Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

on indulgence—I have just broken one of my fundamental rules, with my first word, in fact. That rule is: never start a sentence with the word 'I'. It's a rule that I have tried to live by since my election way back in 2004, and its purpose is simple—to remind me several times a day exactly who this position I hold serves, its purpose, who it's actually there for, and who actually does the work of building community. In the simplest examples, it's not, 'I had a great time at the event,' it's, 'You guys did a great job of organising it.'

The positions we hold here are fundamentally and profoundly not about us. In an electorate like Parramatta, one that is so diverse, when you put it all together, it nets in the middle—it nets marginal—with such diversity in life experience, it is not only about what I believe and my perceptions of the world but also about finding a common path, quite often by using our different cultural perspectives and the skills we have at looking at the world from more than one perspective to find that path.

When you represent a community where one in two people you see in the street do not share your view of the world sufficiently to vote for you—damn it—you learn very quickly that, when you unravel the knot of disagreement, we quite often agree on what the problem is. We're arguing about the solutions we have come up with, the solutions we're vested in, the path we're on, rather than the destination or the outcome that we seek. There are times when the person in me was quietly screaming, 'How can you believe that?'—and worse—but the position I hold was quietly acknowledging that a good person sits opposite me with a different view and is trying to find the middle ground.

An electoral office is, or, at least, should be, a resource for democracy, of finding that common ground. The role our offices play in democratic processes, in finding common ground in local decision-making, in participatory democracy, in using the unique knowledge that, as members of parliament, we have of our electorates to empower us, is an important one, and one that I've seen decline in recent years as we have all stepped in to stem the bleeding in the NDIS, Centrelink and immigration.

In many ways, we've become arms of government—or, in many ways, government failure—helping people in crisis. Of course, we'll always do that first. That's who we are. The reality for me, though, and my staff, is that we spend at least 60 per cent of our resources, and, at times, as high as 80 per cent, helping individual people when they have nowhere else to go. These people find my office: homeless pensioners; two kids who couldn't go to school because of their parents' visa status; two others who've been here since before they could walk, and even as teenagers they're about to be deported because their mother, who was a visa applicant, died; Centrelink delays; real issues with the NDIS; the crisis in Afghanistan; no internet connection for businesses for weeks; people who speak other languages trying to navigate My Aged Care; and people separated from loved ones, including their newborn children, for months or years during COVID. These are not unusual problems these days; they're common. These problems are not caused by a lack of care by public servants—and I want to make that clear—but by bad policy and under-resourcing.

Similarly, we've been overwhelmed by the impact on people of bungled policy development on marriage equality and freedom of religion—government processes that left people afraid and feeling unable to participate in an informed debate, and with people on both sides of both debates personally hurt by things said and not said. My office is overwhelmed because people in the community know my amazing staff help. They really do. In fact, there are people who pretend they come from the electorate, when they don't, to come and see my staff. They really do. A school even told me they were in my electorate the other day. I said, 'No, you're not.' They said, 'Yes, we are!' 'No, you're not.'

We are overwhelmed because people know that, if you come to my staff, they are there for you. I acknowledge the impact on my staff of working with people on the worst day of their life, day after day after day. Not all of them have done well with that. Some have struggled quite significantly. But I want to thank them: Launa, Paul, Alayna, Ama, Catherine, Katerina, Pauli, Hala and Durga. And I thank past staff, and I can't name them all: Himawan, Bela, Alison, Kallista, Semane, among the many others. I and my staff will always prioritise the person who comes to me for help. That's who we are. But there should be other solutions. There are examples in democratic systems elsewhere in the world—solutions not just for the people who manage to find my office for help but for the many others who didn't and who struggled without help.

Running parallel to the failure in government policy that electorate offices are picking up, there's been a weakening in community cohesion over several years, due to structural changes in the economy that have reduced the capacity for communities to engage with each other and find common answers and opportunities. When I'm out talking to my community from individuals on their doorstep to community organisations working with youth, domestic violence or bush care, the common theme is a lack of community cohesion—of the connections that allow ideas to emerge, take root and grow. I suspect the rise of the Independents that promised their community greater participation is a reflection that many in our community know of that missing element—community led democracy and problem-solving. Our offices can do better if we refocus our attention on the role of an electorate office, which is democracy, not government. It's democracy—quite a difference.

The community I've been privileged to represent is extraordinary in what it is and in what it can and should become. I want to take this opportunity to speak directly to them. To my community: over the last 18 years, I have come to know you as a community filled with opportunity and gifts, which speaks every language and which views the world from a range of cultural perspectives of people who have lived and found solutions in remote villages and in the world's biggest cities. We have the world in us, with all the perspectives and experiences and with concepts that are easily expressed in one language and have no equivalent in another. In a rapidly changing world that is shrinking in distance and separateness and, at the same time, expanding in opportunities and possibilities, we are exactly who you want to be in the modern world. We have everything we need to do well in a changing world, if only we could see ourselves clearly enough to exploit our strengths.

Working with you now over 17 years, there is so much more to you than you know. I've been privileged to be invited in, so let me tell you what I see when I look at you. Let me start with some of the patterns that have revealed themselves to me over the last 17 years. I'm going to start by walking down the Parramatta River—not all of it, but between about one kilometre and 1½ kilometres. We start at the confluence of Darling Mills and Toongabbie creeks where the river starts, where Governor Phillip landed and began the walk that he documented in his diaries—the beginning of the dispossession of the Dharug people and a place that is largely neglected, unvisited and unrecognised. The first part of the walk was closed for nearly 200 years. It's government land—mainly health; mainly mental health—but you don't have far to reach the Crescent, which is part of Parramatta Park now—the first gazetted public park in the world. It was Governor Macquarie's domain and it was the meeting place of the Dharug people, including the Burramattagal and the Tugagal clan of Toongabbie. The male place on the hill became Old Government House but, across the river on the female sacred site where the birthing stones are, we built the female convict factory and then the mechanical institute for girls and the Parramatta Girls Home, where we incarcerated the stolen generation. It became a place of incarceration of women for over 200 years—a female sacred site. Go a little bit further and you see one of the last remaining colonies of endangered flying foxes, which a lot of people hate, but I kind of like them.

Then there's Little Coogee, where, in early colonial times, people swam. Then you pass the stadium—some of us try not to look—and go under the Bernie Banton Bridge, named for the asbestos campaigner, an extraordinary man. Then you go under the Lennox Bridge, where you find the spot where the Buddhist community celebrates Loy Krathong. They let their flowers and candles float on the river. Loy Krathong is a beautiful festival. If you go 100 metres further, under the oar bridge, you'll find the place where the Hindu community celebrates the Ganesh festival. They're still seeking permission to immerse their clay model of Ganesha in the river. I'm sure they will get that soon.

A little further along, there's the St Ioannis or St John the Baptist Greek Orthodox Church. They're building a new one on the banks of the Parramatta River. Where else would St John the Baptist have his church? A little further along is a place that is sacred to the Maori community of Australia but also incredibly important to the Dharug people, which is Rangihou Reserve, where the children of Maori nobles were buried in colonial times. It's a very sacred site.

If you walk down the Parramatta River as a whole and you don't know about or haven't been to all those events, you don't see it. You don't see this extraordinary history that unravels in that kilometre and a half. From the dispossession of the Indigenous people right through to the arrival of migration, it's all there. So is the first public school. It's all there in that first kilometre and a half.

It's not the only thing that flows through Parramatta. The train lines are pretty cool, too. For food: Auburn, Turkish and Chinese; Granville, Nepalese and Lebanese; Merrylands, increasingly Afghani; Lidcombe, African; Harris Park, Indian in all its variety, including Telugu, Gujarat and Malayali—you name it and it's there; and Wentworthville, Sri Lankan. It's absolutely extraordinary food. Slightly outside of the electorate: Eastwood, Korean; and Cabramatta, Vietnamese. It's an extraordinary trip if you take that train trip and have a look at what is there. It's not just the food. It's the fashion. It's the cultural life. It's extraordinary. We live in this place where these transport lines flow from one community to another in the most extraordinary way. It's a gift.

We also have creeks flowing through our community. In fact, in my first election, I counted them. There were 30. My electorate boundaries have changed, but it's just about back to that now. We have 30 creeks, but we built our cities with our backs to them in colonial times. They were drains. So, unless you go to the north part of the electorate, which was built later, where there are wonderful assets of trees and open space, they're essentially drains. But they flow from Blacktown to Parramatta. Toongabbie Creek flows the whole way. They are amazing assets—overgrown, undervalued and ignored. You can't pass through most of them, but they are still there waiting to turn this section of Western Sydney into the extraordinary green paradise that it actually is. It's just waiting to be done. It's not cheap. It's not easy. It can't be done with a one-off. It's hard. By—my God!—what an asset we have there. It is still there.

We have the wisdom of every religion. On my first day in my new office, my Hindu community representatives came to me and gave me a small statue of Ganesha, which I still have on a table of its own, as it should be. They explained to me that Ganesha was the god for overcoming obstacles. I thought: 'Woohoo! I have a few of those.' They went, 'No, Julie—obstacles within.' I thought, 'Oh, okay.' I keep that Ganesha there to remind me that most of the things that we don't do are actually not because of barriers outside. They are actually choices we make to do one thing and not another. So I keep that.

Not long after that, at the Buddhist temple down in Cowper Street in Granville, the abbess there gave me a small glass lotus flower and she literally said, 'The lotus flower, like politicians, grows in the slime and the mud, but the lotus flower remains pure.' I carried that little lotus flower hanging off my handbag until the string broke for about four years and touched it every now and again and went, 'Stay pure; stay pure.' I hope I did.

I was talking to a Muslim friend of mine at Ramadan. His six-year-old son was learning to delay breakfast. Six-year-old kids don't fast. That would be ridiculous. But he was learning to wait just half an hour for breakfast. He really wanted to fast with his dad, by the way, but no. We were talking about it and he explained to me that the purpose of it and the purpose of Ramadan is to learn restraint. Children, as they get older, learn to say, 'I want that; so what?' They learn restraint. I thought how interesting that was. So I've learned so much.

And it was my Hindu community, again, who talked to me at length about simplifying life. In some cultures, if you want to do better, you do more. In other cultures, religion says if you want to be a better person you do less, you simplify. They were talking to me about the difference between East and West where, if you want to lose weight, you go and do stuff—anyway, you know what I'm saying. So I tried it. And I thank them for it because the thing that I discovered, having spent some time in silence—and this might sound weird—is how extraordinary the floors of Parliament House are. I'm not kidding. You should all do it one time. Meditate and then take a walk around the halls, take a walk from the House of Reps across to the Senate and up the Senate side and down and have a look at the floor. The work that went into it is truly astonishing. In fact, I did that walk several times a day, for a number of weeks, just noticing the variation in it, the care and attention. It is the most extraordinary thing. For 17 years I hadn't noticed—and, suddenly, there I was, noticing that I'd been surrounded by it. That's probably the thing I'm going to most miss about this place—noticing that sometimes there's a bit of brass laid in the floor, sometimes the bricks go this way. It's a truly amazing thing. Have a look. Thank you, Hindu community, for showing me one of the most extraordinary things about this building. If you talk to the cleaners, you'll find the man cleaning the floor in the Great Hall, who has been cleaning the floor since the building opened. It is extraordinary. It is one of those secret things of the parliament that we miss.

Going back briefly to our creeks: if you turn north at the confluence of Darling Mills and Toongabbie and go north about a kilometre, if you walk up Darling Mills and then Hunts Creek you'll arrive at Lake Parramatta. It's a beautiful place with 4½ kilometres of walk and a 25-kilometre-long walk. It's just gorgeous. It wasn't the first water source for the new colony but it was the first substantial one. You can't actually walk up that creek, by the way, because it is overgrown. But it links Parramatta Park, one of our great open spaces, with Lake Parramatta, one of our other great open spaces. In fact, I often wonder why the triathlon doesn't exist. They do biathlons at Parramatta Park and swimming carnivals at Lake Parramatta but the two do not join. There is about a kilometre of missing creek bank, that's all. It's still there, it's just the missing link. The possibilities of being able to walk from one great space to another is just amazing.

We have cultural differences in the perceptions of time. This is a weird thing for me to talk about in this place. But one of the things about being a musician, learning music as I did from the age of three, is that you spend your life learning to manage the process of thought in real time. That's essentially what you do. You figure out what you have to think of and when, what you have to trust your fast brain to do without thinking. You design a process that allows you to play a piece that lasts 45 minutes, that takes a year to learn, in real time. So the process of thinking, and what you think of and when, is absolutely all I do. That is what I learned do when I was three and it is absolutely all I do. Back when I was at university doing my masters I did a paper on cultural differences in perceptions of time. That was about 35 years ago and there was virtually no writing on it at all except for abnormal psychology and perceptions of time among people who had been persecuted and, at the very beginning of perceptions of time, in advertising, on how long it takes a person to respond to an advertisement. But there was virtually nothing. It is an area that has intrigued me since then.

In an electorate like Parramatta, where we have such a diverse range of people that come from different cultures, that come from different geographic areas, the perceptions of time are different and the way they experience time, and value events in time, is different. For me it has been endlessly fascinating. It has been endlessly fascinating in a positive way and also in the less-positive way of meeting people whose lives have been ripped apart so many times that they no longer believe they have power over time. They are no longer going to enrol in a university course that might take them six years to complete because they don't necessarily believe they have the power over their own time line. They expect that the ground will be ripped away at any moment. So they leave school at 15 and take six bucks an hour as a gyprocker—not because they are dumb, not because they are not smart, but because culturally they do not believe they have power over time. They don't believe, as I do, that they can spend 10 years doing something. I can spend 10 years saving. My world won't fall apart. Theirs will.

There are extraordinary differences in the way people think and we as a parliament need to acknowledge that we have in our community people who have different ways of thinking about reward and punishment in real life. They don't have the capacity that most of us in here have, of a believing you can achieve what you want to achieve by working for it. In fact, the early work that I found 35 years ago said that in communities that are extremely persecuted the smarter the person is, the quicker they learn they don't have the power. These are amazingly important things. I've been lucky, being a person who cares about time and perceptions of time, to be surrounded by this amazing difference, but all of us need to understand just what that means.

Western Sydney is by far the biggest food processor in Australia by economic impact. As the supply chains fragment, we know that the big companies are starting to use small businesses. CC doesn't make its own spice blends; it uses small businesses. We have an opportunity, at this point in time, in Western Sydney to become part of the global supply chains because our own sector is making that change, but we don't have temperature controlled warehouses. We have far too many fabulous small businesses that are stuck within their own cultural community. We have some of the best chilli makers, we have some of the best bread in the world—literally. We have idli batter. We have stuff that should be exported to the world because it's clean Australian food, but it's stuck within its own community. We have an extraordinary opportunity to take ourselves to the world, on food alone. It is amazing food—lucky me!

Thanks to all the Indian aunties who gave me all their cheats. I was talking to an Indian chef recently—he was over from India—and he told me the book of recipes is this big and the book of cheats is like this! So thank you for introducing me to the ways to cheat when I'm cooking Indian food, because it's quite fabulous. Pickled beef, chutneys, Filipino milk candy—you name it, we make it. And we make it incredibly well, but we don't have a path to go from the microbusiness to the small business to the giant business, and we need to do that as a community.

I'm going to talk about art, music, literature and poetry—again, my background. I used to manage the music grants program for the Australia Council. I'd go to four to six concerts a week. I've been to some of the best concerts in the world. Some of the best ones, the really extraordinary ones, were in Parramatta. Again, they're concerts that most people wouldn't recognise. In my first weeks in the job there I saw a sign on a lamppost for Sivan Perwer, a Kurdish artist. I went 'wow' and I went to the concert. There were about 2,000 people there. I was the only white girl there. It was entirely within its community. This man is one of the great artists of the world. I've been to see Sufi bands. I've been to Punjabi poetry. I was lucky enough to hear Mohammad Imran Pratapgarhi—a poet that none of you have probably ever heard of—and I could have sat there for days listening to Urdu poetry. Truly, truly amazing stuff.

My community has introduced me to writers that I'd never heard of. We know the great speeches. Well we think we know the great speeches, but we don't know the ones that aren't in English. I've been introduced to the speech of Bangabandhu, for example. Just amazing speeches that the vast majority of people who stay within their own cultural worlds will never hear or see. I've been introduced to the music of Rabindranath Tagor. This is a gift for a person like me, a gift, but it should be a gift for more people. Again, we're staying within our own communities, when I know, from working in that field, that the Sydney Improvised Music Association would probably love to go and hear the improvisation of the Hindu temple that goes on for 12 days—I know I did! They probably would too.

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