Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Last week, six masked people smashed up by St Kilda office. They shattered windows, lit two fires out the front of my office and led to the evacuation of the residential buildings above, including of a small family with a baby, who had to be evacuated at 3.30 in the morning. The fires destroyed communication lines, and the businesses on Barkly Street had no Wi-Fi to take orders last week.

For the Jewish community, images of my office with horns were reminiscent of some of the worst of our collective memory. In Macnamara, residents and small businesses were left distressed and my staff rattled. For them, it was a dangerous escalation on our place of work. They've been receiving threats on the phone for the past nine months. My staff are kind, hardworking and smart people, and their job is to help the people of Macnamara, which we all love.

I'm here to say today that this is enough. It has to stop. Innocent people could have been seriously hurt. The Australia I know and love is one where everyone is free to be who they are, love who they love and practise their culture and faith with dignity. The Australia I know and love is where we can have hard and difficult conversations while maintaining respect for one another. We must resist talking about issues in absolutes. We can disagree and we can debate. But pain and suffering isn't a competition, and we can't forget how to show empathy, compassion and respect to our fellow Australians. So my plea to everyone in this place is to think about the role we must play as leaders, and we must continue to treat each other with respect and to respect the views of others in this place.

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