Penny Wong’s Australian story

As is the case with many immigrants and their sons and daughters, Foreign Minister Penny Wong’s family background is a good Australian story. Senator Wong’s Malaysian heritage is one of the 270 ancestries represented in Australia. More than half of the nation’s population (52 per cent) were born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas, the latest census, released this week, shows. That is not a picture of a racist or insular nation.

Most immigrants have been good to Australia, and Australia has been good to most of them. As Senator Wong says, Australia’s Colombo Plan scholarship system enabled her father, architect Francis Wong, who has designed many public buildings in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Malaysia’s Sabah state in northern Borneo, to study at Adelaide University. It was there he met Senator Wong’s mother, Jane Chapman. The opportunity to study in Australia was “the opportunity that defined his life. And mine”, Senator Wong said during her visit to Malaysia, her birth nation. “It meant he could climb out of the poverty he experienced as a child. It meant doors opened that would have otherwise been jammed firmly shut.”

Irrespective of their places of origin and their background cultures, Australians with Asian, European and Middle Eastern heritages have enriched the nation. Most have blended successfully into one of the most tolerant multicultural societies in the world. That is something in which all Australians should take pride. Forging links with overseas nations is part of the work of all governments. But it is family and personal ties that bind the strongest.