STATEMENTS

Senator CASH (Western Australia—Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) (10:11): I rise on behalf of the coalition to contribute to this motion. On the morning of 26 August, high in the Langtang range on the border between Nepal and Tibet, part of a glacier gave way. What came down was not a flood as we here understand the word to be.

It was a wall of ice, rock and mud, moving with such force that seismometers on the other side of the world recorded it as an earthquake. It ran for close to 100 kilometres. Villages that had stood for generations were gone within the hour.

More than 1,300 people are confirmed dead, and thousands more remain missing. This is the deadliest disaster Nepal has suffered since the 2015 earthquake. Communities that were reachable by car a fortnight ago cannot now be reached at all.

Tibetan communities are also suffering. Thirty-six Australians still remain unaccounted for. They were travelling in separate pilgrimage and tour groups.

The shadow minister for foreign affairs, Ted O'Brien, made clear how deeply concerned the coalition is for those Australians and the families waiting for a phone call. As the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Taylor, emphasised, after meeting with the Nepalese Australian community in Western Sydney, this is a terrible tragedy that cuts so close to home. Mr Taylor shared that his very first international journey nearly 40 years ago began in Nepal, where he first came to know the extraordinary warmth, generosity and resilience of the Nepalese people.

He and Mr O'Brien have both made clear on behalf of the coalition that our desire to help these communities get back on their feet rises above politics. Australia is actually now home to one of the fastest growing Nepalese communities in the world, in my own state of Western Australia as much as anywhere else. They work hard and they look after their own.

Many send money back to their parents and villages, and for the past fortnight they have been raising money for a country they currently can't get home to. To every Nepalese Australian listening today: you are not grieving alone. We know that the physical distance from home right now only deepens the agony of uncertainty.

One moment, though, says something about both countries. The Nepal cricket team was here in Australia when the flood came. Before their match in Darwin, the ground fell silent for a minute.

Those young men were a very long way from home with no idea whether their own families were alive, and an Australian crowd stood up with them. That is the sort of thing this country does without being asked. Behind the headlines, we must also recognise the sheer scale of the hardship continuing on the ground today.

In rugged valleys cut off from the outside world, rescue teams are navigating treacherous terrain where bridges have vanished and roads have been swallowed by miles of thick mud. The physical toll on local responders has been immense. I record the coalition's thanks to the consular officers of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade who have been working tirelessly on the ground and behind the scenes, to the Australian Defence Force and to the disaster response team now working on the Nepalese-Tibetan border.

We acknowledge, too, the Nepal army and the Nepalese police, who have carried the overwhelming weight of this and lost people of their own in doing that. To the government, the people of Nepal, the families in Tibet who have suffered alongside them and every Australian family still just waiting on that phone call, the coalition extends its deepest sympathy.