Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

I think one of the reasons that the events of last year like MH17 and the Sydney siege affected us so much is that we could all imagine ourselves on that plane or in that cafe. A lot of terrible things happen every day here and overseas, but most of the time we imagine that it could never happen to us. But not this. This was different. A lot of us have been overseas on an aeroplane; even more of us get a cup of coffee in the morning on our way to work as part of our normal daily routine. I was in the Lindt Cafe only a couple of days before the siege; my wife goes there all the time. Like most Australians, on 15 December I was transfixed to the TV screen all day and all through the night. I sat there thinking about the people in the cafe just going about their normal routine until suddenly they were caught up in what can only be described as anyone's worst nightmare. I thought about their mums and their dads. I thought about their husbands and their wives receiving a phone call—or as it turns out, a text message—telling them that their loved ones were in there. They are still in our thoughts, and it was wonderful to see them in the gallery yesterday.

However, there were two people who were not in the gallery yesterday: Tori Johnson and Katrina Dawson, victims of a sick and evil person and a warped, demented ideology. I rang a mate of mine who is a barrister in Selborne Chambers and I asked him if he knew Katrina. He did; he worked on the same floor as Katrina, and they had been friends for 10 years. The day before, Sunday, they had both been in their chambers working on different cases. Katrina had brought her kids into the office, and they were there laughing and joking and talking about what they were going to do for Christmas. He told me she was 'just lovely'. Because of the actions of a madman, this beautiful, bright, lovely person has gone forever. It is so unfair and so wrong. The same is true of Tori Johnson. And for those who survived—they carry with them the physical and mental scars of those 16 or so hours, and will continue to do so for the rest of their lives.

Later this month, the Prime Minister has promised to release a review by federal agencies into this tragedy. It is an important document. Two people died, and more could have. It is important that we ask the hard questions and look at what we need to do differently to try to stop something like this happening again. That is not an easy thing. But we owe it to the people that were in the gallery yesterday and we owe it to Katrina and Tori to do that. That includes looking at how we use intelligence to monitor deranged and fixated individuals like Man Monis and looking at what role the TAG East team, the 2nd Commando tactical assault group based at Holsworthy, should play in situations like this, given their extraordinary capabilities.

Finally I just want to say something about the community response in the aftermath of this terrible tragedy. I expected, and I think many people expected, the sort of backlash against the Muslim community that we saw in September last year after the police raids, where people were spat on, pushed and abused. But that did not happen. We saw something very different in December. A Muslim friend of mine who visited the makeshift memorial flooded with flowers on several occasions told me about one of those visits. He was crying, and an Anglo-Celtic woman came up to him, put her arm around him and said, 'Are you okay?' As tears rolled down his face, she gave him a hug. This Muslim mate of mine said that he had never felt like he belonged as much as he did at that moment, and I think there is a very special message for us in that.

What is happening in Iraq and Syria is a lightning rod for deluded people who want to go there and fight or want to wreak terrible damage here at home—people poisoned by a putrid ideology, triggered into action by what they see on TV, what they read on their phone, their tablet or their computer at home, or what they hear in a prayer hall. Ottawa, Paris and Sydney are all evidence of that. But if the purpose on that day was to divide us then it failed. It has only brought us closer together. It has only helped my mate to feel like he belongs. And that is a message that we should all take with us—a message of hope in the midst of all this violence and pain.

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