Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, I would like to start with a quote from UNICEF. They say: 'Child marriage threatens girls' lives and health and it limits their future prospects.' They go on:

Ending child marriage will help break the intergenerational cycle of poverty by allowing girls and women to participate more fully in society. Empowered and educated girls are better able to nourish and care for their children, leading to healthier, smaller families. When girls are allowed to be girls, everybody wins.

Despite that, there have been some shocking cases of child marriage reported in our country. One case included a 12-year-old Muslim girl who was marriage in a backyard sharia law wedding. The court was told that the husband had sex with the child daily after the wedding. She was examined at the Children's Hospital at Westmead shortly after the so-called husband was arrested and was found to be suffering an ectopic pregnancy and miscarried.

In another case, it was reported that a 14-year-old girl was forced into an Islamic marriage with a Western Sydney drug gang member who raped and beat her and later physically abused their daughter. The report goes on:

So appalling was the woman's life of abuse, which included claims that her father told her she could only leave her marriage "in a coffin", that—

Federal Circuit Court—

Judge Joseph Harman made an unprecedented public appeal … for authorities to act.

There are also recent cases including nine-year-old girls being part of a tsunami of Sydney kids being taken overseas and forced to become child brides. The report stated there are two cases where nine-year-old girls, primary schoolgirls, were being sent to Afghanistan to marry. In another unrelated case, a girl was described as being forced by her mother to return to Pakistan to get married. Yet another case involved a 10-year-old girl who feared underage marriage as well as female genital mutilation, while a 12-year-old girl was told she would have to marry her father's cousins when she turned 13. These are events happening in our suburbs today.

Eman Sharobeem from the Immigrant Women’s Health Service said that this epidemic will not end any time soon. She said the community must work with governments to make a difference but she also said that many consider it to be a practice of culture.

We need to make it very clear to all new migrants that come to this country that a practice of our culture is: if you marry a child bride, that is rape and that is paedophilia and, in our country, our culture is to lock you up and put you behind bars. If you aid and abet that marriage, whether as an imam or someone else, that is a crime and we will lock you up. We need to make that crystal clear. It is our obligation to ensure that every young girl in Australia has all the great opportunities that this country provides. They should have every opportunity.

We have the obligation to make sure we discuss this, that we do not bow down to political correctness, that we raise these issues and that we make sure our police forces and the Australian Federal Police are fully armed and equipped to take this head on. I thank the member for Moreton for bringing this motion to the House.

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