Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is always a great pleasure to deliver an address-in-reply. If you are doing it, it means that you have been re-elected to your job, because that is what it is. It is a job that I very much enjoy. I do want to thank the member for Ballarat. She and I share the privilege of having come into this place at the same time. It is fabulous that she is now at the forefront of defending Medicare, and I certainly stand with her in that effort. I know how important Medicare—and bulk-billing, in particular—and affordability of health care are to the people that I represent in this parliament.

I am very privileged to have been re-elected as the member for Calwell. It was my sixth election, and I feel a great debt to the people that I represent in this parliament. I have gotten to know them very well over the years. For new members: Dr Anne Aly, the member for Cowan—and the member for North Sydney—you will come to realise that eventually you build a very strong relationship with the people that you represent. It is a relationship that is based on friendship, in many ways, and trust. They place a lot of trust in us as their elected representatives to be here to advocate on their behalf and certainly to be vigilant on their behalf when policies are being implemented, or seeking to be implemented, that would be detrimental to their daily lives.

I have indeed formed very strong relationships with my community, and I want to talk about that community today. I also want to spend quite a bit of time—and I do not normally do this—to thank the very many people who, in the time that I have been in parliament, have come with me and have helped and assisted me, and who I have the great pleasure of working with.

I have often said that my electorate is probably one of the most culturally diverse electorates in Australia. It is also an electorate that is quite happy to re-elect Labor members of parliament. After being their Labor federal member of parliament and talking about my relationships with them, I have come to understand why it is that they have placed their faith in the Australian Labor Party. I am very privileged to be the Labor member for Calwell. As other colleagues have said before me, I do not get elected as Maria Vamvakinou the individual, I get elected as the Labor candidate for the federal seat of Calwell. I acknowledge that and appreciate it.

Mr Zimmerman interjecting—

They have come to like me. I think they have realised that I share a very strong identification. Thank you for prompting me, member for North Sydney. I share a very strong identification with the people that I represent, and I think that is why we have such a bond and an empathy.

Calwell is predominantly migrant community. It is a community that has the same experiences that my own family have had. I arrived here as a four-year-old child in 1963—that gives my age away, but it does not matter when you get to this stage. I came here under the Arthur Calwell migration program. It was an expansive, massive migration program that was deliberately designed to set the foundations for modern Australia. It was a nation-building exercise.

My family and I were—as I am sure Dr Aly's family was—a part of that. I can reflect back on it now, 60-odd years later, after Arthur Calwell, Australia's first migration minister, literally went out and sourced migrants from war-torn Europe, as I have said in this place before, from the UK and even from the United States. He sourced them because, as he said—and I think it is very important for us to know our history—we could not hold this continent with 7½ million people. Today, this continent sits at 23 million people. Those politicians of that time, and the Labor government at that time, had envisaged a bigger Australia. They set the foundations for it. There are many people in my electorate who came here under those programs in subsequent decades, in particularly the Turkish community. After the official abolition of the White Australia policy, we saw the great migration of people from Turkey. They settled in Calwell. They came to Australia, got off the plane at what was known as Tullamarine Airport—today it is the Melbourne Airport—and were driven some 10 minutes down the road to the Maygar Barracks, which at that time were similar to Bonegilla, but in inner Melbourne, and were used as hostels hosting newly arrived migrants from Turkey. Then they just left the hostels and moved up the street. They have built a wonderful community. As a result of the Turkish community being in the federal seat of Calwell, when I describe the seat I can say that it has the largest constituency of Australians of the Muslim faith in Victoria. When I first came here I believe we had the largest in the country, but some seat in Western Sydney, that I will not make reference to, holds that record now. In any case, it is a wonderful and vibrant community.

We have people from 100 different ethnic groups. We have the established communities: a very large Italian community, a very large Greek community, a very large Serbian-Croatian community. We have emerging communities from the subcontinent. We have quite a number of people coming and settling in our region from Nepal. But my biggest emerging community of all is the Chaldean Christians from Iraq. They have been settling in the area over the last 25 years since the two Iraq wars. Recently they celebrated 25 years since they began coming to Australia as refugees. They are a growing community and they face lots of similar issues that migrants and refugees face when coming to Australia, especially those who have been quite forcibly and unexpectedly dislocated from their homes. They will face the same sorts of problems in many ways that perhaps a lot of the migrants and refugees who came to Australia in the sixties did, which is why we have this empathy. I can identify so strongly with them and that makes my job all the more rewarding.

In the time that I have been a member, I have forged a very strong relationship with the Iraqi Chaldean community and the Assyrian Eastern Orthodox Christian community—I have both in my seat. I have watched them grow, especially in the last decade, and build the foundations and the infrastructure that any community needs that moves into a particular area. Some people like to call that kind of congregation a 'ghetto'. It is not a ghetto, and I reject that term outright. They are communities that live in an area where they share a common identity and a common language, and in most places it is their places of faith that are established first. In the case of the Chaldean community, we have about four Iraqi Christian churches in my electorate. It is the natural progress of a community. To refer to it as a ghetto is an expression of utter ignorance. I know it is used in contempt and it is often used against my Muslim community in Broadmeadows, and I have had to stand up and defend them. The communities do their own infrastructure building and they support each other in a way that assists the government's overall settlement program. So I see it as a settlement issue not an issue of banding together to exclude everybody else. And this is how it is with the Iraqi Christian community.

I want to thank Father Maher Gurges from St George's Chaldean Church. I work with Father Maher often. He is one of our local priests, a Chaldean Catholic priest who is charged with the pastoral care of the young members of the community. He does a fantastic job and I like working with him and being able to help him and them in the settlement process. I also thank Father Kamal Bidawid from the Church of Our Lady Guardian of Plants, the Chaldean Catholic church in Campbellfield. We had a very special visitor in November last year. The Governor-General of Australia, Sir Peter Cosgrove, and Lady Cosgrove attended the advent mass service, which marks the beginning of Christmas. They came down to my electorate and attended that service and the community was very, very honoured to have had them. From my perspective, the presence of the Governor-General in particular is a very positive sign—a sign of acceptance, embrace and recognition of a new community. It goes a long way to assisting the settlement process and that sense of belonging and being part of the Australian community. I want to thank his excellency in particular for coming to Calwell to Our Lady Guardian of Plants.

The community recently celebrated its 25 years of migration to Australia. They are doing a wonderful job and I continue to work with them. I look forward to the submission that they are going to be making, or I understand have tabled, to the Joint Standing Committee on Migration and our inquiry into the settlement services. I am very pleased my community is able to participate in the process. I also want to acknowledge Father Korkis Tuma from Saint Abdisho's Assyrian Church of the East and Father Youkahana Matti from St Mary's Church, the Ancient Church of the East, and Mr Elias Saliba and Father Aphram from Mor Yacoub Syriac Orthodox Church in Mickleham. I visited that church on a number of occasions. I have actually conducted an immigration clinic there after service on a Sunday because such is the number of people in that community who are waiting for outcomes for family members under the additional 12,000 places for refugees from Syria. It is just an indication of how much is going on in my electorate. In addition to having virtually every Christian from Iraq living in Calwell, I also expect some 2½ thousand or three thousand from the 12,000 intake from Syria. So we have a lot going on in the federal seat of Calwell, but I think we are a well-placed community to help and receive those newly arrived.

Often the stories you hear are actually quite heartbreaking. I want to pay tribute to my local schools, in particular, who will receive children who have just come out of a war zone. I have wonderful teachers and wonderful principals who go out of their way to ensure that those children and their families are assisted in a way that makes them feel welcome. Often a lot of those families are just left to find their way home in the streets of Broadmeadows and elsewhere, and they have trouble doing basic things that we just take for granted, which can frighten people even more. So thank you in particular to Good Shepherd Catholic School in my electorate.

I also want to talk a little about the Oromo community, which is also settling in my electorate, and especially the women from that electorate, who I love to sit and have coffee with and share their cooking advice. It is part of the wonderful things that we do and are exposed to as members of parliament. I feel, at this point, that I had better start thanking a whole series of people that I often forget to thank, because, as other members have said, you do not do this on your own. You certainly do not get through an election campaign on your own and you certainly do not work in the community on your own. And, like all other members of parliament, I certainly do not.

I want to begin by thanking my core staff: Paul Caruso, Emma Ioannou, Marianthi Kypuros, Stephen Fodrocy, Carole Fabian and Aniela Kociuba. They do a tremendous amount of work. They put up with a lot, but they also have a wonderful manner with our community. It is really important, when you are not there, that your staff have the same sense of empathy and the desire to help people that you do, because that reflects on you as well. Our staff really are at the door when we are away, and the community feels that it is being heard, even though you are not there. So thank you to all my staff.

I have picked up a lot of members of the community along the way who have become my friends, and I want to try and thank as many of them as possible. I may try your patience, but I think it is really important to let people know that they are important to us, and that we mention them when we are up here. I want to start by thanking Michael Shergill; Hamza Wariyo, who runs the Oromo community; Irfan Hassan and Samet Istar, who are wonderful friends, wonderful Labor Party members and wonderful community members; Phillip Di Biase; Belal El Baba; Ryan Moore and Justin Barbour; Draga Atanasovski; and Madonna Awad, from the Coptic community.

I want to thank Walid Hanna, from the local Iraqi community, who also runs our annual soccer tournament—the Iraqi Unity Cup. He does a tremendous job in terms of social cohesion. I also want to thank Ali Awan, from our local Pakistani community, who is also responsible for organising the Multicultural Eid Festival—I look forward to attending that again in June this year; Joseph Todaro; Karen Sherry; Louie Josef, from the Chaldean community—Louie is a wonderful supporter of the work that we do and a conduit into the Chaldean community, and I want to thank him for making my job much easier; Thomas Keplar; and Thekla Scarcella. Thekla is one of those wonderful migrant women who has managed—apart from working in factories—to write lots of stories, again indicating that those migrants who came here did have skills other than the ones that were put to use in a factory. So thank you, Thekla, for being who you are.

Thank you to John Patsikatheodorou, Anthony Calfapietra and Upul Chandana, and to Joseph and Sheena Haweil. I want to congratulate Joseph Haweil, in particular, who was recently elected to the Hume City Council. Our council has changed, with lots of young people replacing the old guard, and Joseph is going to do a great job as a local councillor. Thank you to Peter Perna, a stalwart of the Italian community and one of the founding fathers of the Italian club in Sunshine; to Terri McNaughton; and to Chandra Bamunusinghe, who is from the Sri Lankan community—and I look forward to attending their annual oil lamp ceremony in a couple of weeks time, which usually takes place on a very cold morning in April.

I want to thank David Carroll; Cheryl Woods; Peter Ryan; Ted Haydon; Jana Taylor and Geoff Porter, both councillors at Hume City Council; Ray Gorman, an old postie and someone who fought very hard for the rights of post office workers; Ramazan Altintas, who is very well known in the community as the founder of the Turkish RSL Club; John Walsh, the founder of the Bridge of Hope Foundation; Kathleen Wallace; and Saqib Awan and Uzma Rubab, who are members of the newly emerging international Pakistani students community and who are teaching me a whole new world about the thinking and psychology of newer migrants to this country, who come here as international students and choose to stay as residents.

My thanks to Peter Massey and Daniel Grayson. Thank you, Daniel, for being so passionate and caring about refugees. Daniel visits some of the people who have been in our local Melbourne immigration transit centre for a long time. I would also like to thank Richard Donaldson and Sarah Angus; Jess Awad; Sam Caruso; Fatima Hoblos; Yousef Alreemawi; Troy Atanasovski; Burhan Eren; Paskal El Ali, Don Townsend; Janet Curtain—my Janet Curtain, who is an advocate for people with disability. I want to thank her for her brightness, positivity and optimism. I thank Meni Malkos, also a great crusader for animal rights and Amnesty International; George Johnson; and Chris and Despina Havelas, in particular Despina, who established Autism Angels and works hard for children with autism.

I really need to thank my family—my husband, Michalis, and my children, Stavros and Stella—who have been with me on this journey. I know we do not often talk about it, but balancing family life and this job is very, very difficult. My children were six and eight when I came here. They are now adults. I know that we all reflect on how that impacts on our families, but I have a wonderful community that understands that. I can talk to them about it and feel supported, not only by the community but by my family as well. I want to thank them very much.

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