Citizenship community meeting - Springvale VIC
25 July 2017
Last night Australian Labor MP's Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs), Clare O'Neil (Hotham) and Julian Hill (Bruce) hosted a public meeting to hear constituents concerns over the proposed changes to the Citizenship Act.
The Springvale City Hall meeting was attended by several hundred people wanting to hear the Labor MPs' advice on what people can do to stop the legislation from passing. The key issues are
- the proposed four year wait as a permanent resident
- the English language test set to university level English
- the Immigration Minister having ultimate decision making powers on applications
The three MP's addressed the meeting to explain the agenda and introduce the guest speakers, leaders and representatives from various ethnic and community groups.
Each speaker explained how members of their community would be affected, for example uneducated women or refugees whose schooling had been either ignored or disrupted due to war or living in a refugee camp for many years. People without formal education may be able to speak English but being illiterate in their mother tongue makes it more difficult to learn to read and write in a second language.
Likewise many migrants in previous decades have arrived with little or no English but have set up successful businesses or completed tertiary education when given opportunities to learn.
Among those who spoke were:
- Cr Jim Memeti, Mayor, City of Greater Dandenong and an Albanian immigrant in the 1970's
- Jennifer Yang, President, National Australian Chinese Women's Association
- Phong Nguyen, Vice President, Federal Vietnamese Community in Australia
- Dalal Smiley, CEO, Wellsprings for Women, a Lebanese child migrant in the 1970's
- Hari Guduru, President, Hindu Society of Victoria, an Indian skilled migrant in the 1980's
- Hyat Rahimi, CEO, Omid Cultural Association, and Afghan refugee who arrived in 2004
