Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

One of the things that I love about my multicultural community is the way we are linked through our people with some of the great events that have shaped the modern world. We have from our neighbours and people who go to school with our children some of the wisdom and understanding that flows from being there at some of those events that most of us read about in the history books.

On Saturday, a group of Australians of Indian background came together to commemorate one of those events: the independence of India from the British Empire on 15 August 1947. On that day, many years ago, the first Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, raised the Indian national flag above the Lahori Gate of the Red Fort in Delhi. Each year since then on the anniversary of that day, the Prime Minister of India raises a flag and gives a speech. There were many Australians of Indian background who were wearing the Indian flag on Saturday. I was not; I did get hennaed for the day.

I want to share with the House some of the words of that first Prime Minister. He said:

Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we will redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance … We end today a period of ill fortune, and India discovers herself again.

Happy Independence Day, India, our friend.

See this speech in context