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

I rise to recognise the Merrylands Baptist Church community for their outstanding contribution to the cause of global justice and poverty reduction. The church has a very active and successful group that they call ‘Catalyst’, a group whose objective in life is to change people’s views about the need to act on poverty and to better inform their community, and they regularly organise really quite innovative and inspirational events in Merrylands to raise awareness about global poverty and the Millennium Development Goals.

In the past I have attended their fifth birthday party, designed to recognise the unacceptably high number of children who do not reach their fifth birthday. The birthday party was for those who never reach the age of five. They presented me at that time with a tiny little white jumpsuit—for probably a one-year-old—and asked me to bring it down to the foreign minister of the day. Attached to it were cards with the name and address of each person that participated and birthday wishes for children who died before the age of five. It actually looked quite pretty until you realised what it was—one card for every child who died during the four-minute period it took them to write the cards. One of my staff, Jacinta, whose job it was to enter all those names in our database, found it quite a traumatic experience as well. But, again, I would reiterate that they are a quite remarkable group of people.

This week they sent me down with something else. They sent me down with a banner. I know we do not have props, so I will not open it, but it would in fact cover this entire desk. It is a banner covered with 150 hand prints and it comes with a card which I will read. By imprinting their hands on this banner, they say:

… we promise to remember the poor, we promise to remind our leaders to keep their commitment to the poor. As a sign of our promise we make this hand print. Together our hands are a message to our leaders to act with justice and to remember the poor.

In the next day or so I will present this banner to our foreign minister, but before I did that I wanted to bring it to the House and indicate to the members of the House that 150 members of my community have attached their hand prints to this banner to remind us of our commitment to the poor and to meeting the Millennium Development Goals as a nation.

I commend these people from the Merrylands Baptist Church; they are an extraordinary group of people. When they first started this program, there were very few of them who understood or who were informed about the issues that face some of the most disadvantaged people in the world. That is certainly not the case now. They keep me on my toes. They visit me regularly and they contact me regularly, in many ways, to remind me of our obligation. Thank you.