Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll second the motion. I'm pleased to second the motion moved by a Liberal member of parliament because this is a bipartisan endeavour, and there's concern right across the parliament for the situation that we have seen and are continuing to see in Sri Lanka. I acknowledge your work, as my neighbour, member for La Trobe. We keep it a secret that we actually do collaborate in the community interest and call each other and sort out community issues because it would be bad for both of our reputations if people knew that. It's a bit like you and me, member for Mitchell.

There is enormous sadness and anger at the situation in Sri Lanka, in this the 75th anniversary year of diplomatic relations between Australia and Sri Lanka. The economic crisis and, indeed, the civil unrest should never have happened. We should not be in this situation. I say that in that Sri Lanka is a country I know and love. When I was in high school, an exchange student from Sri Lanka lived with us for nine months—my Sri Lankan brother from up in Kandy, as we call each other. For the rest of her life, my mum—his Aussie mum—went backwards and forwards, spending months at a time in Kandy. People looked at the wedding photos she proudly brought back of her other son. She was always the white chick in the saree at weddings and family gatherings. It's a place I've visited on personal trips, and, indeed, it was the last place I visited before COVID.

Sri Lanka has a complex history. It's a multiethnic, multicultural, multireligious and multilingual country. But things could or should have been very different. Sri Lanka is a country blessed with its geography, sitting right off the coast of India near the entrance to the Bay of Bengal, in a part of the world that's so economically vibrant with a multicultural, multilingual population perfectly poised to engage in trade with the world. Someone said that, if Sri Lankan governments had followed perhaps a different course over many years, it should have been the Singapore of this part of the world. It has incredible natural resources and truly wonderful, beautiful people. And perhaps not all the legacy of colonialism is positive, but it has the base level of infrastructure in governance systems that should have set the country up to succeed. That's what my Sri Lankan friends tell me. Instead, we've seen a failure of governance over many years. I make that point in a very general sense.

People in my community have pointed out to me the endemic corruption over so many years. People can insert their own villains into this. I'm not going to make it a political speech; I'm not trying to set off stuff in the diaspora. But people have observed—and I think with a lot of evidence—that this is a sustained failure of governance over so many years that has led such a beautiful country to the place they're at now, that a moment of such promise economically after the end of the civil war is now a moment of such hardship and despair for so many people. Of course, it's not just for the people in Sri Lanka that we worry; it's for the more than 170,000 Australians of Sri Lankan origin, be they born in Sri Lanka or be they of Sri Lankan decent. Indeed, I think they're our 10th largest ethnic group in Australia, and we have one of the largest, if not the world's largest, Sri Lankan diaspora.

There's enormous pain and worry and anger here. Fifty per cent of these Australians live in Melbourne, many of them in the south-east. There are Tamils, Sinhalese, Burghers, Moors, Malays and people of Chinese origin, all of whom call themselves Sri Lankan Australians. People are not getting basic supplies. They're at risk of missing out on food. They can't get petrol. And the medical crisis is heart-wrenching. On one of our trips, my daughter's life was saved in a hospital in Sri Lanka. It's a story I've told elsewhere for other reasons. She diagnosed herself. She said, 'Dad, I think I've got a DVT.' She was a medical centre receptionist for her part-time uni job. I said, 'Oh, that's a bit dramatic, darling, have some porridge.' She said, 'No, no, we've got to go to the hospital; I've got a DVT.' Sure enough, our friends rallied to the cause and got us through, and it was a Sri Lankan specialist in the ICU ward who did indeed save her life from that blood clot. She will be on blood thinners for the rest of her life. So I know firsthand that the quality in many of the hospitals is world class. They have good surgeons, many of whom trained overseas, and they are doing good work, but they now can't get supplies. People are worried about their family and friends getting into a medical emergency. I applaud the Australian Sri Lankan community for their generosity, for raising money—so much of it for the children's hospitals—and for bringing the whole community together. I particularly applaud my long-term staff member and now volunteer Sithy Marikar, who I've known for many a year, for her leadership within the Sri Lankan Muslim community.

One final thing I would confirm is that the government will continue to provide humanitarian and development assistance. I'm also in dialogue with the minister for immigration and home affairs regarding some of the two-way visa issues, both about people not wanting to return, given the medical care issues right now, and also the need to continue to be reasonable on allowing people to visit.

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