There were two elephants lurking in a very big room when Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten joined a crowd in the Great Hall of Parliament House this week to celebrate the work of those who help new arrivals settle in Australia.
The Prime Minister presented the night's first award and spoke evocatively of Australia's harmony, egalitarian ethos and diversity to explain why up to 190,000 permanent migrants are drawn to this country every year.
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Coalition pushes forward on 18c changes
Australia's race hate laws are set to be dramatically overhauled with Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull claiming they have lost their credibility, but the opposition says the government will fuel a return to the dark days of the Cronulla riots.
For some, he explained, the catalyst for leaving their homeland was disaster or conflict; for others, including his own forebears, it was "simply the lure of a better life". The result was the same: "Waves of people from all corners of the globe, of all faiths and cultures, have come here to live together, as Australians under the Southern Cross."
Turnbull made no mention of the first elephant: the changes he announced the previous day to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act that ethnic groups and Indigenous leaders have condemned as "utterly shameful and at odds with the principles of multicultural Australia".
When he announced the changes on Tuesday, asserting they would make for a better, clearer and fairer law, Turnbull insisted the freedom to speak freely was a, if not the, principal attraction for new arrivals.
"Our freedom of speech is the foundation of our great democracy that has caused people from every corner of the world to join ours, the most successful multicultural society in the world," he said.
It fell to Bill Shorten to acknowledge the 18C elephant when he presented the second settlement award and began by applauding Turnbull's "personal commitment to multiculturalism".
"I've never been a victim of discrimination based on the colour of my skin, the god I worship, or what I believe in," the Labor leader said. "I've never personally come face to face with racial prejudice directed at me.
"And – by an overwhelming majority – neither have the people who are arguing that the Racial Discrimination Act needs to change. These are predominantly powerful, vocal, middle-aged men – who think this is all just a thoroughly interesting philosophical discussion."
Shorten made no mention of the second elephant: Australia's treatment of those who fled persecution and arrived in leaky boats, who are now living with uncertainty on bridging visas in the community, or in limbo on Nauru or Manus Island.
This oversight was highlighted by the fact that some of those being honoured were refugees who arrived on boats before Australia's policy became singularly focused on deterrent – Australian citizens who have devoted their lives to the service of others.
Among them was the evening's keynote speaker, South Australian governor, Hieu Van Le AC, who arrived as a Vietnamese refugee with his young wife in 1977, carrying only his "invisible suitcase filled with dreams".
Hieu Van Le recounted how he became the navigator on the dangerous voyage from his war-torn homeland when the skipper became lost, his time in an over-crowded refugee camp in Malaysia and a surreal arrival in Darwin harbour.
"Gradually, emerging out of the morning mist, we saw a 'tinnie', with two blokes with shorts and singlets in it, sun hats on, white zinc cream on their noses, fishing rods primed and sticking up in the air, and the first beers of the day were in their hands," he recalled.
"They looked like extras from the old Barry McKenzie movie! They spotted our boat and waved at us and steered their boat very close to ours, and one of them raised his stubby as if proposing a toast."
"G'day, mate" the fisherman shouted. "Welcome to Australia!"
Turnbull had left before Shorten or the governor spoke. He had the visit of the Chinese Premier Li Keqiang to prepare for and, in any case, he had a clear position on 18C and those on Nauru and Manus.
In certain quarters, Turnbull's stand on free speech has been lauded as him crossing the Rubicon and embarking on a free speech crusade that will continue to the next election. Bollocks.
An exhaustive parliamentary inquiry had recommended procedural changes aimed at ensuring that complaints with zero prospect of success, like those against the cartoonist Bill Leak and the students at the Queensland University of Technology, would be quickly thrown out. Turnbull went much further.
Not only has he supported replacing the words "offend, insult and humiliate" with "harass" in section 18C, he has backed a change in the objective standard against which harass and intimidate are judged – from a "reasonable member of the relevant group" to "the reasonable member of the Australian community".
My first reaction was that Turnbull stood to lose both ways: that these changes will be blocked in the Senate and the Prime Minister will still incur the wrath of racial minorities who now fear they are more vulnerable to racist tirades.
But there is another way of viewing Turnbull's willingness to champion a free speech position he insisted before the election was not on his agenda, one that suggests the Prime Minister has now settled on a strategy that goes beyond mere survival and is based more on outcomes than words.
We saw evidence of it last week with Turnbull announced his plan to supercharge the Snowy Hydro Scheme to provide a cost-effective back-up as the nation turns increasingly to renewable energy sources.
The imperative here was to get 18C off the agenda without antagonising the free speech zealots on the right or those more concerned about racism on the left and Turnbull may well do all three things. Assuming the 18C changes are defeated, he can say that he at least tried to secure them when Tony Abbott retreated.
Moreover, many of the progressives who are dismayed that Turnbull has embarked on this course will temper their anger because his commitment to promoting tolerance is well-established (and was demonstrated again by the emphatic putdown of Pauline Hanson's latest appeal to fear and prejudice).
The test, of course, will be whether the procedural changes to 18C do the job, so that the section returns to its intended function as a fundamental, but limited, protection against the worst kind of hate speech.
As for the second elephant, the challenge is simple enough: to reconcile an uncompromising border protection policy with the need to display a measure of compassion and humanity to those whose "invisible suitcases of dreams" were lost by the baggage handlers too long ago.
Michael Gordon is The Age's political editor.
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