Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to start by thanking our frontline workers and local residents in my electorate for their response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Locally, in the City of Casey, I think we've had about 70 active cases of the coronavirus. In particular, I wanted to thank the frontline workers—the doctors, the nurses and our testing officials at the Casey Hospital, the Cranbourne Integrated Care Centre and Westfield Fountain Gate pop-up testing facility—for their work and others in the area for keeping our community safe. I wanted to thank our community organisations, like the Cranbourne Information & Support Service, for their work to provide emergency relief to those in need during this pandemic and during this time of crisis.

I think, particularly in speaking of the sacrifices that have been made by those in my constituency—to those who have lost their jobs, to those who have had diminished working hours—there's been a sense of cohesion, of community and of understanding the joint sacrifice that's been made to beat this pandemic. And I wanted to commend the government and the state premiers for the work that they have done in a cohesive, collaborative, collective way to keep our country safe. That has been mirrored by the sacrifice and the resolve of those people out in my constituency. The one thing I think they would say—those who have lost their jobs, those who have suffered a diminution in income, those who have experienced mental health challenges because of the isolation—is that what we were asking people to do, and what people did in such astounding numbers and so quickly and with so much discipline, was almost give themselves a form of home detention to keep the community safe. I think it's often forgotten that home detention is used as a form of punishment. We asked the Australian community to, in effect, put themselves into home detention, with time out to go shopping and to exercise et cetera, and the fact that they did that in such great numbers says a lot about Australia's community spirit.

In that vein, I think that great community spirit offers a window in terms of where we should be conducting ourselves, the national debate about where we need to go. We can't have made these sacrifices as a community without wanting politics to change a bit, to imagine a future where all Australians have a stakehold, where we all work together collectively, where we all look after each other—that hand reaching down to lift others up rather than pushing people down. So, particularly to those in the Australian community in my constituency who made that sacrifice, who kept themselves at home, who isolated themselves: thank you, again, on behalf of us all here. What we have to do now in this place is ensure that that spirit of sacrifice and that spirit of coming together and of sacrificing for the common good is kept so that we have policies that include all Australians and not just some.

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