Cassandra Fernando (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

'Every moment, you feel like you're in a prison.' 'If we can't speak, why even live?' 'We're like dead bodies moving around'—these are the haunting words of women living under the Taliban's brutal regime in Afghanistan. Since coming to power, the Taliban have erased women from society and taken their most basic rights from them: the right to speak, the right to education, the right to freedom. The new restrictions give the morality police the power to imprison women simply for speaking in public. It is a regime designed to silence and oppress.

Three years ago, women in Afghanistan could run for president. Now they can't even decide when to buy groceries. Here in Australia, women have the right to speak. We have the right to run for parliament and to lead. I will not stop using my voice to stand up for the women and girls of Afghanistan. Their voices may be stolen, but their ideas and their dreams of freedom cannot be.