Chris Bowen (McMahon, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I second the member for Chifley's very important motion and his amendment. These days, with the world being subject to so many tragedies and calamities, it is easy to think, to assume, that we are somehow inured and desensitised to the devastation that we see regularly on our television sets—that somehow Australians and people around the world are used to these tragedies. Tragically, of course, we are used to them. But Typhoon Yolanda, as it is known in the Philippines, and Typhoon Haiyan, as it is known here, has impacted I think on Australian citizens and on the world by the sheer devastation it has wrought to a wonderful people who are in need of economic development, not in need of the sort of devastation they have seen in recent weeks.

We know that the death toll is almost 4,000 and rising, with 1,500 people remaining missing. It is predicted that that death toll will rise further in coming weeks. More than 12,000 people have been injured; more than half a million people made homeless; almost one million displaced in other ways; 55 cities have been affected, and more than 50 million people affected in some way in the area that was hit by these winds of 314 kilometres an hour, and the chaos and destruction that they wrought.

The Filipino community, tragically, is subject to these events all too often. Four out of ten Filipinos live in storm-prone cities with populations in excess of 100,000 people. For an island nation with the world's 12th-largest population, this is very concerning indeed. The Philippines is the third-most vulnerable country in the world to national disasters. When earthquakes, volcanoes or severe typhoons occur, the poor are the worst affected. One in three people still live below the global poverty line. The typhoon caused considerable damage to the public water system, which will take a long time to fix, resulting in minimal availability of public water in the city of Tacloban and the surrounding suburbs.

The impact on food production has been very real as well. The United Nations World Food Program released an emergency operation document requesting $88 million to support an estimated 2.5 million typhoon affected people who are likely to require food assistance in the next six months.

So this is a tragedy of the first order, which has affected so many in the Philippines. Australia's Filipino community has responded as you would expect them to. In my own community of McMahon, money was raised. On the weekend I was speaking to leaders of the Filipino community, who were on assembling hampers and rescue and support materials that they were having sent to the Philippines. The Australian Filipino community has been very directly affected indeed. Under the leadership in my community of Father Nards Mercene, the Filipino pastor in the local Catholic Church, the community is responding, of course, as you would expect them to.

As the member for Chifley flagged, he and I, and the member for Greenway and other honourable members, are coordinating a fundraising effort which will occur on 1 December. We are inviting prominent Filipino Australians to come and help raise those funds with us. It will be a day that will be bittersweet. We hope to have fun—there will be community and fun activities for children, like face-painting and all sorts of things—but of course it will be a day of tragedy as well. It is appropriate that we raise as much money as we possibly can. I am confident that the entire community, not just the Filipino Australian community, will be turning out on that day to help us raise the necessary money. We will provide more details to the community as the event is being organised, but it will occur on 1 December and it will be a very important day for the Western Sydney community to come together to raise funds for this crisis.

The Filipino community, as the member for Chifley indicated, calls deeply on the two fundamental elements of its community and society: faith and family. Faith and family are so important to the Filipino Australian community. I know that they have called on their faith and their families even more than they normally do over recent weeks. As they do so, it is important that they know that the thoughts of every single member of this House, and the thoughts of the Australian community more generally, are with them as they deal with this tragedy which has beset their beautiful island nation.

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