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

Yesterday I attended a funeral in my electorate for a family and a community suffering extraordinary distress from a terrible accident that took place in my electorate a little while ago. There were a number of families involved who lost precious children. But I don't want to talk particularly about those families today—I want to give them privacy—but I do want to talk about the extraordinary community of faith that came together to support them.

The Maronite community in Parramatta centres around the Our Lady of Lebanon Co-Cathedral, which rises as an extraordinary building that you can see for miles out of the suburb. It's centred there, but equally as impressive as the building itself is the community of faith that rises together out of the ground in Harris Park. The families themselves were extraordinary examples of faith to the community in the last week, but the community came together in a way that only religious communities do to support these families. They were there in every way that mattered, and I just want to thank them for that.

We all know that in our communities in recent decades we've lost some of the coherence. We stopped living and working in the same suburb and we don't necessarily work with the same people all of our lives, so a lot of the connections that we had have disappeared. But we hear, from time to time, from people about how the churches themselves and the mosques and the temples in our communities are becoming places where people gather. People come to Australia from overseas and, even though they might not have been religious in their first country, seek out the places where this community exists. They are extraordinary things. When you go to these church communities, they're one of the few places in our communities where you see families—

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Churches, places of worship, in our communities are among the few places where you actually see a community in its vertical, where you see grandparents, parents and children together, where the patterns can be identified. These groups of people can support intergenerational development. You'll see the Maronites have built a youth centre. You'll see they have built an aged-care facility. They look after those intergenerational needs because they are a full community. For them, of course, these are wonderful side benefits. This is a community that shares a single thing, which is faith. They share it with their whole being. They share it in the good times and they share it in the dreadful times. Again, I'd just like to thank the amazing Maronite community of Harris Park for the way they have come together behind some of our families that are in the greatest need one can imagine right now. Thank you for your faith and thank you for what you do.