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Speech delivered by Cat-Thao Nguyen, Managing Director of Global Ready LLC and inclusive leadership strategist, during the final Western Sydney Votes Economy forum, held on Thursday 16th February 2023
We are all different from each other but we are all walking on the same earth.
I learned to Forgive. Imagine. Keep smiling.
These are words on a community public art feature near Bankstown train station. Voices of the young people who are forged of the grit, the resistance, the deep intelligence of where we are. Western Sydney. Countless stories upon the sacred lands of our First Nations peoples accumulate. A few meters away from the station is a bronze boat - memorialising the hundreds of thousands of lives of Vietnamese refugees lost forever and the momentum which would coalesce into the Vietnamese diaspora in Australia.
A flag flies there that is nowhere to be seen in Vietnam. A flag of a lost republic that doesn’t exist except in the minds of many Australian Vietnamese elders including my father - a republic only embodied in their memories and 20 meters from Bankstown station.
The current Vietnamese national flag doesn’t fly there. This has presented both a community and bilateral relationship challenge between the federal government and Vietnam, amidst an important relationship for not just mutual economic prosperity but also geopolitically from a security perspective.
Community politics matters. And those who we elect must be able to have the perspective and skillset to navigate the complexity of our contemporary reality.
These lands of Western Sydney have living vestiges of colonisation of First Nations lands.
It is time we are mature enough to embrace the shame of benefiting from racist colonisation of this land whether our ancestors were on that First Fleet or not. Unless our First Nations people have dignity, none of us can or ever truly will in this country.As Western Sydney collects people from all across the world it has also been nurturing back to life other victims of war, economic inequality and continuing colonisation. It is a place where some of us can speak more safely in our mother tongue, eat with less vigilance our spiced foods, and can talk openly of longing about ancestral homelands without our loyalty for Australia questioned.
But this place and its people, in our healing and striving and creating, has been and can be, easily weaponised for political gain.
For too long Western Sydney was a trading port for political territory within parties and a conceptual contest between the major parties. Growing up, I knew there was an election when the premier or treasurer would show up at the Lunar new year festival in Warwick Farm but absent the rest of the time. Recently the Premier stood alongside an East Hills MP again talking about the funds for the Bankstown hospital and announcing the actual site. At 8 months’ pregnant, my friend walked 20 minutes to the hospital because there was not enough parking on site. She said this hospital business has been going on for years and they are so sick of pre-election announcements.
When the seat of Fowler, held by Labor since it was created, was lost to Independent Dai Le, finally the reckoning crystallised. There can be no greater disregard for voters when politicians are parachuted in.
Because when a Lebanese little boy is hit on Hector Street in Bass Hill who lives in my parents town house complex because there are no speed bumps, or the whirring of planes at night because there’s no curfew on the Bankstown airport, or I’m giving water to the woman who slept in my apartment rubbish bin room, or when my Indigenous friend without any provocation is forced by police to strip in public – it hurts us.
With acute housing inequity, illegal dwellings are developed and overcrowding occurs. With not enough legitimate rubbish bins, the system produces symptoms of structural inequity. One of these is illegal rubbish dumping. So early in the morning, before my meeting with a multibillion-dollar client in the city, my mum and I in pajamas, are sweeping and picking up that rubbish. At 70 she’s vomiting because of the maggot infested nappies. During covid the tale of 2 cities was most visible. A family friend as a front-line worker had to get tested so frequently, and the lines were so long she began queuing at 4am. She had to wear a nappy so she urinate in it and not leave the queue. Dignified political representation in this area is not about desktop research or conceptual modeling by consultants. There’s a difference between a detached sanitised view of the issues and your heart wrenching because it’s your mother, your kids, your family, your friends. The constant linger of this heartache is what informed and effective policy is about because it’s our truth.
Many here are facing the harms of casualisation, lack of living wage, housing shortages, industry lobbyists domination of policy formation, and the reverence of the profit margin as the primary measure of our success as opposed to Dignity. And here these negative impacts are compounded by a variety of factors such as race, disability, class in addition to gender.
Structural barriers to equity are widening and we in Western Sydney live the symptoms of it. As unrelenting company profits soar over the last decades, workers’ wages hover between stagnation and regression. Policy from every level must include the adjective Just for justice. We are not against climate solutions or energy transition but there must be just energy transition. And to figure out what ‘just’ means, is complex and requires an ability to first listen inclusively with a deep sense of humility.
Two of the most intelligent people I know is an Indigenous friend and a Serbian friend who grew up here with me. But our systems of measuring and assessing knowledge are inadequate. Knowledge does not equal wisdom. We must have the courage to be open to disrupt conventional approaches and to ensure funding of education institutions is actually equitable. We must move away from simple measures like treating everyone the same. If we fund everyone the same, then we deny the disadvantages and therefore advantages that are being perpetuated in the name of equality as opposed to equity.
When we think of Western Sydney policy, infrastructure comes up. Yes, we can see this. When I think of my clients and they want to pursue racial equity, they may impose targets in their leadership. But then these targets guide behaviour to recruit those from the outside to play a numbers game instead of interrogating why are those targets needed, what is the structural inequity within? So, the real question is not "what are the numbers we need to meet" but "what are the conditions for each person's success". We wouldn't want a shiny new metro to transport people from the Eastern suburbs to work at Parramatta whilst there's increased homelessness of local people around the metro station.
Therefore, as we look at the economy and all other intersecting aspects from health, education, infrastructure what is the just approach, the anti-racist approach, the gender-equitable lens and so on. In good faith to alleviate suffering we may inadvertently cause more and we may ironically perpetuate oppression. If you are not prepared to do the self-inquiry and the deep ground understanding to open up your approaches and to be brave enough to challenge the status quo, the question I ask my clients is “do you deserve to lead?”
I was invited to meet Prince Harry and Megan Markle and attend a private lunch with a former PM, and returning to Bankstown from these events there’s a relief and pride. I see all around me here equally stunning characters. My neighbor’s great grandmother came from Mainland China to Mauritius and her dad speaks French and she speaks only Creole and English. The man at BWS Bankstown a couple of weeks ago told me he worked in 14 countries in the top hotels of the world. And my friend Boutros, a tech wizard with a Masters in Philosophy whose thesis was on the ethics of agile scrum tech teams.
Here the stories, the values, the qualities of the world’s cultures converge. What a blessing it is for all of us. And not in a ‘isn’t it lovely to have some Kebe or authentic Butter Chicken or Banh Mi sort of way’ with a patronising admiration of multiculturalism from afar. But a blessing in a way that challenges us to be more sophisticated in wrestling with different perspectives to create pathways and solutions we didn’t think possible with homogenous thinking.
As a corporate lawyer I was negotiating deals hundreds of millions of dollars. I sat in Board rooms in Hong Kong and had meetings in New York and what was incredible to notice was the lack of cultural intelligence in the supposed international executives I encountered. What I had honed growing up in Canterbury Bankstown as my neighbour and I chatted about tabouli recipes, or as my friends shared their Kosovo memories, was an ease around diversity, a nuanced approach about differences in what academics call power distance.
As I drive down Stacey Street after visiting a client in their $10 million home in the Eastern Suburbs, I see the unconventionally shaped stacks of Western Sydney University in Bankstown. It beckons a present not just a future. The dynamism of Parramatta is clearly evident and inside this campus we can feel it.
Western Sydney. It is not about achieving our potential. It’s about stepping into our power.
This is the time for our becoming – a becoming of our authentic selves underpinned by collective and inherent courage, creativity, resilience and grit.
We have the solutions. And the people who deserve our votes are not those who from afar and logically and intellectually tell us the answers. But those who co-create the conditions for our own answers to emerge.
