David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Interest rates went up again today. For those with a mortgage, these constant rises are brutal as budgets are squeezed to keep paying off a home. For renters, prices are already astronomical and getting worse. We hear stories about families looking for cheaper places to live, of rental inspections with 50 people looking at a single home and of people renting homes without ever having seen them, out of pure desperation.

Mortgages are rising faster than wages and rents are rising faster than wages. Food, fuel and electricity are all rising faster than wages. People are starting to make choices: to pay the electricity bill or to take a child to the dentist for a check-up; or a fortnight of train fares or a single session with a mental health professional. These are awful, impossible choices—like to pay for new school shoes or to buy groceries. Wages have been deliberately suppressed by state and federal governments, with wage gaps, freezes and anti-strike laws, and by corporations, with increasing commercialisation and precarious work.

Workers are paying the price, while billionaires are celebrated and treated as media personalities for increasing their already obscene wealth. And corporations, who never waste a crisis, report ever-larger profits. It's time to restore wages and to tax profits and obscene wealth. If we do that, we can ensure that every Australian has a secure home. We can fund essential public services that put dental and mental into Medicare. And we can make this country live up to its increasingly tattered promise of a fair go all round.

In the last 24 hours, more than 4,800 people have been killed in deadly earthquakes across Turkiye, Syria and the lands of the Kurdish people. Many thousands more are trapped in collapsed buildings, or are missing. This devastation, grief and loss is in addition to the trauma of 11 years of ongoing conflict in Syria and the region. The humanitarian needs were already enormous, but now hundreds of thousands more are in need of shelter, food, water, fuel and essential trauma informed care.

Survivors after such grief and pain face the added hardship of a freezing winter, with some areas in deep snow. While we stand in this building today, warm and comfortable, hundreds of thousands of people who have just undergone a catastrophe, many losing loved ones, are now waiting for our aid and our help in the snow. It is unthinkable. I note the $10 million in urgent aid announced by the Australian government as a positive first step, and I hope our government remains open to offer every possible assistance in the next days and months to ensure a humanitarian response that helps as many people as possible and, particularly, that supports local humanitarian actors working on the ground in their own community.

I've spoken to families here just today about what their extended families are facing on the ground. They've asked for the Australian government to ensure that our aid goes directly to the communities affected, whether they be Turkish, Arabic or Kurdish, and that it's distributed free of discrimination. Now more than ever, the broken politics of division in the region must be set aside for common humanity, and I stand here—I think with all of us—in solidarity with all of those affected.

Today this parliament heard from the powerful Behrouz Boochani about the devastating laws that imprisoned him and thousands of other refugees. Every day we hear tragic stories that highlight the inhumane nature of our refugee laws that torture and cause suffering of refugees. I want to share just one of those stories with you. Leila and her son were refugees from Iran. In 2013 they had no choice but to board a leaky boat and seek asylum in Australia. They were imprisoned on Nauru, and her son was just nine. She told that story today through a painting. This painting is a portrait of her son and his journey as a refugee. It represents the constant threats that he and other children in his situation have received since stepping foot in Australia. For 10 years, they were threatened and bullied, and constantly told they were not allowed to stay in Australia—not allowed to study, to get a job, to have a normal family life or to hope for a secure future. The impacts have been devastating for her son and her family.

Leila's painting represents just one of thousands of stories from Australia's offshore detention system. Countless families have been victimised by both major parties in Australia. Too many people have lost or taken their lives. The scars and trauma will stay with their families forever. After 10 years of suffering, Leila told me she doesn't expect the Australian parliament to become humane, and that is a heartbreaking conclusion. If you listen closely, her request has actually moved beyond this parliament. She wants freedom. Freedom to work, to study and to have access to basic human rights. Freedom as human beings. In the words of the ever-inspiring Behrouz Boochani: 'Freedom, only freedom.'

I seek leave of the Senate to table this document.

Leave granted.