Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to congratulate an organisation called Bounce Back for their great work with South Sudanese Australian youth and give a special shout-out to my friend Yong Deng who's been a driving force behind Bounce Back.

Bounce Back is a basketball and mentoring program run by South Sudanese Australian Youth United, and they welcome young people of all backgrounds—and there are many great young Australians of African heritage—from many communities.

They have a unified goal of helping young people to excel at life and they do this through targeted mentoring, having people along to talk, chat and engage—and I've been a couple of times—and through sport. It happens on Friday nights in Doveton.

There's so much racist rubbish which we read in the media, particularly in Victoria, I might say, driven by the Victorian Liberal Party in the lead-up to the last state election about African crime, that you couldn't go out, misusing crime stats. All of a sudden of course, when the election was over, it just all stopped and it was safe to go out again. But in amongst this rubbish that just makes life harder for young people of African heritage growing up in Australia, we have to try and focus on some positive things. There are no elections in sight for the next few years—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

so, hopefully, now we can focus on positive things that will give young people some hope and support and inspire them.

I congratulate the Scanlon Foundation on their work in funding this. I've written to the assistant minister—he said he'll come along with me in the next few weeks—to see if, together, we can put the politics aside that we've seen too much of and actually do something positive. I've sat down with these young people and I challenge anyone yelling at me to go and do it. Talk to them: how do they feel hearing the crap from your side?