STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator BRAGG (New South Wales) (13:56): One of the great things about Australia is that anyone can be an Australian as long as you subscribe to our institutions, and our great multicultural country has been enriched by people from all across the globe. Recently, I had the opportunity to visit the International Youth Entrepreneurs Summit hosted by the Federation of International Nepali Youth Entrepreneurs.

That was in Sydney, and that was a magnificent opportunity to meet with members of parliament from Nepal but also engage broadly with the Sydney diaspora of Nepalese background. It is a very enterprising group. They have a magnificent skill set that they've built up in their community.

I was able to engage very widely with the Nepalese Australian community on that occasion. At the last election, we were very proud to have Binod Paudel as one of our candidates, in Macarthur, and, prior to that, we had Pjay Shrestha be a candidate for us in the seat of Barton. We are very excited about the Nepalese Australian community across Sydney and across New South Wales, and, of course, we look forward to the day when we do see a Nepali Australian as a member of the Australian parliament—hopefully in the Liberal Party.

So that was a tremendous opportunity to engage with the Nepalese Australian community.