Clare O'Neil (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Housing) Share this | Hansard source

This year Australians made a choice. They chose a future shaped by fairness, ambition and care. They chose Labor, and they rejected division and negativity. What an incredible victory we had on 3 May. Ninety-four Labor members now sit in this place, each of them bringing with eloquence the hopes and dreams of their communities, the strength of their convictions, and the promise and vision of a better Australia. I'm honoured to stand amongst them.

One of the very best experiences I know we've shared since the election has been hearing the first speeches of the 24 new Labor members in this place. I was so moved by every single one of these individual journeys of 24 people who have come to our chamber through very different pathways, through a variety of life experiences and from a plethora of backgrounds. They come together to sit with us in a Labor caucus that, really, for the first time, represents modern Australia. That's something that I am incredibly proud to be a part of.

I joined the Labor Party when I was 16 years old because I believed, as I now know, that Labor governments—particularly back-to-back Labor governments—change the lives of the people that we care about and reshape our country. This will be the 12th federal Labor government that Australia has had since the Second World War, and in that time our party—the one I am so proud to be a part of—has laid the foundations of our beautiful, great, modern country.

Medicare, paid parental leave, superannuation, land rights, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, the accord, the National Disability Insurance Scheme—these achievements were not accidents. They did not happen by inevitability. They happened because brilliant Labor people got themselves elected to parliament, stood up for what they believed in and reshaped our nation. We now have the opportunity over the coming three years to do it again. We have an amazing opportunity to build on that legacy. We're going to govern with purpose, and we are going to deliver for the people who placed their trust in us.

I sometimes think that people outside of politics may not realise the complexity, the difficulty and the amazing feat of running a campaign in your local community. Our campaign in Hotham was built on the shoulders of volunteers who gave us their weekends, their evenings and their hearts. The Hotham branch members, in particular, were the beating heart of this operation. We could not have done it without you, comrades. We are so grateful for your efforts. Deputy Speaker Mascarenhas, I know you would have seen the same thing in your community of Swan.

The commitment, the grit and the grace that my community showed me—the work they did with me—got us to a point where Hotham is now the safest Labor seat in Victoria. I can tell you, we have lots of ups and downs in politics, but that endorsement from my community means everything—that the people I represent in this chamber voted in such numbers to return our government to its position to be able to continue the good work that is improving their lives.

I want to come back to our Hotham branch members, because I'm thinking back to January, when it all really began in earnest. We knew it was an election year, we gathered together at the Oakleigh RSL and we asked our community to get involved, mainly branch members but not all of them. We asked people to step up and to be part of something bigger than themselves and make that big contribution to their local neighbourhood. We did train stations throughout January and then all the way up to that epic election day on 3 May. It was four months of hard work and probably a year of preparation before that.

We had hundreds of volunteers helping us out—giving out flyers, phone banking, doorknocking and letterboxing. I can't thank everyone individually, but I want to give a few special mentions. To Andrew Williamson, Mark Giles and Mark Harding, three marvellous south-east Melbourne men: thank you for your leadership, your expertise, your tireless support. To our phenomenal yard sign team—and Deputy Speaker you know, as I do, the work that goes into identifying the sites all over the community where you're going to have your yard signs and making those yard signs, putting them out and then taking them down again after the election—Alan Ide, Peter Wenborn, Gregory Neal and Dolphin Sharma: thank you so much for your efforts across Hotham.

We had a lot of phone banking going on, but I want to mention by name Phillip Graves, Amuna Ebenezer, Sue Rocco and Olivia Carroll. Thank you so much for the work you did connecting us into our community and talking to my constituents about the work that was being done.

As always in Hotham, we have incredible support from our proud multicultural communities. I am very lucky in Hotham to live and work in a community where most of my constituents either were born overseas or have a parent who was born overseas. I want to thank our fantastic Vietnamese community—Dr Kimson Vu and SEMVAC—for running phone banks nearly every day, as well as the AUMSAI Sansthan Temple for providing lunch to all our booth captains, as well as our wonderful local councillors, including Nicky Lou and Richard Lim, and the Cambodian Association and their president, my dear friend Youhorn Chea. Thank you so much for your support and leadership.

To Jane Rollason, Glenda Garde, Pat Dillion, Anne Barker, Joy Graves, Paul Klisaris, Hadi Saab, Lana Formosa, and Luca Ragni: thank you for going above and beyond; I will never forget your efforts.

Behind every great campaign is an amazing office, and I want to acknowledge my electorate office staff in this last term. To Natalie Durkin, Lachlan Newman, Jane Foley, Natalia Genovese, Sophie Federico, Elijah Oakford, Dylan Kumar and Emma McGrath-Cohen: what an amazing team we were. I love you guys so much. Thank you so much for your kindness, determination and public service.

Election day was absolutely epic. We had hundreds of volunteers staffing booths, we had some experienced branchies who were showing that leadership role and we had first campaigners alongside them, and I hope everyone who came along for this ride with us will be back there again in a few years time. With this amazing momentum, I'm really excited about what we can achieve next election.

Being the member for Hotham is the absolute privilege of my life, and none of us come to this chamber without the support of our families. I want to thank Fee for her help and for the care that she shows to our whole family. We would not survive without you, Fee. I want to thank my mum, Anne O'Donovan, who taught me everything I know about life, really, and she's always at the end of the phone when Brendan and I are desperate for a date night—thanks, Mum. To my beautiful kids, Elvis, Louis and Greta: the joy these three bring me is just incredible. They're the best. And to my partner, Brendan, who is my best friend and the finest person I know: a life being married to a cabinet minister can be pretty thankless and unpleasant at times, but he believes in what I do, I believe in and support what he does, and I love him from the bottom of my heart.

I want to mention some specific groups around Hotham who deserve a little bit of recognition in this parliament. Hotham is a place of extraordinary diversity. It is just amazing. If you have not come and visited us in Melbourne's beautiful great south-east, you need to get down there. We have something from every part of the world, the best of every part of the world, represented in our community. Around dinner tables in Hotham, you'll hear Tamil, Khmer, Mandarin, Dari, Greek, Hindi, Vietnamese and pretty much every other language there is in the world, and they're spoken with pride. My community is home to temples, churches, mosques, market gardens and manufacturing floors. It is a place where Australia's fantastic story of opportunity is being written every single day. In Hotham, difference is not just tolerated; it's celebrated, and it's the very best thing about living in our beautiful area.

We have a large and very important Indian community that's growing in my electorate of Hotham, and I want to say namaste to my beautiful constituents—in particular those from the Sri Venkata Krishna Brundavana temple in Murrumbeena, who recently hosted me for the most amazing visit. It was beautiful, and I wish I had the capacity to go back there every single week with my family. The temple leaders, Ashwin Bindu, Ranesh Rao and Raj Saini, are incredible leaders in our community. This is a community that really got going around 2015, when the priest house was first established. We have seen devotion in this particular community grow massively across Melbourne, and when I visited recently I got to experience this teeming joy and energy of celebration around spirituality. I just wish I could paint the picture for you: a suburban street and a community of hundreds of people gathering together to celebrate, to support each other and to build and support a great life in our country. It just made me so damn proud to be Australian, and I absolutely loved it. So I want to acknowledge that community and thank them for welcoming me so beautifully. I can't wait to come back and visit you again very shortly.

Hotham is a place of service, and I want to acknowledge some outstanding individuals from my electorate who were appropriately recognised in this year's Australia Day awards. Jim Magee OAM, my old friend from Bentleigh East, was a very long-serving councillor and a fierce advocate for all-abilities access and for protecting services for the vulnerable. I think we've got a Jim Magee in lots of parts of Australia, and we're lucky to have them. Jim is one of those amazing people who is, in every walk of his life, making a contribution and trying to help people step up and get involved, whether it's in sport or education or aged care or any of the other things that he's passionate about. He's championed so much good that's happened in our local area, and he remains a staunch supporter of access to sports and recreation for people of different abilities, and also of growth and prosperity in Hotham. Jim, mate, I'm so pleased for you. Congratulations. It is very well deserved.

We also honour Senior Sergeant James Egan APM of Bentleigh East, who passed away in November 2024. He has an amazing story. He was a proud Bangerang and Gunditjmara man. James was—would you believe it?—the longest-serving Aboriginal employee in Victoria Police. He stayed in that organisation. He was a mentor. He was a trainer. He was a change-maker who helped shape the next generation of officers and improve cultural safety right across the force. It was an appropriate and really important moment for our community to celebrate the work of this remarkable individual, who received an award on Australia Day

We remember Adam McKay OAM of Oakleigh, who was, of course, the founder of Helping Hoops. This is a charity that revolutionised access to basketball for children and young people. Adam's legacy lives on in the thousands of lives that he touched through sport and inclusion. I pay tribute to his work today, and I'm so pleased that the Australia Day Council was able to give that appropriate recognition to him on Australia Day.

In this new term of the Albanese government, we're delivering real investment for the people of Hotham. One of those big investments that we were able to announce during the election campaign was almost $4 million to create equitable, inclusive and accessible playing fields and parks across the electorate—and this includes a few local projects that I'm very excited to champion: We've got Bailey Reserve in East Bentleigh, which will receive new facilities for women and girls, supporting clubs like the Glen Eira Moorabbin Softball Association, or GEMSA. I have to tell you about GEMSA. What an amazing group of women. I had so much fun with Minister Wells going out and announcing the grant for their organisation. I don't think I've ever felt the warmth of inclusion at the level I felt at this sporting club before. I spoke to so many women who are involved in the club who, frankly, have had some troubles in other parts of their lives. This club was that place where they felt at home, where they felt loved and accepted for whoever they were. GEMSA, I think you're amazing, and I'm so pleased to be able to support you, so let's get that grant out the door and your beautiful new club rooms built. We're also going to see investments at Ross Reserve in Noble Park that will see female inclusive change rooms and upgrades to athletic tracks. We've got Jack Edwards Reserve, which is coming online pretty soon. We've got Princess Highway Reserve in East Oakleigh and Namatjira Park in Clayton South, which will also receive funding, and we're pretty excited to see what that's going to mean for accessibility, safety and inclusion in parks right across my electorate.

I want to mention one piece of Hotham that I haven't talked about yet. I am so lucky to represent the heart and soul of Melbourne's Greek community. In fact, I get to not only represent Oakleigh in the federal parliament but live in Oakleigh myself. I really can't put into words the warmth and the love with which this community embraces not just me but my family—my kids, my husband and my mum. It's amazing to live amongst Greek Australians. This is a culture that celebrates food, art, philosophy, politics, caffeine, drinking and dancing. So, I'm just like, 'Tick, tick, tick; this is fantastic; I love it!' This community is absolutely brilliant. It was wonderful during the election campaign to be able to work with this community on a really big contribution that our government will be making to what is really the centre of this community—the Greek Orthodox Church of Oakleigh Sts Anargiri and Oakleigh Grammar, which is the school that sits next door. These are two absolute institutions of Greek Melbourne. They perform incredibly important roles for our Greek community. It was fantastic, during the election, to be able to announce $4.5 million to back culture and inclusion through the construction of a Greek cultural club in Oakleigh. I want to thank Chris Damatopoulos and Mark Robertson for their absolutely impeccable advocacy around this project. This is going to mean a transformative difference to our ability to pass on that incredible Greek culture to the next generation. We have a vision together of a community centre where we have older people doing computer classes, young people learning Greek dancing, young people learning the Greek language and people who are that bit older finalising and putting those finishing touches on their grasp of an ancient language. This is a really exciting development for the community. I want to thank those two leaders, and I also want to mention our school captains, Alexander Korlos and Natasha Kaniadakis. The students at this school are just incredible. I loved visiting the school during the campaign. I'm there really frequently, and they're just a bunch of legends, so thanks so much, guys.

Another important area of contribution that our government has is to support our local Ukrainian community. Our government has led the country in the strongest possible condemnation of the illegal and immoral invasion of Ukraine by Russia. We continue to work at a diplomatic level to do whatever we can to support the Ukrainian government. But I want to acknowledge the extraordinary Ukrainian community that we have here in Australia. I'm very lucky to have a Ukrainian community centre in my electorate, in Noble Park, and it was fantastic to be able to announce an investment of $225,000 during the election. That money will restore and enhance the Ukrainian community centre in Noble Park. They are a fantastic community. They were fantastic even before the invasion, but now this community is welcoming, supporting and providing that beautiful love and support to Ukrainians who have fled the war. So it's fantastic to be able to provide that practical support to this community, and I thank the community for welcoming me to their art show a couple of months ago.

Thank you so much for the time of the parliament to talk about some of these critical issues in my electorate. I can't wait to contribute more as we work together in this term ahead.

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