Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

When the first reports of the Martin Place siege hit the airwaves, after the initial shock I think the thought of many people in this country was, 'That could have been me.' It could have been any one of us in that cafe at that time, doing nothing more than having a morning cup of coffee. Then, as the events unfolded and came to their tragic end, people around the country, who were gearing up for the end of the year, were heartbroken to know that Tori Johnson's partner was not going to see him again and that Katrina Dawson's kids were heading towards a Christmas without their mum and that a husband had lost his wife.

As we find out more of the stories now from the people who were held hostage in the siege, we understand more fully what we saw and recognised immediately on their faces, when we saw them inside the cafe in those first moments, before the footage was cut. We saw people who had perhaps resigned themselves to the worst and were struggling to comes to grips with it, knowing that they might not be able to have that last goodbye with the people who were close to them.

The emergency services personnel and security forces, who train their whole career for an event like this, would also, no doubt, hope that an event like this never happens, and yet they were called on to go into a situation that many of us would hope to never experience in our lives. We know now—it became apparent at the time—that all of these people and all who were close to them were the victims of criminal acts from a violent man with a criminal record. Those acts are going to define the lives of the people who have been left behind, and those acts took the lives of two people who did no more than be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

For myself, and, I am sure, on behalf of the people of Melbourne and on behalf of my party, I pay tribute to the courage of all of the people who have been directly or indirectly touched by this tragedy. For those close to the people who were killed, and those who were in the cafe at some point or another during those fateful hours, this must be unimaginably tough. I really do not think that any of us can truly put ourselves in your shoes. We try and imagine it. I recoil in horror, and I think many others do as well. The toughness is, of course, not over and will linger for some time for those people. It may in fact be a continuing tough process for them as the inquiries and the discussions continue, but it is our obligation as parliamentarians to look at what happened and to discuss it and to work out how we can try and prevent anything like this from ever happening again.

One of the things we know is that here was someone with known mental health issues who was on bail for a violent crime who was able to get a gun. One of the questions that will be traversed during the inquiry is: how did that happen? We also know, as previous speakers have raised, that we are now in an environment where groups like IS or Daesh, or others around the world who wish to do us harm, are not now recruiting or organising in mosques; they are inflaming people who are perhaps on the edge of society anyway while those people are sitting in their homes using their computers, watching videos on their computers. That is now how a lot of these so-called lone-wolf attacks are predicted to arise.

We have to ask ourselves then how we stop people getting into a situation where they feel it is the right thing to come and do us harm and they draw no distinction between doing harm and not, where terror groups like IS are then able to prey them and use them to come and attack us. As I think the member for Melbourne Ports said, it almost in a sense does not matter whether or not this person was part of a hierarchical chain of command or was just someone acting on their own at the behest of the likes of Daesh; what matters is that we have to work out how to make sure that this is not a template for the future and work how to make sure that extreme propaganda when it hits the airwaves does not result in people in this country, whether they were born here or born overseas, wanting to come and do us harm.

As we have those discussions and many others, that may be quite raw for those who are close and affected by this tragedy. But I do hope it is of some comfort to those who have been affected by the siege and whose lives have been irrevocably changed to know that everyone in this parliament, no matter where you come from, is thinking of them. We are at one in supporting the victims of the siege. We are at one in wanting to make sure that it never happens again and that what people like about Australia—its peace, its democracy, its commitment to resolving disputes without resorting to violence—is something that is never shaken.

In that respect, I am filled with optimism seeing the response to the tragedy. The fact that Martin Place became a sea of flowers and not of violence speaks volumes of the spirit of the Australian people and is a sign that, if the intention of that man who was behind the siege was to disrupt and make us fight each other, it failed. If the intention was to make people change their values of democracy and friendship, that failed. We saw that not only physically with the flowers but we saw that virtually as well. Within a matter of hours the #illridewithyou hashtag took off on Twitter and other forms of social media as people stood side by side with another and said immediately, 'We understand that this is not something that is representative of the faith, because no-one who truly is a person of faith would think it is in any way justifiable to take people hostage and then see two of them killed.' The fact that that happened so quickly and that people were willing to stand next to their neighbour and say, 'I understand you are not responsible and if anyone says that I will stand next to you,' is remarkable—and an outpouring the likes of which I have not seen for a very long time.

So I do take some comfort, and I hope the families and friends of those who are affected by the siege take some comfort, in knowing that, in the wake of the siege, Australia has comprehensively rejected violence and Australia has chosen peace and friendship. Our thoughts will continue to be with you and I am sure that everyone in this parliament will do whatever they can to support anyone who in any way has been affected by this terrible tragedy. I commend the motion to the House.

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