CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS

Mr HAWKE (Mitchell) (16:18): I rise to join the chorus of parliamentarians in expressing our compassion to the people of Nepal for the recent disaster the Prime Minister spoke about in the House of Representatives. I want to thank members of the community in Western Sydney, so many of whom have reached out to me—people I've known over many years and excellent migrants in this country—who had family members in the region, both on the Nepali side of the border and in China and in parts of Tibet when that wall of water just swept whole populations and their dwellings away in those shocking scenes that we saw on our television screens across the world.

I do want to thank the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and the government for the response that Australia has provided. It's very appropriate. We have a great relationship with the country of Nepal.

We have beautiful people who've come here and made a great home in Australia. Those are wonderful Australians who have family and people who were there visiting family, and they are to be given every assistance that we can provide them. I do want to thank in particular the actual officers on the ground, the disaster and recovery team that was sent to Nepal in two groups, searching for people in very difficult circumstances, working with authorities that are overloaded, trying to relay messages back home in a timely way, especially when you've got relatives on the phone, as you do as members of parliament.

I thank my staff, who've worked so hard with the actual geolocation information that they think they have of missing relatives—very, very difficult content. I know everyone's been working around the clock in my office, in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, in the disaster and recovery team, in the government, in the foreign ministry and also the Foreign Minister, who are doing everything we can to provide assistance in what is a wide-scale tragedy.

I ask the Australian government to continue its excellent efforts in lobbying. We've sought access to parts of Tibet and things that have not been available to the government of Nepal from China, and our good relationship there would help us ensure that we can do our best for people who are still missing and their family members here. I know we're all trying in this parliament to work in a very difficult environment among people's sovereign borders, but we urge everybody to have that common humanity to allow search and rescue to just get on with the job that we all want to do, which is to find people and find out what happened to people.

I thank the Nepali community of Western Sydney—beautiful people, great migrants. To anybody online who has said anything negative about these migrants to this country—and there has been an unfortunate group of people who have—these are outstanding Australians. They are very welcome communities.

They are part of the fabric of this country, and those comments are completely out of place. To the people of Nepal, Australia stands with you. We stand with the Australian-Nepali community as well in this time of crisis, and I thank the government for the work they've been doing.