Visiting the Malaysian city where she was born, Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs Penny Wong (黃英賢) said her story showed that Australia was part of Asia, as new data showed that more than half of Australians were born overseas or had an immigrant parent.
Wong visited Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah state, where she lived for eight years as a child before migrating to Australia, as part of an official visit to Malaysia.
“One in two Australians are either born overseas or have parents who were born overseas, so this is a very Australian experience,” she told reporters on her first visit to Malaysia since newly elected Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese appointed her in May.
Photo: AFP / Malaysian Ministry of Foreign Affairs
“It matters that Australia speaks to Southeast Asia in a way that recognizes that we are part of this region and our futures are shared,” she said.
Results of a census conducted every five years and released on Tuesday for the first time showed that more than half of the Australian population, or 51.5 percent, were born overseas or had an immigrant parent.
“We are a multicultural and diverse nation... It is one of the strengths of who Australia is, and we should tell that story in the region more,” she said.
A day earlier, Wong recalled in a speech that her grandmother, who was of Chinese descent, raised her children alone in Sabah after most of the family died in World War II.
Wong’s father won an Australian scholarship to study architecture at the University of Adelaide, which “meant he could climb out of the poverty he experienced as a child,” she said.
He married an Australian woman, and the couple returned to raise a family in Kota Kinabalu.
Wong’s comments and official visit to Malaysia came two decades after then-Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad famously said that Australia could not join an East Asian diplomatic group because “they are Europeans, they cannot be Asians.”
The UK, India, China, New Zealand and the Philippines were the biggest source nations for the almost one-third of Australian residents who were born overseas, the census showed, with Asian countries combined a bigger source than Britain and New Zealand.
Mahathir, who did not immediately respond to a request for comment, in a 2019 interview predicted that migration meant Australia would become “more Asian than European.”
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