Race Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Tim Soutphommasane, has told a gathering in Canberra that there is no single way to prove one’s Australian patriotism. Referring to the Prime Minister’s recent remarks about Team Australia, the commissioner said, ‘I think it is only fair that we ask what Team Australia must mean … If Team Australia is to mean an Australian, democratic community, then I think no one would object to it. In fact we are all members of that community, whether we are born here or have come here as migrants.’
He went on, however, to talk about humbler, quieter forms of patriotism and ‘the proposition that there is no single or authoritative way that you can be Australian’.
The commissioner was speaking at the A.C.T. Government’s One Canberra Symposium in the A.C.T. Legislative Assembly.
31 October 2014
