John Alexander (Bennelong, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to my friend and colleague the member for North Sydney for bringing forward this important motion. The word 'genocide' is a terrifying one. It is the chilling finality of homicide but on a mass scale—not killing one person, but killing one race, one ethnicity. The concept is as horrifying as it is unimaginable. That genocide exists at all is tragic. That we saw so many in the last century on so many different continents and in so many disparate situations is truly frightening. Some genocides are organised—the Germans. Some are chaotic and opportunistic—Rwanda. Destroying a race is nearly impossible and, thankfully, all genocides fail in that goal. Genocide leaves deep scars in communities. It is not just the loss of the victims, the empty seats at the dinner tables and children growing up as orphans. It's also the deep psychological cuts and the branding aimed to dehumanise before the killing starts. The effects of this dehumanisation live on for decades to come. What can we do?

You can't fix it or undo a genocide. You can't bring people back from the dead. Genocide leaves a legacy that can never be forgotten and will mark a people for centuries. Perpetrators can apologise. But what apology can compensate for the lives of millions lost? There is only one thing that can be done; we can discuss. There can be no healing without acknowledgment. The Jewish will never forgive and they will never forget, but they can start to heal at memorials around the world, including in Germany, where they can air their grievances, mourn openly, and continue a discourse with their former persecutors. The Armenians, similarly, will never forgive or forget the atrocities that were visited upon them in the fading light of the Ottoman Empire. There is nowhere they can mourn, no place to discuss, because the genocide is not acknowledged by the descendants of the perpetrators or by many countries around the world.

There are tens of thousands of Armenians in Australia. We have one of the largest Armenian diasporas in the world. We've had an Armenian Treasurer, and our biggest state was run by an Armenian until recently. Yet we still cannot officially acknowledge the genocide at a national level. My local council has and my state has, but the government I work in still has not. This is shameful. In my years representing the largest Armenian Australian populated electorate of Bennelong, I have witnessed that this community is made up of active and vital contributors to our contemporary understanding of what it means to be Australian. These Australians are the descendants, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren, of those who tragically died from starvation, deportation and death marches.

I have pushed during my time in this place to have the Armenian genocide recognised by our government. Not recognising the past's harrowing realities leaves room for mankind's most atrocious perpetrators to continue pursuing heinous crimes against humanity. The open wounds of the Armenian genocide are a primary example of this. In September 2021 I had the privilege of joining a federal Australian delegation to the republics of Armenia and Artsakh. I visited the Armenian genocide memorial with parliamentary colleagues intent on seeing motions like this lead to what we must do: recognise the Armenian, Assyrian and Greek genocides as a proud signatory to the UN convention we celebrate today. On 9 December 2021, the United Nations International Day of Commemoration and Dignity of the Victims of the Crime of Genocide and of the Prevention of this Crime, surely this is the time to acknowledge this genocide and give these people the opportunity they need to grieve. The word 'genocide' didn't come from a lab or through an experiment. It was first used in 1944 in reference to the killing of Armenians in the 1910s, the very intent of which coined this most odious of words. We should now recognise this for the sake of our Armenian Australians.

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