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

Last Sunday I had the pleasure of attending the official launch of the Manna4life food van with His Grace Bishop Suriel, Father Abanoub Attalla and Councillor Sam Aziz, who is the Deputy Mayor of the City of Casey. We joined with the local Coptic community at the St Mina and St Marina Coptic Orthodox Church in Hallam. This is a landmark church, I might point out.

Manna4Life is a not-for-profit organisation established in 2012 that works with local communities to provide support and assistance for some of the most vulnerable members of the community, ranging from our youth to the elderly. Manna4Life aims to assist vulnerable members of society by providing relief from poverty for homeless persons, offering support for youth and adolescents, providing low-income families with access to financial support, encouraging basic health and hygiene standards within communities, and promoting the significance of religious and social education by actively involving the broader community.

It was an honour to attend the official launch of this Manna4Life food van and to lend my support for this project, run by our wonderful local Coptic community. Australia's Coptic community has some 100,000 people and has made an enormous and positive contribution to our way of life and to our society over recent years. This community based project is just one example. Through this project, my local Coptic community is trying to bring the community together to help those in need.

And yet this very same community lives under the shadow of the persecution of loved ones, friends and family members in Egypt. Following the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 there was a chance for the newly elected Morsi government to include all Egyptians, including minority groups, in its future without persecuting those minority groups. Unfortunately, time-in time-out, on the reports from our local communities, this appears not to have happened. Since Mubarak's overthrow, attacks on Copts and their institutions have been widely reported.

My intense interest in this matter was aroused in January 2011 when Coptic Australians were devastated and outraged after the heinous and evil Orthodox New Year suicide bomb attack on an Egyptian church in Alexandria. It was just a terrible event. In October 2011, for example, following the burning of a Coptic church in Upper Egypt, security forces clashed with Christian protesters and 28 people, mostly Copts, were killed. In April 2013 Muslim extremists laid siege to Egypt's main Coptic cathedral in Cairo. This assault followed a funeral for five men who died days earlier in Khusus, a small town north of Cairo, in clashes with militants.

The Australian Coptic community has explicitly expressed concern that President Morsi is not doing enough to quell the violence. And while President Morsi did issue a statement of regret following the attacks, it is still the case that President Morsi does not fully engage with Coptic Christians in Egypt. The incidents of sectarian violence between members of the Muslim and Christian communities have occurred with increasing frequency and intensity since 2008 according to the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which tracks such attacks. However, prosecutors initiated investigations in only one case, in Dahshour, south of Cairo, in July 2012, and even these investigations did not lead to any prosecutions.

Since President Morsi became Egypt's first democratically elected president, the authorities have taken no steps to investigate serious incidents of sectarian violence committed under the preceding military government, or during the rule of former President Hosni Mubarak. Moreover, Egyptian law discriminates against Christians by prohibiting construction of churches without a presidential decree, a requirement which is not applied to other religions and their places of worship. This has long been a source of tension between Christian and Muslim communities.

I could go on, but I think economically Egypt is hurting, particularly with more than 100,000 Copts leaving Egypt because they just do not feel safe in their own country. We have ongoing representations from the Coptic community in Australia about the persecution that seems to be experienced almost daily by Copts who still live in Egypt. It is very tough for their community to have to put up with the persecution of their loved ones and friends and family over there, but the Australian Coptic community is a remarkable community. It adds to my local community, and I am very glad it is there. We will do whatever we can to continue to voice their concerns in this House.