source : the age
A little over 125 years ago my grandfather, Sidney Myer, landed in Port Melbourne, penniless and with little English. Escaping the pogroms in tsarist Russia, he came in the hope that this country would offer him the safety, freedom and opportunity to begin a new life.
Typical of so many immigrants before him and since, he started out with nothing, carting a haberdasher’s trading box on his back and selling door to door until he was able to open his first store in Bendigo in 1900. From there, he built the largest department store chain in the southern hemisphere by the time he died in 1934.
As the grandson of one of Australia’s most famous and most successful immigrants, it feels like my duty to make an intervention into the debate around the significance of immigration in the cultural, social and economic fabric of this country.
As we watch the rise of populism in this country in the form of the One Nation Party, and its leader, Pauline Hanson, what seems to be lost is the profound contribution that immigrants have made, and will continue to make, to the strength and vibrancy of our nation if they are given the chance.
Sidney Myer’s deep commitment to this land that gave him a new home inspired him to build tirelessly and never stop giving back to those in need. This is best exemplified by the work he did funding the construction of Yarra Boulevard that kept hundreds of men employed during the Great Depression, and a massive Christmas dinner he held for the unemployed at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre in 1930 that drew more than 11,000 people across five separate sittings.
What drove him was the tireless entrepreneurial energy that also spurred so many of this country’s great entrepreneurial immigrants. Men such as Frank Lowy, Dick Pratt, Harry Triguboff and Maha Sinnathamby, who share that same energy. Together they helped shaped the culture, and the social and economic fabric of this country. Through their endeavours they have contributed hundreds of thousands of jobs, and their personal philanthropy has made further enduring impacts on the cultural and social landscape of our nation.
What the increasingly strident populist voices being led by One Nation and its openly racist leader Pauline Hanson are doing is demonising, devaluing and degrading the timeless value that immigration and immigrants bring.
Just some of the abhorrent comments she has made over the years include that we are “being swamped by Asians”, and that “Islam is a disease … we need to vaccinate ourselves against”. Now she wants to close the door to international students and to the families of skilled migrants.
The Coalition has followed, promising it would deliver “the biggest cut to immigration in the history of this country”.
In listening to these voices and giving comfort to anti-immigration rhetoric we are turning our backs on the enduring legacies of those great immigrants. In every facet of life – science, medicine, the arts, agriculture, industry, and politics – our lives are enriched by the energy, drive and inspiration immigrants bring to our collective lives.
It is time for us to stop giving credence to voices that see immigrants as people taking from us and being a burden upon society, worthy of condemnation and censure. To demonise immigrants is essentially un-Australian.
We all are enriched by our multicultural heritage and must resile from the notion of a “monocultural” Australia.
We cannot deny the fact that the tens of thousands who seek to build better lives in this country today, just as my grandfather did 125 years ago, do so with the energy, drive and determination to create new lives. They build businesses, drive innovation and contribute to the cultural, intellectual and social dynamism of this country. It’s undeniable that those who are prepared to take great risks in building anew can do great things.
Denigrating immigration demeans the memory of all the immigrants who have gone before and blinds us to the contribution that today’s immigrants make now and will continue to make in the future.
Let’s not allow a fear of foreigners to pollute our politics. We are all immigrants in this country.
Michael Sidney Myer is the grandson of Sidney Myer.
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Michael Myer – Michael Sidney Myer is the grandson of retailer Sidney Myer.
