Hopes and Fears: Australian Migration Stories panel discussion

Daniel Gleeson: Good evening, everyone. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that we are on Ngunnawal and Ngambri land and I pay my respects to their elders both past and present, and to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. My name is Daniel Gleason and I'm the Director of Community Engagement here at the Library, and it's my absolute pleasure to be welcoming you all here this evening. The issue of migration has been a hot topic ever since the British established a settlement at Port Jackson in 1788.

Just consider that the early settlers considered any links to convicts to be distasteful, and that was referred to back then as having the convict stain. But today, many Australians are coming here to the Library looking to their own family history, and they're very proud, and they're pleased when they find these connections to convicts. And then again, early government policy was 'populate or perish', and there was subsidised travel on offer for preferred migrant groups.

But today's migration debate centres around the number of migrants, the effects on the price of housing, inflation and a whole range of other issues. And of course, people who migrate to Australia come here for a whole range of reasons. Anything from seeking new opportunities to be reunited with family, to study, to flee persecution or even for love. So to explore these issues tonight, we have such a great panel. I'm so glad they have agreed to do this discussion for us tonight.

I just want to express my thanks to the panel for agreeing to participate. It's a really rare thing to be able to get together a panel of this quality. Thank you so much. And I would like to hand over now to Claudia Chan Shaw.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Thank you so much, Dan. Well, good evening ladies and gentlemen. It's so lovely to see you here tonight. My name's Claudia Chan Shaw, and it's an absolute pleasure to welcome you to the Library this evening for what's going to be a fascinating discussion. Now, we are here tonight because of the wonderful exhibition that's been developed by the National Library of Australia, Hopes and Fears: Australian Migration Stories. Have you seen the exhibition yet? Nodding, good. Thank you. You can all have a lollipop afterwards now.

So the exhibition, as you have seen, explores the history of migration to Australia through the eyes of government, society and individuals. And it includes posters and photographs and newspapers, oral history, mementos, diaries. And the exhibition asks, "What were the Hopes and Fears that motivated migrants to leave their homelands to come to Australia, and what impact did that have on them in coming to their new home?"

So to answer these questions, we have four eminent Australians who have each got a personal and professional story of migration to Australia. So let's meet our panel. Mariam Veiszadeh, an award-winning human rights champion, lawyer, diversity and inclusion practitioner and social commentator. Mariam was born in Afghanistan and came to Australia in 1990 with a family as a refugee, and she's been a vocal champion of the rights of asylum seekers and refugees. Mariam is the chief executive officer of Media Diversity Australia. Would you please welcome Mariam.

Om Dhungel arrived in Australia as a student in 1998 before being granted a refugee visa following the Bhutanese government's persecution of ethnic Nepalese in southern Bhutan. Om played a critical role in the settlement of over 5,000 Bhutanese refugees in Australia. He's the author of "Bhutan to Blacktown: Losing Everything and Finding Australia". Would you please welcome Om.

Nyadol Nyuon is a lawyer, community advocate, writer and public speaker. Nyadol was born in a refugee camp in Ethiopia and raised in the Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. In 2005, she came to Australia as a refugee when she was 18 years old. In Australia, she completed her law degree and she's a vocal advocate for human rights and multiculturalism. She's also a regular media commentator. In 2022, she was awarded the Order of Australia Medal and she's the director of the Sir Zelman Cowen Centre at Victoria University and chair of Harmony Alliance. Please welcome Nyadol.

And Professor Brian Schmidt grew up in the United States. In 1994, he moved to Australia. Brian is now a distinguished professor and astrophysicist at the Australian National University's Mount Stromlo Observatory. He was vice chancellor of the Australian National University. He won the 2011 Nobel Prize in physics, which provided evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Brian is also a viticulturist who runs his own winery, Maipenrai, where he grows pinot noir. Would you please welcome Brian and all of our panellists?

Now, the title of the exhibition is Hopes and Fears, and I'm particularly interested in the period where it was decided that you all would come to Australia. So the question is starting with you Mariam, what were your hopes and what were your fears?

Mariam Veiszadeh: I was a young child at the time, so I don't know how well articulated my hopes and fears were. I had really mundane concerns like where my toys were and whether my mum had packed them. I remember that's one thing I cross-examined my mother on as to it where my toys and why weren't they packed as we were fleeing and going from one country to another, selfishly as a child. I think if I can reflect on it as an adult, I think hopes and fears, I now as a parent understand the struggles of, I cannot imagine how my parents were able to flee a war-torn country, a war zone with young children and have to think about all the other things that come with that. I mean, I struggle to do the grocery run with my two kids and I just lose it at the best of times.

I think this is a very live conversation because as we speak, war is ravaging across the Middle East and other parts of the world. And so I think for me, it puts a spotlight on reflecting on my own experiences and then being able to humanise the experiences of others. And just because we don't personally experience it, it doesn't mean we can't empathise with it. And so I think for me, I know that hopes of my parents was finding a safe place, let alone a land where your children and future generations can thrive, but just basic safety where you are not being persecuted, where you're not at risk of being killed.

As I reflect on that, and I've done an oral history interview today for the National Library, which I'm really grateful to do and I've reflected on my life and how we don't... There's a birth lottery and no one chooses the circumstances of our birth. And yet by pure chance someone can be born in Australia, Sydney, Australia versus Kabul, Afghanistan. And we know that depending on where you are born, which had zero control over, that can dictate and determine the circumstance of your life.

So I'd say the hopes would've been opportunities, better opportunities, but at a bare minimum survival. And then in terms of fears is how that will play out because the uncertainty is always a factor when you are seeking asylum.

Claudia Chan Shaw: And stepping into the unknown. Om, what do you think? What was your experience?

Om Dhungel: Thank you. And I just want to bring warm greetings from Blacktown in Western Sydney. Well, after fleeing Bhutan, my wife and I, along with our daughter, we were living in Kathmandu as refugees. I volunteered to help set up schools and hospitals in refugee camps in Nepal, and we focused on advocacy trying to go back to Bhutan. But after five years, nothing was happening. During that time, three of us were at the shopping centre and my daughter was about three and a half, four years old, and she was just behind us and we looked for her and she was looking at a beautiful dress there. And as soon as she saw us, she just dropped it and she just started walking.

I said, "Darling, did you like the dress?" She said, "No, no, no, no, Papa. It's okay, it's okay." My wife asked her and she said, "No, no, it's okay." That day we went home and both of us cried. And she as a child, even she knew that she's a refugee and she can't afford it. So she didn't want to ask for it because she knew we couldn't afford it. And at that age, for a child to have that mindset, I thought it was very... It wasn't right. So that's when we decided maybe we need to start looking at, yes, things happen to us. We became refugees, but what do we do about it?

Because one of the thing is you cannot control what happens to you in life as I was just talking to Brian earlier. But I found that we can always choose to respond the way we want to. And that was a time we thought, "Okay, we need to do..." Looked at our daughter's face and said, "We need to do something to change this situation." She need to be able to go to a good school, get education, and able to lead a good life. That's when I decided, my wife and I decided that maybe let's look for other opportunities.

She had some jewellery. We had whatever we had, we sold, and then I managed to pay first substitution fees and somehow managed to come here and start a new life all over again. Although of course I had to leave here for three years. Again, when you talk about hope and fears, it wasn't easy to leave away from my wife and our little daughter. And I was lonely, I was exhausted. It was so difficult to find a job and I could pay my tuition fees. So I was really lonely, exhausted, and consumed by anxiety.

And I'd never been anxious that, but I was lying awake the whole night. One morning when I was after that, I couldn't sleep five nights, consecutive nights at the stretch, and I was going to my work at the cold supermarket in the city, I was crossing the intersection of George and Liverpool Street, my vision started to blur.

I fell underneath the ground. A stranger grabbed me and dragged me to the pavement. He might have saved my life, but he suddenly changed it. So this is about when you have fear, but then you cannot separate that with hope. You get a second chance in life. If I had really been killed on that day, again, my daughter wouldn't be proud to say that my father died because he was weak. So from that day onwards, I started taking a different approach to life. Yes, there are things you can't control and there's no point hopping on that. And I was so anxious.

Thinking about my daughter and my wife and my parents, all that, I started changing the way I was dealing with life. I kept them aside and focus on my studies and I was able to move forward. I think when you have hope, there's always chance that you'll lead a new life. So it's about having that fear, but at the same time, if you're able to deal with that by keeping things you cannot control, like we tend to spend too much time on things that we cannot control. So how do we focus on things that you can control? And that was a decision I made and that has really changed my life in terms of how we have started now.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Thank you, Om. I think that's a lesson for all of us that could change our lives if we focused on things that we can't control.

Om Dhungel: It wasn't easy, but I think that was a life and death matter. So I had no choice. Thank you.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Nyadol?

Nyadol Nyuon: I think with the arrogance of a 17-year-old, I was very clear about what my dreams are and what my fears were. The first was I wanted to get out of the camp. I was about year 12, equivalent of year 12, running out of options. I knew I was loud enough not to make a good wife, so I thought I better get out of this place because that was going to be the end of my education. So I think my dreams were to get out of the camp, go to uni, become a lawyer. And so again, with the arrogance of 17-year-old, I started negotiating with God directly.

At night, when my mum goes to bed, I would just trade. And I knew I was an atheist kind of at the time, but I'll sit there and I'll say things like, "If I go to Australia and I go to school, I'll be a good Christian. I'll always listen to mum. I'll never complain." And obviously now I complain when the tram is around three minutes late. But I got lucky and I came to Australia and I did achieve those dreams. I went on and did a BA and then went on and did a law degree and became a lawyer in 2016.

So God kept his promise I didn't keep most of mine. I think in a way my fears didn't come until later. As a 17-year-old, this place felt like it was going to be heaven and it wasn't I suppose until 2007, you begin to see a lot of the media about African gangs. And so gradually you began to realise you never belonged and you were never considered to belong and you will never be considered to belong because of who you are and how you look.

And I think that's when the fear, the fear of place and belonging and where to go and who to be, I suppose. Because it felt like everyone had assumptions about you. Mainstream media had assumptions about who you are. Sometimes your family had assumptions about who you are, but you were somebody who had changed because of the things that have happened to you and where you had come. I was not the same. I say there's a person I am in this country that I cannot be anywhere else, that I'll have to leave that up. What if I ever have to give that up? But there are times in this country where you do feel as though your ability to claim belonging is always negotiable. So I think that's the line you tread.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Maybe time for another bargain with God.

Nyadol Nyuon: Maybe, yes. I went to Cuba and it's not just an anecdote, but it was fun. I was assumed to be Cuban. I have never been assumed to be Australian. So that was very telling in the sense of when we say someone is Australian, there's something we mean. And obviously countries like Cuba and South Americans are quite different in that they have complex histories and there's a difference between a racial identity and a national identity, but it's so sufficiently distant that someone like me can pop out of an airport and a Cuban look like me or someone with blonde hand, blue eye.

But in Australia, when we say an Australian, we know who that is. So I think when taking lead of that joke about praying again and saying this idea of are people like my daughter ever going to be assumed to be Australian when we think about what an Australian is. Maybe that is the new dreaming.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Brian, you made your way from the United States to Australia. What were your hopes and dreams?

Brian Schmidt: So obviously I came under quite different circumstances than everyone else. I came for me to have a life with my family. My wife was Australian. And so my hope was to have a good life and for my wife to have a good career, for me to have a good career, the kids to have a good upbringing. And that was framed very much by the expectations I had as a kid growing up in the United States. And I had a very good upbringing. And in the United States, you are, certainly of my era, indoctrinated into 'America is the best place in the world. Why would you go anywhere else?'

Now, I grew up in a very funny part of the United States and Montana and Alaska, so very rural area. And so we didn't quite have the same indoctrination in the same way. So hope is very simple, just a good life. I started thinking about vineyards and things a couple years after I got here. Fears were fitting in. Am I going to fit in? Because although I'm not identifiably not Australian, I look like your classic Australian, my accent even to this day is still American. And when I first got here that was commented on regularly. You would get into a cab and say something,

Claudia Chan Shaw: Where are you from?

Brian Schmidt: -and cab driver driver, No. They would say, "Bloody yank." And you're just like, "Whoa. Okay, now I feel scared." Right? What's going on? And so whatever reason, that was my first two or three years there were things like that. And then they kind of disappeared, not for any other reason. I think Australia evolved a bit.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Or did you just get used to it and it was water off a duck's back?

Brian Schmidt: No, I heard someone said that to me, "You always, you feel fear." If it happened to me today, I'd still feel fear because it's said in a way that makes you feel fear. So that was really my only scare. Am I going to fit in? And for the first year, you don't really know.

Claudia Chan Shaw: First impressions of Australia and the expectations. Mariam, what were your first impressions of Australia and did they fit what you imagined Australia would be?

Mariam Veiszadeh: Again, as a young child, it's hard to know exactly. I think first impressions, I think to the point that you made, given the circumstances we were in, anything else was incredible. So it's like, "Oh, it's heaven." I think for me, I sense that because we moved country so many times and I felt that. As mundane as it is with your toys, but your surroundings and then making friends at school, for example, because we lived in India. I went to school in India for a short time. We lived in Germany. I went to school in Germany for a short time and I also knew all these languages, which I forgot, but that's another day.

And then came to Australia. And for me it was just like, "Is this it? Are we staying here?" So it was more about, I think that. I think I had a sense of that. I also remember being enrolled in ESL, English as a second language for those of you who don't know. And so I think first impressions, everything is just perhaps overwhelming. I have some memories about... You've all heard about the lunchbox story. As migrants my mum would give me interesting food, which I now love, but at the time I had zero appreciation for it and I didn't want it to be different.

So I think first impressions was, yes, it's incredible and there's a level of safety and perhaps freedom. I may not have articulated, thought about it in that way, but I think I also felt very welcomed. I to this day am Facebook friends with my ESL teacher many years ago on Twitter slash X. I tweeted, I think it was off the back of a Q&A episode. It prompted me to tweet how grateful I was to Mrs. Patricia Brown from Penrith South Public School and mum is in Blacktown by the way.

Om Dhungel: Oh, good on you.

Mariam Veiszadeh: Somehow someone found my tweet and sent it to her and then we became Facebook friends. And she is on par with my mum in terms of commenting on everything and saying how proud she is. I felt very welcomed by her in particular as my ESL teacher. And that I think this speaks to the role of educators, but also the role that each of us play in welcoming fellow Australians and how you may take for granted how little, "Oh, that's going to be..." It actually is very, means a lot when you're new.

And so I think that's probably my first impressions. We did feel welcomed. It's only later in life that I came to realise just how different I was. And I think I became a lot more conscious of racism and all the different -isms that exist in society as I got older. And I started to see them. You've got the innocence of childhood where you don't really see difference and you don't think people can see your difference.

And it's only as you grow up and you're exposed to different environments where you come out of that bubble and you realise no, you are different. And it could manifest in different ways in comments about your lunchbox or it could manifest in the looks that you get as you're walking somewhere with your parents and your family is visibly Muslim. And that point of difference. And I'm sure we'll get time to talk about this, but I think Australia has a very vexed issue with race and many of us here could speak to it. And it's particularly relevant because today I've spent some time reading the ABC racism review that got released this afternoon and had to do some media on it.

So I've been really thinking about that quite a lot and I'm happy to speak to it, but I think it is a formative experience for many. I'd say many. I'm sure the research can back that up many migrants where people do feel othered and Australia has. This is one issue we really need to come to grips with and do a better job of navigating whether it's at our national institution at the ABC as the report has damningly shown today or across the top echelons of Australian society. And the fact that you can live here your whole life and still not feel Australian, that your Australian-ness is constantly negotiable as you've mentioned, that for me is always a fear. And no matter how much we move forward, we find ourselves when there are challenging circumstances, when we are tested, whether domestically or globally, when there are wars that we are reminded we're not quite Australian enough.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Om. F impressions. And did Australia live up to what you expected?

Om Dhungel: Well, my first impression about Australia is when I was a child, we had the government import some cows, jersey cows from Australia. So that's when I first heard about Australia. And we had a cow and I think from Australia and it gave so much milk. We had to buy new buckets because-

Claudia Chan Shaw: What was the name?

Om Dhungel: Gotu. James called it Gotu, but it's Gotu.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Gotu.

Om Dhungel: Gotu guy. And for generations it's given us milk. So I'm very grateful. So that's a start. But I was also, got my driver's training by an Australian because when I was in Bhutan Telecom, I was the head of planning in development and we hired some experts from outside and one of the Australians happened to be one of the experts. And one day my wife and invited him for dinner and a driver took us home and he left home and he said, "Why this fellow come?" I said, "No, he's our driver." He said, "Can't you drive? "I said, "No, I can't." So I didn't know how to drive then. So he said, "From tomorrow, I'll teach you." So he was the one who taught me.

So there are a lot of good things that I started with Australia, so I'm really grateful. But again, coming to Australia, I think in the first place, of course, because I was a refugee seeking asylum. Now when you get asylum, you don't have a fear of persecution and everything else is a bonus. So I feel really grateful and I get up every morning and thank government people of Australia for giving me a new life. And I think, yes, there are challenges. I travel a lot and I've visited, I think a number of countries. I travel all the time. And every country has problems and issues. And I'm personally being a victim of ethnic cleansing over a hundred thousand, one-seventh of the country's population what made refugees.

And you look at every country, there are challenges, but I'm a strong believer in individual power. There's a saying that if you think that you cannot make a difference, try going to bed with a mosquito. You have a mosquito net and a mosquito goes in there, one mosquito can ruin your sleep. So I believe in making that difference ourselves. So I strongly believe in that and we are trying to do that in Blacktown. Rather than thinking of ourselves as people from different countries or different places, different nationalities. Because Blacktown, we've got people from 180 countries of birth and we speak 182 languages. So if we start focusing on our differences, we would be fighting every day.

So we have to look at what's common? We all want a safe neighbourhood. We all want a great neighbourhood. We all want a clean neighbourhood. That's common. Once we have that common, it's a common platform. If you drop that platform, it disturbs everyone. So if you start taking that approach, I think we can create a prosperous Australia. And I strongly believe in that.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Nyadol, first impressions of Australia?

Nyadol Nyuon: Oh, definitely, I think my first five years felt like, as I said, it happened, I was really excited to just get things going. And I think I might've gone to a school that I saw and asked the principal if I can enrol myself and they asked me to go get my mom. But that's how excited I was. I was ready to go. It was a huge opportunity for me. I knew that I wanted to pursue certain things and I knew I couldn't do it in the refugee camp. And so the first impressions were of a place that gave me a new lease of life.

I still think to some degree there is that. I think when there was the African gangs and so many other incidents of public, a sense of exile, I suppose. And in a way it is because I mean I came to this country as a stateless person so we've been refugees for so long that you were considered stateless. So the only country I've ever had a passport for, I've ever officially been a citizen of is Australia. And so even though people who know me or know I'm South Sudanese or my parents are from that, officially, this is the only record of citizenship I've ever had anywhere.

And so I suppose there's this sense of psychological exile when the media commentary and the hostility that sometimes it's visceral occur. And so you go from this idea of hope and dreaming to this is hell and I hate it. And then you grow up and you realise that's just life and there's as much, there's so much that is true and unacceptable, but there's so much as well that is amazing and rewarding.

Two of my best friends are white men over 60. But I say that both as a joke, but I think also the fact that I think when we talk of immigration, it can be very homogeneous. We can begin to think of those people and lump people up so much that we forget that you are, I don't know, someone with a South Sudanese background. You came to Australia. You are also a you and you change and you have expectations that are different from your parents, that are different from your community. So I always tell, the way I give an example is my mother is not an Australian role. She didn't come to this country. She didn't want to come. She came for her kids, has no interest of being here.

And then you've got people like myself who came as a 17-year-old. And so you can see some of those things. And my brother was born here. I don't think he even knows he's Black. You see this transition of who they think they are and what their dreams are, and what they want. People might tag them what they think they look like, but who they are and their dreams and their expressions and what they want to do are so different from what a typical South Sudanese young person is doing in South Sudan right now. And I think that's what get missed in a lot of the way we talk about Australian stories and about even migration is the fact that you might not look like the typical Australian but your way of being and your expectations and what you want to do become part of the collective of what it is to be Australian.

You see young Sudanese girls, I tell them they're very lucky, by the way because I was not allowed to move out of home, but they now travel for a year. This is a very typical. You tell a Sudanese parent back in South Sudan, you'll be told to go get married or something. I'm joking. But the point is, the dreams and the goals that they have, my brother's dreams are to play football. That's a very Australian AFL game. So that get missed and we get lumped either as the way we look or what we wear, or who we worship, or there's an assumption that somehow we got stuck at the point of landing in this country and then nothing else happened. But you are formed and transformed by the places that you are in.

And I think that's where now as a almost 40-year-old with two kids who were born here, that's the reality of not seeing it so black and white, but not also undermining the things that are bad. There's no joke that racism is here, but there's also truth in that this country has some really good wonderful things that it can be and can improve on and we should take pride in that to the extent that it's permissible.

Claudia Chan Shaw: I bet you never thought when you left Kenya that you would be an AFL fan.

Nyadol Nyuon: No, no no.

Claudia Chan Shaw: What happened to you?

Nyadol Nyuon: Something really bad. I remember sitting in a train in Melbourne, I was heading back to my house and it was a Friday, and I had a sense that something was completely wrong. And I kept thinking, "What is going on? What is it?" And I realised it was Friday night footy. I truly thought, "Yes, I become one of them."

Claudia Chan Shaw: Melbourne girl. Brian, what were your first impressions of wonderful Australia?

Brian Schmidt: So for me, almost everything was compare and contrast with the United States where I'd grown up. So there were things straight out of the gate where you're just like, "Wow, the food has." The Asian fusion had come through at this point. I had visited Australia for three months, twice in '80 and '85, and it was very old English at that point. The food was not that good. And '94, '95 when I arrived, it was great. And just going to the supermarket, things were high quality cheap, great. Really took an instant like to AFL and cricket.

I was like, "Okay, that's fine." And then there were other things that seemed a bit backwards. Just the whole technology here just wasn't quite the same. We used old things, the house, single glazed windows in Canberra. I grew up in Alaska. You die if you have single glazed windows. People don't die in Canberra, they spend a huge amount of money on gas as we did. We used more gas to heat my house in Weston Creek than my parents used to heat their house in Alaska because it was so poorly built. And so that was just things like that.

There was a real frankness at some level that I enjoyed, but there was a tolerance for overt racism and misogyny that I had heard about my grandma talk about in pre-World War II in the United States. But that was quite a shock. And it's still around not like it was, but it was a real shock at the beginning. And then the other thing is I realised is, "Wow, it is a long ways to everywhere." And I really appreciated that first year and I still appreciate that.

Claudia Chan Shaw: See now I'm feeling a little left out here because I was born in Australia. My Chinese family has been in Australia since the gold rushes. I don't like AFL and cricket.

Mariam Veiszadeh: Neither do I.

Om Dhungel: We got a problem.

Mariam Veiszadeh: Thank you, Mariam.

Brian Schmidt: Where's your citizenship. They're going to come and carry it away.

Claudia Chan Shaw: I'm on Australia and also don't own a pair of thongs. How is that? Mariam? We know that more than half of all Australians are either migrants or the children of migrants. So why don't we see this diversity in the media or in senior leadership roles?

Mariam Veiszadeh: I could talk all day. I wanted to just make one point just reflecting what was said before I come to that. And as you were talking in particular, I think the ultimate test for being Australian and being accepted as migrants is when all of your achievements are celebrated and owned as you're a great Australian, in the same way that perhaps your mistakes are overlooked as individual. "That's okay. You made a mistake. It's okay." And I just feel if that could be the test, it's an easy way to go. We celebrate migrants when they're good and they say things we agree with, and they're winning, Gold Logies, AFL championships, all sorts of things. But if they step out of line and they say something we don't agree with, because that doesn't happen to be my lived experience, we don't go... And I think we don't just go, "You made a mistake," we say, "People like you."

And that for me is the test of migration of when you'll become an Australian. When my mistakes are my mistakes alone and that you do not conflate them with those people that look and sound like me, however, loosely they're connected to me. And that's the ultimate test. Because what I want to understand is do we all get told to go back to where we came from? Or is it just the ones that don't look typically Australian? And that's something that I grapple with and I don't want to be all negative and doomsday, but apologies. Maybe it's because the ABC racism review came out and I got my head in that. But I think in terms of your question, this is related because you talk about media and why we're not seeing. Diversity is not a trend. It's not going away. It's not. We've been talking about this at a few conversations I've been having in the last few days, and it is here to stay. Diversity is not a minority. It's a majority.

And there's a saying that equality feels like oppression for those that are accustomed to privilege. So, yes, Australia is evolving. The face of Australia is evolving and maybe that makes some people deeply uncomfortable. I get that. Right? But also, you can't deny a reality. Whether we like it or not. This is Australia. We are diverse. And this attitude of, "Go back to where you came from" or "I was born here and you flew here," or the reality is you, and I don't mean you individually, but just in general, you didn't choose the circumstances of your birth. We have all won the postcode lottery or the country of birth lottery.

And so by virtue of things you cannot control about yourself, why are we so proud of something you didn't do anything to achieve that you happen to be born in Australia as an Australian? I get that. Anyway, I digress. But media executives, top echelons of Australian society, there are barriers in place for people who don't fit the norm.

And there's ample research across every single industry that proves this. My expertise at the moment is media. That's research Media Diversity Australia that has done, it's called Who Gets to Tell Australian Stories? More importantly, who doesn't get to tell Australian stories. And what that shows is that representation is not there. The reason it's not there, the diversity of Australia is not represented on screen and behind screen, and the reason it's not there is because there's systemic barriers in place. It's not because people lack merit. It's because despite the diversity coming in the profession, it's not moving up into the industry. And we find that that statistic plays out across every industry.

So when we know there are systemic issues in place, then it's about how do you address those systemic issues? Because this idea of we live in a meritocracy, and if you just work really, really hard, you'll get that job. It's a myth. And there's books written about it. And so there is systemic issues in place and which is why we're not seeing the diversity. And across any other. And we also, as I said, the ABC racism review, but this is across the board. It's not just the ABC. There is racism, sexism, bullying, harassment, a whole host of systemic issues that play out across industries.

Now the media, however, is if you think about migrants coming here, there are experiences of Australia might just be through the media. And media is a shopfront to society. The shopfront has to reflect what's inside the shop, and it doesn't. It doesn't. It's misleading and deceptive conduct at this point. And so it's starting to change. But media is a loudspeaker for cultural change. At any time, at any given issue, how it plays out in the media is incredibly important because if all you've heard about and seen around First Nations issues is through the media.

And we know in the last several decades the representation of indigenous issues have been appalling, which is why you get a situation where a referendum can fail because the truth telling has never happened in this country. And so who tells your stories, how they curate those stories, whose perspectives they include, who they choose to interview, how they frame it, what words they use is important, ultimately influences what you think of that person of that demographic. And what Media Diversity Australia is doing, and you've mentioned Sudanese gangs, Nyadol and how that this has been such a huge problem, this week on Thursday, which is why I'm running around like a headless chook and constantly on my phone, we have hosting an MDA symposium and launching a race reporting handbook that was commissioned by the Australian Human Rights Commission. It's written by journos for journos, and it's a guide on how to report inclusively on issues related to race.

Do you need to mention that they are Sudanese gangs or do you say it's youth crime? Do you need to mention Lebanese gangs? And why don't we identify the Bra Boys as Anglo gangs? Do you need to mention race in certain sentences, in certain frames, in certain headlines or not? And would you have mentioned one's race if their race was of an Anglo background? And so it feels, the fact that we even have to say it, but in the media because lived experience of these various backgrounds is not commonplace, particularly across commercial networks where I think the representation on breakfast television of cultural diversity sits at 0 3%, last time we checked commercial television, breakfast shows.

So when that representation is not there, when Black Lives Matter happens live, and there's no one live that can speak to that issue from a place of lived experience, and therefore they say factually accurate things live on air, this is why representation is important. But do it in a way where it's not tokenized. So yeah.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Thank you, Mariam.

Mariam Veiszadeh: No worries

Claudia Chan Shaw: Om. In your book, 'Bhutan to Blacktown: Losing Everything and Finding Australia, you wrote, "I lost my possessions, my salary, my status, my career, my country. And in that fall I gained everything." What did you gain in Australia?

Om Dhungel: Well, I was just talking to Dan earlier. If I was still in Bhutan, I would have been retiring as a bureaucrat. Now everything seems to happen for a reason. Now, I fled my country leaving my wife, and our two-year-old daughter, never knowing I would ever see them again. Fortunately, we reunited again, spent the next six years volunteering, helping set up schools and hospitals in refugee camp. And then, again, I was a little crazy, dreamt about doing an MBA as a refugee. And as Nyadol was talking about, I used to. One of my cousins sent me a photo of UTS building. And I used to look at the photo every evening before going to bed, close my eyes, go into level 16, level 17, attend my class. And then after the class, I'll go to sleep. I'll do the same thing in the morning before I go out. And then it just happened.

Now this is something I visualised, and it did happen somehow. But again, if I hadn't become a refugee, perhaps a lot of things that I'm doing now, I wouldn't have been able to do. So when you're actually going through whatever you're going through, this is where I share this with a lot of people who come as migrants or refugees, we go through a lot of struggles, and I think life is meant to be a struggle. It tests you. And then there's always a day following a night.

So similarly, when you're down and out, I've lived three times now. Once I was attacked and left dead. My head was twitched[unclear] country and managed to survive that. And then again, here, I collapsed on the street and I survived that. Given what I've gone through and given what I've been able to do, having seen what people go through, my only purpose in life is to see if I can be of any help, any service to another human being.

And since the arrival of Bhutanese refugees here in 2008, I was able to follow this journey. And I've seen this in refugee camp where we couldn't really apply for funding as we do here in Australia. We had to actually look at what everybody could do, mobilise that, make relations, make connections, and then help each other. So I thought, "Why don't we adopt a similar approach here?" And when the refugees arrived, rather than leaving them to a service provider, we started helping refugees to help themselves.

And a lot of friends actually in the sector were scolding me and said, "Om, why did you make them to volunteer?" And volunteering was a key thing for newly arrived refugees who said, "Okay. I'll go and receive somebody at the airport. But the next day it's you who will go and receive somebody else." That way you kept engaged and you're not waiting for services to be provided for you, rather you are actively engaged. And once you start engaging, then finding a job becomes a lot easier because I had a lot of challenges finding a job here in this country, which we'll talk about later, I think.

So I think given what I've gone through and given what we have been able to do together as a community, I think I've gained so much in terms of being able to give back to the community, wider community, not only my own family, but to the broader community.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Thank you, Om.

Om Dhungel: Thank you.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Nyadol. Hello. You recently returned to Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya. This is where you grew up. Can you tell us about that experience?

Nyadol Nyuon: Nearly 20 years after leaving, I went back with Australia for UNSCR to go back to Kakuma to try and raise some money for schools. It was a really interesting experience. It felt as though I had not left partly because you got there and there were people who you left 19 years ago who were living in the same mud houses, no electricity. It did look like you'd just pop out to get milk and come back. Then their life was still the same, yet you're so aware of how much your life has changed. And the only difference was that you went to a country that could provide you opportunities and they didn't. It wasn't that you were any more smart or talented, or anything. So that was really confronting.

But there was some joyful stuff. And going back in the camp and seeing the amount of young girls that are now in school. When I was there, there was much more fewer numbers. And I think the most interesting experience for me was that I thought I had this big purpose for going to the camp, of course. And I got there and I realised, I had no purpose as in I was holding onto an identity that I think was time to give up.

I was born and raised in refugee camps, and I think you can really construct an identity around survival. Everything has to be earned and work hard, and everything is at survival-like level. And I think that's why parents who come here or migrants, you are a lawyer, engineer, or a disappointment to your family, don't make anything. I stole that from a comedian. It's not my job.

Mariam Veiszadeh: I think doctor is one other too.

Nyadol Nyuon: But it was going back to the camp. And then after that, I went to Morocco for the first time. And I remember just watching people, all these tourists and I. Just there, not doing anything. I thought, "You can do this. You actually can just go somewhere and just be there." That to me is probably one of the greatest gift I think safety gives you. Being in Australia gives you the opportunity to know what is equally a human inheritance, what it is to be just, not in survival. I think survival is essential, but at some point it is as dehumanising when you don't have any other options but to survive.

And I think what safety in Australia has allowed has been in a sense the ability to give up that identity and then find out what is available to be beside that. And I think that to me, especially going from a camp to a different place, that difference was really a clarification of what it has actually meant to be safe for those 19 years when I was here.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Thank you. Brian, you were formerly the vice-chancellor of ANU. Education is Australia's fourth largest export, and there's talk of a cap to international student numbers. So what does a cap on intake of student numbers from overseas mean to our universities?

Brian Schmidt: Yeah. Well, it's going to be a big shock. And it's a shock that's probably 15 years in the making where there has been what I describe as a sort of a subversive agreement between government and universities, that governments will spend less on universities if universities are allowed to make up the income by bringing in more international students. And I mean, I am very blunt on what happened. Other people are not so blunt and the public, but that's what's happened. And both government and universities need to think very carefully about that agreement and what it means.

I mean, is education and our universities a commodity? A little bit, but how much of a commodity? Are the students coming in creating housing shortages in Australia? Well, the answer is a little bit, but they're not the main driver. They're a driver, but they're not the main driver. But they're a convenient thing to complain about. Do they generate $50 billion in export income? Yes. And so if you're a treasurer who just very proudly ran an $18 billion surplus, $32 billion of that's going to go away if you just get rid of this, right?

We need to find an equilibrium where I think we treat the students who are coming in with dignity and respect and give them a great opportunity. And Australia is going to continue to be a very strong migrant country, and it's a great pool of people to have come to our country, have great skills, they're going to have good English, they're going to have all these things that will make them successful immigrants.

So I don't think we should be ashamed of that, but we also have to acknowledge that just treating them as a commodity isn'y okay either. And like it or not, a bit of that has occurred. So I think there's going to need to be some changing of the structure of things. I don't think $50 billion of export income is sustainable based on public opinion and all sorts of other things. But I don't think zero is the right answer either. So hopefully we'll come to an agreement.

But the challenge we have is that the funding of the university system is very dependent on the current arrangement. And the decision by government to just pull back one lever and not replace the funding they have withdrawn over the last 15 years, well, that will have consequences. And we're about to see them because very clear, they're going to pull one lever and not the other. So expect big shocks in the higher education. It's a very good time for me not to be vice chancellor.

Claudia Chan Shaw: You left the position in January this year.

Brian Schmidt: Yes. November 31st. I gave Genevieve the keys on the 1st of January.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Hallelujah. Now, I have a final question for you. Would you believe it's come to that time? A final question for you all. Can you tell me just in one word, what is Australia to you? Mariam.

Mariam Veiszadeh: Home. Home is where... Sorry, did I...

Claudia Chan Shaw: Did she pinch your word? That's all right.

Mariam Veiszadeh: I promise, I didn't know. Home is where you can be comfortable, where you can eat all the junk food in the world and no one will judge you. You can not have your hair washed for three days and no one will know.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Yeah, that was COVID too. Love that.

Mariam Veiszadeh: And you can dress however you like. It's where you can be good, but also lazy, and home still accepts you and doesn't judge you. And so Australia for me is home. I'm not going anywhere. But equally, home is a place where you can go, "I'm so happy and comfortable here." But when something is not working and you need to, I don't know, call a plumber and get it fixed that you can still complain about home and not be called un-Australian.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Om, one word.

Om Dhungel: Home.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Home. Okay, I'm moving on.

Om Dhungel: I was stateless for 12 years and I so much wanted to belong. Australian citizenship gave me that sense of belonging and a home in Blacktown, gave family not just an identity, but a new life. So for those of us who have fled our homeland and found a sanctuary in this beautiful country, it's an incredible privilege to be an Australian citizen. It's incredible privilege. So it's definitely a home. Thank you.

Claudia Chan Shaw: What's your word, Nyadol?

Nyadol Nyuon: Footy.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Free. Free.

Nyadol Nyuon: That's just my covert way of saying being Australian is being Victorian, which is Victoria is the best. It's just a covert.

Claudia Chan Shaw: So what was your word? AFL?

Nyadol Nyuon: Footy.

Om Dhungel: Footy.

Nyadol Nyuon: Just footy. But have you ever been in Melbourne during the grand final as they're just about to blow the whistle and you hear the noise, it's holy ground.

Om Dhungel: I was stuck in the traffic. I was stuck in the traffic.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Brian, one word.

Brian Schmidt: So my word is livable, and I use that because I have chosen Australia to be my home. And I could live anywhere on the planet, but I choose to live in Australia because compared to any other place I've been, Australia is the most livable place that I've been. And it's not that it's perfect. There's lots of things I want to fix, but in the end, it's just a great place to live.

Claudia Chan Shaw: Perfect. Three little words. Home, footy, livable.They say so much. Our Nobel Laureate, Professor Brian Schmidt's, Nobel Prize in physics, provided evidence that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. And maybe that's something that discovery, something that we can put into our own lives that we keep expanding, that we keep accelerating our humanity, our tolerance, and our hope. Mariam Veiszadeh, Om Dhungel, Nyadol Nyuon, Professor Brian Schmidt, thank you for sharing your stories with us tonight. We celebrate your achievements. You are all trailblazers and you're aspiring, aspiring, inspiring Australians. Would you please thank our panellists?

Daniel Gleeson: Thank you, everyone. That was just the best. Such a fantastic discussion. I would like to mention a couple of other events quickly that we have coming up here at the Library. If one astrophysicist tonight wasn't enough for you, come back tomorrow night because we've got another one. We've got Karlie Noon coming in. She's the co-author of the acclaimed book, 'First Knowledges Astronomy: Sky Country'. Karlie will be joined in conversation with technology communicator, Celeste Carnegie to discuss the astronomic heritage of the Kamilaroi people.

And then next week on Tuesday, author Peter Crowley will launch his debut book, 'Townsend of the Rangers'. We're so proud to be publishing this book, which is the biography of Scott Townsend. He surveyed huge areas of New South Wales and Victoria in terrible conditions in the 1800s. And then on Friday next week, we are hosting Australian musician, Kasey Chambers, and she'll be celebrating the release of her book, slight rude word warning coming up, it's called 'Just Don't Be a Dickhead another profound things that I've learned'. Kasey will also play us a couple of songs as well. So please register for any of those events via the Library's website. That's it from me. Ladies and gentlemen, before we say good night, can I ask you again for another round of applause for our fantastic panel this evening?