of us who are migrants or of migrant descent, have finally acknowledged the unique position of the First Australians and received their blessings and welcome to what was their country. It would be absurd for us to proclaim that welcoming migrants and refugees should be Australia's highest priority, before we make sure that the majority of us, the non-Indigenous Australians, are welcome ourselves, albeit retrospectively.

Perhaps now is a good time for me to make a disclaimer and apologise to those who have come here in anticipation of discussing Australia's highest priority. As I have already said, Reconciliation is a higher priority, probably our highest, because it concerns the birth of the Australian nation, and goes to our very heart, or more correctly, our very soul. To use the Christian analogy, what we have done and what we have failed to do to our Indigenous brothers and sisters, remains our Original Sin.

I also do not want to suggest that welcoming migrants and refugees is a higher priority than looking after the interests of those who are already here. Charity, after all, must begin at home. I would certainly give priority to the education, health and employment needs of current Australian citizens and permanent residents – perhaps education most of all, because investment in education is the surest way to produce good health, employment and other social outcomes .

But fortunately, migrants and refugees do not come at a cost to the rest of us, but actually enrich us all in many ways. The reason for choosing the extreme term 'highest priority' for today's address was partly a marketing hype to persuade all of you to turn up, but mainly because it is critical that we return as fast as possible to a positive view of all migrants and refugees, whether or not they are in the queues our orderly minds and programs would like them to be. In the minds of many and probably most Australians today, migrants and refugees represent a problem, and the asylum seekers a national crisis. And yet, it was not so long ago that our collective view was that this country had been built by the continuous arrival of newcomers, and those already here, excepting of course Indigenous inhabitants, were always the better for their arrival. If we can return to a welcoming mind-set, we will once again celebrate their coming instead of needlessly worrying about them.

While it is probable that most of you are already positive about immigration, I would like to discuss its benefits as well as some of its perceived disadvantages.

At the most basic level, we cannot do without migration because otherwise our population would already be in serious decline, which in due course, would become irreversible. Our fertility rate is now below replacement level. Raising it through baby-friendly policies is worth trying but unlikely to have much more than a marginal effect. We are following a trend throughout the developed world which has reached the point where former migrant sources like Japan and several European countries, are now forced to consider immigration and settlement programmes. We are indeed the 'lucky country' because, for us, immigration and settlement have always been core business, something we are very experienced and good at.

While we need immigration to avert population decline, we need to acknowledge that the earlier rationale for a much larger immigration intake, "populate or perish", is probably no longer an imperative in either strategic or economic terms. In today's world, security does not depend significantly on having a large population to defend our shores. Technology can make up for a relative shortage of people and we can rely on our defence alliances to help us in case of any overwhelming threat. From the perspective of the economy, migration is unlikely to have a huge and lasting impact on our major challenge, the relatively small size of our domestic market. The answer to the problem of market size must be found elsewhere, especially through exports to regional and global markets. Migration will also not have a major impact on the ageing of the population, especially if we increase the intake of parents. After all, even young migrants eventually grow old. And ageing will not be as serious a problem as is sometimes made out, because older people are becoming fitter and, given the opportunity, will remain productive for much longer.

So some of the more simplistic arguments in favour of migrants and refugees are unlikely to pass scrutiny. However, while migration is no longer a panacea for our strategic and economic challenges, most analysts agree that, on balance, the impact of a net inflow of migrants is beneficial. In particular, it would be hard today to find too many economists who would say that migrants take more jobs than they help create, and studies commissioned by the Department of Immigration consistently show that, overall, our current migration programme adds to our per capita income and makes a significant positive contribution to the Federal budget.

While numbers are important, and I believe that a somewhat larger intake would be good for us, the value that migrants add to Australia is more qualitative than merely a matter of how many come here. Because they are driven to make a better life for themselves and their children, all migrants make our community collectively more hard working and entrepreneurial. But refugees, especially asylum seekers, because of the hardship they have experienced and the courage they have needed to survive and just get here, are likely to have the most impact.

A strong migration programme also gives us continuous access to much-needed skills. Given the speed and unpredictable way in which technology and globalisation change skill requirements, we are fortunate that we have a great capacity to attract and employ skilled people from around the world on a permanent or temporary basis. It is also important to recognise the role migrants play in providing essential services in less skilled jobs that Australians born here, for whatever reason, no longer want to do. The most visible example of this is the taxi industry, which almost all Anglo-Celtic Australian drivers have abandoned.

However, by far the greatest way in which migration enriches us today is by making us a more diverse society. Non-discriminatory immigration continuously adds to our diversity, and does so almost automatically, because it means people from almost every corner of the world can come here, but economic push factors attract more from the developing world, rather than from Britain and Ireland, the origin of the majority of Australians. The benefits of diversity are now generally recognised and referred to as Productive Diversity. I must acknowledge my bias. Having come to the White Australia of 1961, and then witnessing first-hand its evolution into the Multicultural Australia of 2002, I know from personal experience that diversity has made Australia, both socially and culturally, a much more exciting country to live in, and an infinitely better place to eat in! But while the food, song, and dance bit is the most obvious and enjoyable outcome of our diversity, the economic benefits are even greater. Multicultural and multilingual skills and cross cultural competence help us to develop new products and services, access new markets and connect to international networks. Our fastest growing service industries, the education of overseas students and tourism, could not have been so successful were it not for the fact that, thanks to the diversity of our own population, we were already comfortable engaging with culturally different people. White Australia may have been awarded the 1956 Olympics, but could never have won the 2000 games, and only Multicultural Australia could have run them and welcomed the whole world so naturally and so brilliantly.

Most importantly though, diversity unleashes innovation and creativity, the primary drivers of income and wealth creation in the Information Age, as the recent experience of America and Japan so conclusively demonstrates.

While Japan's monoculture underpinned the disciplines of total quality management and continuous improvement, giving Japan economic supremacy in the manufacturing economy of the Industrial Age, leadership in the knowledge economy of the Information Age has been seized by America, where diversity has unleashed unlimited creativity. The great lesson of the recent performance of Japan and America is that, as shown by the more successful American companies, diversity does not need to be divisive, the benefits of teamwork can be achieved by a diverse workforce through leadership and training, but a nation without diversity cannot easily generate creativity, which is often the unexpected result of people daring to be different. When it comes to diversity, thanks to our migrants and refugees, Australia is fortunately very much like America, and the exact opposite of Japan.

Given my conviction that our diversity makes us the lucky country, you can imagine my surprise when I read yesterday's papers to find headlines like, "Fears of cultural rift as Sydney's migrant magnet works overtime" and "Where the suburbs meet Orient excess".

The articles report the research undertaken by Professor Bob Birrell of Monash University, ironically the same University that has organised this lecture. It's good to see Monash encouraging the diversity of ideas and opinions! Dr. Birrell is quoted as saying, "Sydney and Melbourne now constitute the multicultural heartland. The rest of Australia, with the exception of Perth, show a relative absence of ethnic diversity". My immediate reaction was, "Wow. We now have research that proves the strong link between diversity and economic success. Multicultural Sydney, Melbourne and Perth are booming, in sharp contrast to the regions, referred to in one of the articles as ,"the strongholds of Anglo-culture". Clearly the imperative is to dramatically increase the cultural diversity of the regions. But no, the good Professor goes on to say, "Sydney and Melbourne contain the generators and transmitters of the multicultural and cosmopolitan ideas which are so influential in intelligentia circles. Rearguard resistance to these images is largely based in regional Australia". So it is Sydney and Melbourne that have a problem – generating ideas that are influential in intelligentia circles, which I presume do not include Australia's leading demographer. All I can say Professor is you should join the rearguard resistance and seek asylum in Hobart! Only joking, Bob!

Unfortunately it is no laughing matter that the newspaper comment accompanying the reports opportunistically infers from the research that the concentration of immigrants is, "creating new varieties of community tension and resentment …. intensified by an antagonism towards some of the cultural practices of Muslims evident before September 11…..another reason why the attitude towards asylum seekers is far less sympathetic in (Sydney's) West." The ethnic labelling of everything bad continues. You would think that we were a perfect society before all these 'others' came here, except yesterday's papers also carried an article that outlaw bikie gangs, which I imagine would be mainly white, pose the biggest criminal threat the nation has known.

Despite Professor Birrell's research, and to some extent because of it, I remain a very strong advocate of diversity. But, if we truly believe in Productive Diversity, we must make a special effort to sustain and replenish our diversity assets. In other words, we need to take specific actions to develop a sustainable multicultural society. As long as we remain a country that welcomes migrants and refugees, they will continuously refresh our multicultural community.

The higher net migration target announced last year is therefore good news, although I personally believe that we could sustain an even larger number. In my view, a net 120,000 would be a lot better than the current level of 85,000. But going from 75,000 to 85,000 is still a very positive step and should be warmly welcomed. This raises the other vexed question regarding migration and that is its size and how big a population should

Australia have. In yesterday's paper Bob Carr attacked those who advocate higher migration by pointing out all the problems that will befall Australia in general and Sydney in particular if we decided to increase our population to 50 million. He implies that everyone who wants an increase in migration wants this extreme figure. This is not very helpful. One could just as easily say that everyone who wants less migration, Mr. Carr included, would like our population to decline to the 12 million that one of his environmental guru friends suggests is what Australia's fragile environment can sustain. Or we could say that he supports the target of the Australians against further immigration. The reality is that most people who believe we should have a higher population think in terms of the current projection of 25 million or a moderately higher figure of 30 to 35 million. Mr. Carr himself doesn't indicate any preferred figure, although his great concern regarding Sydney already bursting at the seams would suggest that he might want a lowering of the immigration programme, perhaps even to a level that only averted population decline. The point I am trying to make is that it is not helpful to criticise other people's targets, especially unfairly exaggerated ones, without proposing alternative scenarios, which can then be subjected to scrutiny based on rigorous research.

To be fair to Mr. Carr, he does say, "Yes, we may need a nationally agreed population policy". This is not a view shared by Philip Ruddock. Returning to the subject of migration in general, what we clearly need is a formal population policy. In a recent article (SMH February 11), he says, "the Government does not need a population

policy to tell it what Australia's population future will be". He then proceeds to make what sounds remarkably like a claim of a successful population policy . "We already have an informed and clear vision of Australia's population future, based on a thorough understanding of, and research into, the underlying demographic trends." He also insists that, "the onus is on those who advocate a significantly larger or smaller future population to put forward sound arguments and strategies for achieving their population futures, having regard to the implications for Australia's economic, social, environmental and humanitarian objectives." So, they should have a comprehensive population policy too! And he talks of information that, "is vital to the planning of our economy and caring for our environment". Planning is important for our economy and environment, but not for our most valuable assets, our people!

Clearly, what we see here is another semantic problem similar to those the Government has had with other terms, like sorry, ownership and anti-racism, preferring instead regret, custodianship and harmony. Why a Government that is so critical of the language constraints they see as imposed by 'political correctness', should themselves be uncomfortable with perfectly appropriate and accurate terms, would be an amusing question, were the issues trivialised by this word game not of great importance to the future of our nation.

Every country must have a population policy because planning for everything else - the economy, health, aged care, employment, education, transportation, housing, the environment, sport, entertainment and the arts - starts with the number and characteristics of our people, their age, gender ratio, fertility, life expectancy, skills, cultural heritage, lifestyle, whether born here or overseas, where they live and so on. And, of course, whether they care to admit it or not, all Governments, including the one currently in power, have a population policy, even if only by default. Surely it is better not to leave things to chance or serendipity, but to be pro-active and plan for the best overall outcomes for Australians present and future. Of course, once a Government becomes more explicit about its objectives, its performance can be measured against them. Perhaps this is the real reason for the reluctance to enunciate a population policy! This seems borne out by what the Minister said in another article recently, that "no democratic government would allow itself to be hogtied by a population target or a formal population program". No business would get away with such an approach to human resources!

Fortunately, Victorian Premier, Steve Bracks, had a different view from Philip Ruddock and organised the recent very successful Population Summit for February 25. This created a great opportunity to move the whole debate forward constructively without degenerating. This does not mean a unanimous view emerged or should have, but that all viewpoints were given a fair hearing and full consideration.

The Summit's most valuable and enduring outcome will I hope be the development of a holistic population policy and plan, one that takes into account the numerous implications of each particular setting - for example, the effect of various levels of population on the environment; the impact of skilled migrants on the employment, education and development of Australian residents; the total cost and benefit to our economy of the complete migrant family unit, including the skilled migrant, spouse, parents and children, as compared to Australian-born families; and the positive and negative impact of our immigration policies including the current asylum seeker regime, on the image that potential overseas students, tourists and business partners have of us. The answers to such questions, based on rigorous and objective research, should ensure a clear, sound and rational assessment of many issues concerning the Australian community, and significantly counteract the FUD ( fear, uncertainty and doubt) factor that causes so much unproductive and unnecessary anxiety.

But, while numbers matter, the composition of our immigration intake is also extremely important and is sometimes overlooked by many in the pro-migration lobby, especially business, who focus largely on the skilled stream. We need to understand that the family stream, in fact, makes a greater contribution to diversity than the skilled stream. The criteria for skilled immigrants are defined by us. As we prefer people whom we feel we need and whom we think will fit in, we tend to favour those who, by skill or culture, are more like us.

With the family stream, on the other hand, we have no say in the choice of parents, spouses or children, so they are likely to be more diverse than the principal skilled migrants. Moreover, when it comes to sustaining cultural diversity, the strongest influence comes from parents. It is parents who are most familiar with culture, language, history and tradition. And it is parents, in fact grandparents, who are most able to hand down their heritage to the young, especially to their grandchildren who were born here or who came at any early age before they could absorb the culture of their origin. In my opinion, if we took into account the added value that family members contribute to the social, cultural and economic wellbeing of their families and the community, then we would not find it difficult to justify a rebalancing of our annual intake, correcting the drastic reduction of the family stream relative to the skilled stream. This would also help remove the current absurd, unfair and discriminatory limit of 500 places that are allocated to parents each year. With 20,000 in the queue, and probably as many or more discouraged from joining a queue that will take them 40 or more years to reach the front of, this is one of the most counterproductive and inhumane aspects of current migration policy. The solution being canvassed by then Government to increase the parent numbers would be hilarious if it weren't so tragic. It is proposed to give those parents special entry, whose children agree to pay $25,000 for medical care and post a $10,000 bond as a guarantee of support for each parent. Can you believe that this Government, with its strident condemnation of queue-jumpers, is seriously suggesting that parents can jump the queue if their children can come up with the money?!

Which brings me to the other component of our immigration programme that benefits our society, namely the humanitarian stream, whose annual target is 12,000, far lower than it has been at many times in the past, even though the number of refugees around the world is a record 29 million. Our absolute preference, as we all know, is to only accept refugees who are in the queue. The absurdity of this concept is obvious. People fleeing their homes in fear for their lives are not too keen to get into a queue. And before someone suggests that they should join one in the first country in which they find safety, I should point out that, if the nearly 3 million Afghanis in Pakistan formed a queue, most of them would end up in the Arabian Sea!

The most beguiling argument against asylum seekers jumping the queue is that it is unfair to the others waiting in line. After all the objective of a humanitarian programme should be to take the most deserving, those most in need. Of course we do nothing of the kind. We don't ask the United Nations, whose queues we say we service, which refugees most desperately need a new home. We decide which queues we will apply resources to, not the ones that have been there the longest. If a queue of white Zimbabwean farmers formed a queue in South Africa tomorrow, would we ask them to wait until all the Iraqis who have been waiting since the Gulf War or earlier have been looked after? And we do not use exclusively humanitarian criteria to select the ones most in need of help. In fact, we consider skills and health, preferring those likely to cost least and contribute most to our economy. If we really wanted to choose the most deserving, we would fill our quota many times over with the orphaned and maimed. So, we should stop the sanctimonious hypocracy which suggests that it is our Aussie fair-go values that are most offended by the asylum seekers.

Sadly, of course, when it comes to asylum seekers, we seem incapable of seeing anything positive. The debate on Asylum Seekers has degenerated into the adversarial rhetoric that characterises our politics and our sport, where it is always us and them, we win they lose, and vice versa. But this is not Australia versus the Asylum Seekers, as in Coalition versus Labor, or Collingwood versus Carlton, where one side must lose for the other to win. In relation to the Asylum Seekers, both they and we have become losers, with seemingly no way out of the current malaise. And yet, it would not take very much to move from despair to hope, with both Asylum Seekers and Australia emerging as winners.

There can be no doubt that current policy is hurting us all. The Asylum Seekers have already lost or given up everything they had in their country of origin, endured enormous trauma and tragedy to get here, and our now suffering even more - either in detention centres, or as the most disadvantaged battlers in the Australian community, where they struggle to survive under their Temporary Protection Visas, which deny them even the most basic settlement services they need to find a job. No winners among them!

But, what about the rest of us, the Australian nation and community ? What are we winning ? Some would say the battle to protect our borders. But can anyone seriously suggest that a few thousand Asylum Seekers a year are a threat comparable to an invading foreign power that the term 'border protection' implies ? And this a country that in the past 60 years has accepted millions of migrants and refugees, including huge numbers of boat people from Indo-China and 40,000 overseas Chinese students that we decided to classify as refugees even before they asked for asylum!

Moreover, if we were genuinely concerned about border protection, we would be endlessly checking and even body searching the millions of others who stream into Australia, including skilled migrants, business visitors, tourists and students, who come in with approved visas – a much easier and safer, and therefore more likely, method of entry for potential terrorists, criminals and drug smugglers, than risking everything on the mercies of people smugglers, leaky boats and the high seas.

If we are winning anything at all, it is a very minor battle indeed and our 'victory' comes at an enormous price, both in Australia and overseas. We now have a community that is more divided than it has been since the Vietnam war or the Dismissal. We have lost our faith in our political leaders, senior public servants and even those at the top of our Defence forces. There is serious disagreement and tension within and between the Public Service and the Defence Establishment – something that poses a very grave risk if our borders are ever genuinely in need of protection.

As a community, we do not know who is telling the truth any more. In fact, the majority of Australians now believe that they have been lied to, or, at the very least, that several people at the highest levels of public office, have deliberately avoided discovering or communicating the truth. And prejudice, and even overt racism, have reared their ugly heads, seriously threatening the community harmony that underpins Australian Multiculturalism.

We are also losers because the Asylum Seeker issue has become so dominant that it must be reducing the time and focus that other pressing responsibilities are receiving. How could our leaders give anything but cursory attention to such matters of national urgency as education, health, defence, aged care or indigenous affairs., when they are faced with non-stop and relentless questioning and cross-questioning by the Parliament, the media and the wider community ?

And the damage goes further. The cost of border protection, detention centres and the Pacific Solution are all soaring to the extent that the next Federal budget is threatened, and several other portfolios will have to bear the brunt. The Pacific Solution is also making us beholden to some very dubious regimes in our neighbourhood, encouraging them to breach there own constitutions for monetary gain, and driving other foreign policy change at the cost of significant principle.

And finally, whether we like it or not, our image overseas is taking an enormous battering, severely damaging our reputation as a welcoming multicultural society, hard-won by our non-discriminatory immigration policy, Australian Multiculturalism and the Olympic Games. This is hurting business and making Australia less attractive as a migration destination of choice, allowing our competitors to denigrate us as people who still exhibit racial, ethnic or religious prejudice. How could we ever hope to become insiders in the Asian region, when we are so fearful of people of Middle Eastern appearance or of the Islamic faith ?

Fortunately, it doesn't have to end this way. We can still cut our losses and set out on the path to recovery. Pursuing a win-win resolution of the Asylum Seeker issue is, in my view, not just the most practical approach, it is the only one with any hope of success. But we must change direction urgently. Otherwise, the fallout of current policy could do irreparable damage to both the Asylum Seekers and the Australian community. The loss of integrity, trust and goodwill could become so ingrained in us as to permanently destroy the faith we have in each other and in our leaders. Intolerance, if allowed to develop for much longer, will become so entrenched that serious racial or ethnic violence could erupt, something we have been mercifully spared from so far. Internationally, the White Australia tag will once again be applied to us, and shaking it off will become almost impossible.

While a change of policy to one that is more accepting and supportive will clearly benefit the Asylum Seekers, how will it make Australia a winner ? The obvious first answer is that we will stop losing. Provided that the change is achieved by political consensus and is accompanied by strong leadership, all the damage we have suffered so far will soon stop and the healing process will begin. The Australian community will respond as positively as it has eventually always done to leadership-driven social policy change – as the widespread acceptance of the abandonment of the White Australia policy, the successful 1967 referendum which recognised Indigenous Australians, and the settlement of the Indo-Chinese boat people, so conclusively attest.

Best of all, refugees and Asylum seekers make great Australians. European refugees breached the wall of insular British/Irish Australia after World War Two. I doubt that we were too particular about queues then. And the Indo-Chinese refugees, especially the 'boat people', finally laid White Australia to rest. Australia coped with all these arrivals in the past in numbers that make the present Asylum Seeker so-called flood seem a trickle. In the process, we have been enormously enriched, by their collective and individual contribution. Two outstanding Australians that for me exemplify this, are Frank Lowy AC, head of the Westfield Empire, and Quang Luu, Head of Radio at SBS, a Vietnamese boat person, who was one of only three recognised on Australia Day as an Australian Achiever.

So we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by changing our current asylum seeker policy. Can we do it? Of course we can. We have made much bigger policy changes before. Whether with the White Australia policy, the Vietnam war, or Native Title, we have learnt to walk away from untenable positions, no matter how deeply entrenched. And Australia has always been the better for it. Of course it will require great magnanimity and statesmanship, not only on the part of the Government, but also of the Opposition, the media and the community. We will all need to desist from any further negative rhetoric and stop adopting a position of righteousness, acknowledging that none of us can be certain how we might have acted if we had been in the other's shoes, including the Government's.

All this might seem like an impossible dream, but one we must pursue nonetheless for our sakes and for the sake of our children and grandchildren. In the end, the pragmatism and decency of the Australian people will prevail and we will say of current policy and its tragic consequences, "enough is enough".

Change will come when our leaders realise that the present approach is no longer politically sustainable. Clearly, this will be more difficult for the Government, whose policy stance was so successful at the polls, to accept. However, if personal experience and anecdotal evidence are any indication, there is growing discomfort in coalition ranks that could eventually prompt a less extreme approach.

The Opposition of course has the greater incentive and opportunity to change. Echoing the Government's policy has been a disaster for them. They cannot expect to seize leadership if they continue to march to the Government's drum. Encouragingly, Simon Crean has signalled a few changes already and the Labor Party is engaged in a full-scale debate. A decisive policy shift has to be their best option. If there is anyone here who has the ear of the Opposition, please encourage them not to finalise their policy until they are ready to distance themselves totally from their election strategy, once again giving the electorate a genuine choice.

I realise that I have said a lot about the value of migrants and refugees, but nothing about how we should go about welcoming them. I believe welcoming them is indeed a very high priority because it makes both the new arrivals and the receiving community feel positive about their special relationship. This is particularly important for regional and rural Australia, the areas most in need of migrants to reverse declining population and address severe skill shortages. Migration to rural and regional Australia also avoids the infrastructure and environmental pressures that migration to cities, particularly Sydney. Yet, we are told, rural and regional Australia is the most negative about refugees and migrants. I am not convinced about this, but even if it were true, the answer lies in communities sponsoring migrants that they believe will make a positive difference, welcoming them when they arrive and helping them to settle into and become part of the community. This process will inevitably give Australian mateship a chance to replace fear and prejudice against the amorphous and anonymous 'other'. The approach I propose is not pie in the sky. It worked extremely well in the 50's and 60's under the name of the Good Neighbour policy. And it shows welcome signs of working again in the form of an amazing new volunteer initiative called 'Rural Australians for Refugees', where some 40 or so groups around Australia have formed to urge a change in Government policy and to offer support to asylum seekers. Another wonderful example is the economic transformation of the rural town of Young, where some 80 or more Afghani asylum seekers on temporary protection visas have transformed the economy of the town by providing desperately needed labour to increase the productive capacity of local industry and the consumer demand to boost the retail and service sectors. The community desperately wants their new neighbours to stay and has made strong representations to the Government to eliminate the uncertainty of their temporary protection visas and grant them permanent residence, although so far without success. But the community's needs are so great and their case so compelling, they will not give up easily and their political clout must inevitably cause the Government to find a face-saving solution. It is hard to conceive an outcome where the asylum seekers are forced to abandon the town that wants them to stay knowing they will never overstay their welcome. The experience of Young also gives the lie to the view that regional Australia is fighting a rearguard resistance to multiculturalism and that migrants of non-English speaking background will not go to regional Australia. It does show that people of different cultures will go to a small town if they can do it as a group, providing each other the cultural support they need.

The story of Young is a good hopeful note on which to conclude. Clearly we will need many more Youngs before we can convince our political leaders to accept the inevitability of change. Meanwhile, all of us must show leadership and press for that change. Meetings like this one, with a politically non-adversarial style, can be a start. Hopefully, we an follow up with a process of ongoing discussion, research and negotiation, always encouraging the free expression of all views, including those supportive of current policy. It is only by giving all opinions a fair hearing that we can develop a set of proposals that address legitimate concerns, one we will have a chance of persuading our political leaders to adopt and the Australian community to accept. We will all be winners then!