Luke Simpkins (Cowan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

(

At a very good church that is based within Koondoola , the Flaming Evangelical Church, I have had the opportunity to meet those members of the church who are from the south of Sudan. As other speakers have said, they have welcomed the opportunity to come to Australia and take up the freedoms and the opportunities that this country has provided to them. They have made a good contribution. Whilst it has not always been a smooth path for all people who have come from Sudan, as has been said, the vast majority are very good, law-abiding people who have come here wishing to take up those opportunities.

It is only relatively recently that the times of autonomy within Sudan for the south and now, just in recent weeks, the independence of the south have provided greater hope for the people of Sudan. As we know, the north of Sudan has dominated the country for many years and their system of policies are discriminatory and negative in a lot of ways. But autonomy and now independence have provided the opportunity for the people of South Sudan to flourish.

We know that it is a fairly subsistence type of economy, very rural in its nature. But we also know that 80 per cent of the oil reserves of Sudan are based in the south and this, of course, provides a great opportunity for the wealth of the south to make a positive contribution to the future. It is a very positive future that we see for South Sudan. Even the plans to move the capital from Juba into the Lakes State, the more central part of South Sudan, really is the epitome of a country that sees the future as all very positive and so we welcome that.

Although there are some eight million people who live in South Sudan—and barring comments about whether the past censuses have been accurate, or whatever—it does mean that the opportunities to share in this wealth that will be redistributed from the arrangements of the past, where the north basically sucked up all the wealth from the south, so you can see that there will be greater opportunities now in the future. It has also been said in other places that the infant mortality rate of 112 deaths for every 1,000 is far too high. The maternal mortality rate of over 2,000 deaths for every 100,000 live births is just far too high.

But within Cowan, and for those that hail from South Sudan and Sudan in general, those people have decided that their future lies here in Australia. It has always been the case that we welcome them. We welcome the positive contributions that they make. We welcome them in places like Koondoola Primary School where the intensive language school operates very strongly for them. We welcome the positive contributions the Flaming Evangelical Church makes in Koondoola as well. I see a great and positive future for the South Sudanese in Cowan and I see an excellent future for South Sudan, and the government should continue to back them strongly.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Murphy ) The time allotted for this debate has expired. The debate is adjourned and the resumption of the debate will be made an order of the day for the next sitting.

See this speech in context