Thursday, 17 October 2024

Meera Mansukhani

Natalie HUTCHINS (Sydenham – Minister for Jobs and Industry, Minister for Treaty and First Peoples, Minister for Women) (10:17): Earlier this year I met a wonderful woman in my electorate called Meera Mansukhani. She submitted to the Parliament Prize last year as a young student a piece of writing called Time to Make Unconscious Racism a Conscious Reality. In a tribute to her work, I am going to read out parts of her submission:

Unconscious racism.

A term that’s not widely utilised in day-to-day life, is sadly a prominent reality for thousands of people across Australia.

In schools and society, it is accepted and taught that an individual’s worth is not predicated upon their race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation or any demographic standard.

This issue stems from being culturally conditioned to believing that such demographics, more importantly, one’s race, do indeed matter.

Research by Australian universities investigated experiences of racial discrimination in schools, and found that 40% of students from non-Anglo or European descent have reported enduring a form of racism from peers.

This is fundamentally where the problem lies.

As a person of colour, I too held an unconscious bias on my own capabilities and aspirations, and how my race would be a benefactor to what I would and would not be able to accomplish in life.

This has translated into workplace racism, and growing up seeing no one like myself in the Australian media or in any broadcasted industry, made me believe that these jobs were not for us.