Canberra
My Government looks forward to working in partnership with the Migration Council on this important plan.
Work like that matters because one in every four Australians was born somewhere else.
We are a nation of migrants.
I know - because I'm one myself.
My family made that journey of hope and courage to a new land.
A land where we found welcome.
A land where we found opportunity.
And long before we got our certificates of citizenship, we were already Australians deep in our hearts.
In this most multicultural of nations, our social fabric has never been measured by the fineness of its thread.
It's a fabric we have embroidered and embellished, and when necessary, patched and darned - but it is not something fragile or easily torn.
My family has been fortunate enough to be able to stitch its initials into this social fabric.
Two adults and two small girls, among the seven million who have sought to make new homes here since World War Two.
Great waves of us.
First, from the UK and northern Europe.
Then from the Mediterranean and the Middle East.
Later from South-East Asia, India, China, Africa.
And of course these post-war waves were not the first.
From the earliest colonial times this land has exerted a pull on the hearts and imaginations of dreamers.
Matching and tracking the world's great events.
From the Irish fleeing the potato famine in the 1840s to the “Ten-Pound Poms” leaving behind the bombed-out cities of Britain.
From Jewish people seeking a safe haven after the horrors of the Holocaust to the Vietnamese fleeing in the aftermath of a terrible war.
The Australian story is the world's story also.
And I suspect that the things that led my own parents to emigrate in the 1960s were not so very different from the hopes and dreams of all who have made the journey.
Packed away in acid-free paper in the vaults of the National Archives are some remarkable records: records that tell of thousands upon thousands of these hopes and dreams.
The faces of our migrant nation, photographed by Department of Immigration staff between 1946 and 1999.
Expectant faces looking down from passenger vessels docking at our ports.
Faces bent over books at migrant English classes.
Labourers hard at work on the Snowy Scheme.
Faces under sunhats, picking fruit, or looking out from beneath hairnets on the factory floor.
Now, all 22,000 of these photographs have been digitised and are online.
The Destination: Australia website lets people search for photos, share stories, add descriptions, even upload their own photographic memories.
These memories will feed into a major National Archives exhibition on post-Wold War II migration, planned for 2014.
The exhibition will be entitled A Ticket to Paradise?
Complete, as is our Australian way, with an upward inflection, a final question mark.
For many millions of migrant Australians, I suspect, there is no question mark.
The decision to come here was right - full stop.
Just as Chifley's decision to open our doors was right.
Of course, there are challenges, sorrows, moments of doubt.
No nation is built without these.
But overwhelmingly this is a place where dreams are fulfilled.
Where a form of “paradise” can be found - at least as much as is possible on this earth.
Towards the end of Anna Funder's award-winning novel All That I Am, the character of Ruth is spending her last days in reflection, recalling her flight from Hitler's Germany, the losses wrought by war and finally her new life in Australia.
“After the war,” she says, “I came to this sunstruck place. It is a glorious country, which aspires to no kind of glory.
Its people aim for something both more basic and more difficult: decency.”
Together we have built a nation that strives to be classless, confident and compassionate.
But above all, a country which is decent.
A country that has been enriched by the hand of welcome each generation holds out to those who come after us.
The gesture of inclusion and belonging that enlarges us all.
These qualities are found in abundance among the finalists in the inaugural Migration and Settlement Awards.
Individuals and organisations who are there for migrants and refugees in those first bewildering months, offering good counsel and local know-how, and bringing “paradise” a few steps closer.
So congratulations to all the finalists and category winners.
Thank you for proving, by your example, that we are a nation of welcome and a place of opportunity.
Australia has given us everything, so we give everything in return.
That means no matter how far we've come, our best days still always lie ahead.