Craig Laundy (Reid, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with great honour that I rise today to talk about an event I attended on Saturday morning for the Australian Relief Organisation, a wonderful organisation based in Auburn run by the Turkish community in my electorate. The Turkish community is a wonderful multicultural success story. They arrived here in the late 60s due to the Cyprus wars. Now the second and third generation of that community are working out ways they can give back. It was great to attend their factory in Auburn to load a container of aid that will find its way to Cambodia, which is just recovering from excessive monsoonal rain. To think that this community who came to our shores with pretty much the clothes on their backs have within 40 years embedded themselves in Sydney's greater west and are now looking at ways that they can give back to not only our community locally, which they do day-in and day-out, but also around the world.

To Cihan Tumen, who is the president of the ARO; to Ahmet Keskin, who works with Affinity Intercultural Foundation; to Mehmet Saral, who is with Galaxy; to the Feza Foundation; and for all the amazing work that the Turkish migrants who call Australia home in my electorate do not only in my electorate but, as Saturday proved, around the world, I say congratulations to you and long may it continue.