Anthony Byrne (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Neighbour Day is Australia's annual celebration of community, encouraging people to connect with their neighbours. Neighbours matter, never more so than we've demonstrated in dealing with COVID as we did last year, particularly in sticking together. Knowing your neighbours and the broader community is clearly important, and that is why we're encouraging everyone, if they can, to celebrate in a COVID-safe way Neighbour Day 2021, which is generally held on the last Sunday of each March, which will be 28 March this year.

The theme of this Neighbour Day this year is 'Every day is neighbour day'. As I was alluding to, particularly given how collectively we saw off the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic by sticking together as a community, I think it's a good reminder about that sense of community that helped us get through and why we should stay connected to our neighbours. One of the things that I discussed when I caught up with Ruth Murray and Jenny Colvin—they are two amazing and remarkable women who used to live in Doveton and have now shifted to Cranbourne and currently live at Lifestyle Casey Fields. They are people who embody what the sense of community is. During COVID they were posting a song on Facebook that Jenny would sing each day. It's a sense of who we are as people. We are humans and we need to interact with each other and protect each other. We need to matter and care. Neighbourhood Day is a good way of celebrating that.

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