Luke Gosling (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In Darwin and my electorate of Palmerston in the Northern Territory, there is an incredibly diverse community of Australians, international students and workers from the Pacific who are picking our mango crops. There are people from all over the world doing all sorts of things, and I just want to acknowledge a recent event in my electorate. It was a pop-up art show at the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art for NT Legal Aid's Your Rights Through Art project. The project began as a workshop for international students living in the Territory, using art classes to engage, empower and educate them about their legal rights in Australia whilst they are studying and working. The students also learned about respectful relationships, employment, money and renting rights. As well, they developed new artistic skills such as different painting styles, drawing, watercolours and collage.

I'd like to congratulate the winner of this project, Nadira Yasmin Neela, and the people's choice award winner, Eva San. Nadira, the winner, had incredible artwork which really went to her experiences in Australia. She has just finished a nursing degree and has volunteered to go down to the COVID outbreak in Katherine and the communities that are hard hit by COVID around Katherine as a nurse. Basically, as soon as she graduated she put up her hand to go down there and help. Her experience, an unfortunate one but something that we can all learn from, is that she was working for a big multinational company in the food retail business and she had a boss who said to her: 'Get that hijab off. We don't want you in this workplace with a hijab on.' She's a young woman, a Muslim from Bangladesh, and she broke down and had a very difficult time from that overt discrimination. So she really appreciated, obviously, being part of this event.

International students are so important to us. Like many international students and migrants, she worked through that discrimination and she was supported by the wonderful people such as those at NT Legal Aid. I want to thank the community education team at NT Legal Aid; the NCCA, the Northern Centre for Contemporary Art, and, in particular, Petrit, who does a great job running that; and the NT government, who made this project possible. Despite the hardships they've faced, with the support of the community I just want to let international students know how welcome they are.

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