STATEMENTS ON INDULGENCE
Ms JORDAN-BAIRD (Gorton) (16:50): I seek leave to continue my statement. Leave granted. Ms JORDAN-BAIRD: I'd like to update this chamber and provide some more detail about the community meeting I had last week with the wonderful Nepali community from Victoria and across Melbourne's west.
We have a wonderful community leader, Ram Kumar Shrestha, who was kind enough to organise this incredibly important meeting at a meaningful and important time for Nepali Victorians and Nepali Australians across the country, given the devastating floods we're seeing in Nepal and Tibet, China. I met with a number of people, including Mahadev Dhanuk, who's very involved in the Non-Resident Nepali Association; Sudeep Shrestha, the president of the Nepalese Association of Victoria; Dr Raju Adhikari, a CSIRO senior scientist and the founder president of NAV; Anchi Sherpa, the president of the Sherpa Association of Victoria—an incredibly important association we have down in Victoria representing the Sherpa community; and Siraj Shuhyta Kali, a local from the Melton Nepalese community.
We have an Australian Nepalese multicultural centre in Diggers Rest, in the north-west of Melbourne. It was wonderful to convene this community meeting at my office to hear straight from them about the impact that these devastating floods are having on their community across Victoria and across Australia. We are home to one of the most wonderful thriving communities of Nepali Australians, which is a wonderful thing.
But a lot of our community members have families that are impacted by the devastating floods we've seen in Nepal and Tibet, China. This is a long road to recovery. It will take weeks, months and years for this community across the seas to recover from this devastation.
Thousands of people remain unaccounted for and missing, which is truly unimaginable—as is the sense of grief and loss that this community is feeling at the moment. I make it clear to my community in Melbourne's western suburbs as well as the community in Victoria and the community in Australia more broadly—I note the member for Nicholls is in the chamber; I'm not sure of the size of his Nepali community, but I'm sure it is there and it is thriving, and I'm sure he feels the same about his community there, too—that this is a long road to recovery.
The wonderful thing about being federal representatives of this Australian parliament is that our offices can provide consular assistance for these communities that are experiencing this unimaginable loss and devastation; I made it clear in the meeting that I had with community leaders that that was something we were happy to do. A lot of them have family members there.
No-one in that meeting had anyone that was unaccounted for, thankfully, which is a huge relief, but they had many people in their network that were very much feeling the loss and the grief of what their community is going through. As I said previously, I, as the federal member for Gorton, and everyone in this chamber stand with our Nepali Australian community.
I note that, while this is a long road to recovery, the Australian government is behind them to support them.