Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean communities are celebrating lunar new year at the moment, between 23 January and 12 February. Lunar new year, for one quarter of the world’s population, is the most important holiday of the year. This year it marks the end of the Year of the Rooster and the beginning of the Year of the Dog. In this last week, I have celebrated with Australian Chinese Buddhists at the Nan Tien Temple in Parramatta, with the wider Chinese community in Parramatta Chinatown and with the Australian Vietnamese community at the Tet Festival at Warwick Farm, an event that attracts around 60,000 people each year and is organised by an organisation representing the Vietnamese community in Australia at large.

I have great affection for these communities and, more than that, I am amazed by them. They are so strongly Australian—and proudly so—and such extraordinary contributors to the Australia that is common to us all, yet they have also retained such a strong cultural base and maintained that base through generations of Australians. How privileged we are in this place to be invited, as representatives of the people, into these little slices of Australia and to be given a front row seat to see the lion and dragon dances, to hear the music and the language, to eat the food and to catch a glimpse of other philosophies, other religions and other belief systems that flourish so well within the Australian context.

It was also a privilege for me to hear the wisdom of the Abbess of the Fo Guang Shan Nan Tien Temple, the Venerable Man Chien, a woman of extraordinary wisdom and grace. She was kind enough give the politicians at the Buddhist ceremony last week crystal lotus flowers to remind us, in the Buddhist way, that even though lotus flowers grow in the mud they retain their beauty and purity—a fitting metaphor, she thought, for politicians. Several of us are carrying them around with us in our handbags as a reminder. It is quite a beautiful concept.

As we celebrate with these three successful communities we should remind ourselves that we did not always open our arms to these new arrivals. At times we were quite tough, particularly on our Chinese and Vietnamese Australians, but how lucky we are as a nation that we do not just have the world at our door to experience it from afar but have it within us, in our own population. The traditional lunar new year wish is for health, wealth and prosperity, and these three communities have given those things to us. It is fitting at this most important time of the year for them that we wish them the same—health, wealth and prosperity and a happy lunar new year and Year of the Dog.

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