Mission & Justice

Farah Farouque; 5/7/08

Growing Up Asian In Australia; Edited by Alice Pung; Black Inc, 351pp, $27.95
Everyone has battle scars from primary school. One of my worst was turning up at my school, a newly arrived child-migrant, attending her first sports day. My problem was sartorial - I wasn’t wearing shorts like everyone else in grade 3. My mother, in the Sri Lankan style, had insisted I wear a lovely short smock - garish green for my house - with a matching set of (handmade) knickers. It was the Age of Aquarius - the mid-1970s - but it wasn’t exactly the outfit to perform the mandatory somersault in.Of course, I couldn’t get out of it. The public humiliation lingers. Enduring such schoolyard challenges, as well as the much bigger ones (language barriers, discrimination and a motherlode of parental expectation) forms the basis for a new volume exploring what it is to grow up Asian in Australia.

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Paul Maley; 3/6/08

Australia’s most powerful unions will use a review of the temporary skilled migration program to campaign for foreign workers to have access to collective agreements. They will also seek guarantees of market wages for workers on 457 visas and tough requirements for bosses to prove skilled jobs can’t be filled locally. The heads of the Construction Forestry Mining and Energy Union, the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union and the Australian Workers Union will push for an overhaul of the program, which some say has become a source of cheap labour, rather than a vehicle for addressing skills shortages. AMWU national president Julius Roe said his organisation would push to have foreign workers’ wages bound by collective agreements. “We’ll be arguing that there should be a specific requirement to pay market rates and that those market rates should essentially be made applicable in relevant collective agreements,” he said.

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