Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health) Share this | Hansard source

There is a thing I like to say whenever someone asks me about my electorate. I say, 'I am the luckiest MP in the country.' When I say it, I'm not referring to our beaches or the beautiful opal waters of Port Phillip Bay, and I'm not referring to the sparkling leaves in the hills alongside our vineyards or to our walking tracks, where a daily collision with a koala, an echidna or a roo is pretty common. I'm referring to our people, the people of Flinders. Here's how I describe it: they bring their best selves to meet with me every single day. They bring their kindness, their generosity and their sense of adventure, combined with a sense of resilience and responsibility to one another. They look after each other.

I saw it on the weekend at Cliffex Meats in Rosebud, where hundreds of people turned up to thank the CFA of Rosebud and Rye for fighting fires across the state. The people of Rosebud are of modest means, but Bec and Blair put a call out and people turned up and stuffed their $20 and $50 notes into those plastic jars, and our firies chomped down on a snag with some sauce. I saw it at the Boneo market, where people stopped for a chat to check in on one another and, there too, to stuff more money in those CFA tins, and then at the Portsea Swim Classic, where I was worried about everyone's welfare because of the easterly gale, but the organisers looked at me with a bit of a giggle and said, 'We've got this, Zoe, because we're lifesavers.'

Next week, I will join another 50 people as they take the final steps in their marriage to Australia on Australia Day. That's how I like to think of citizenship ceremonies—they are like a marriage, particularly for those who've been in a long-term de facto relationship with this wondrous land. Where I'm from, it's not uncommon to meet someone becoming Australian who's lived here for 50 years already. The choice to become a citizen is a welcome one. In taking the oath, our new Australians pledge loyalty to Australia, to care for our nation and our shared future and to embrace in perpetuity the blessings of this land—because the blessings of this land are many.

As a country, we have been particularly good at imparting the notion that, when you come to Australia, you join our way of life—a way of life so amply demonstrated that Sunday night in mid-December when families gathered on a warm, early summer evening at Bondi Beach to have a barbecue, to play games, to have a swim or a surf or to just catch up. We say it less loudly, but we ask you, in coming here, to leave the troubles of your earlier homeland behind, whether ancient hatreds or contemporary wars. We ask you, 'Please do not bring them here,' and, in return, we say to you, 'Here you are safe.'

Since 8 October 2023, I've no longer been sure that that is Australia's promise. I learned that lesson two years before—to the day—15 innocent people lost their lives on Bondi Beach. I was in Israel, on the Australian parliament's only bipartisan trip to Israel since 7 October, so we could see for ourselves what had happened there. During that visit, I put a single photo up on Instagram—standing with my mate, the member for Macnamara, on the Mount of Olives—and I wrote, 'I am proud to stand on and in Israel with this bloke.'

A few hours later, the comments started coming in—hate filled references to 'violent colonial oppressing regimes', 'genocide and terrorism', 'the sound of children being brutally murdered'. People suggested I lacked moral fibre. 'You make me sick.' 'I'm disgusted in you.' 'You are vile.' 'Free Palestine,' many wrote—and one odd one: 'If you've ever wondered how atrocities like the Holocaust happen, it's because of apathetic politicians like you.'

I came back to Australia and I talked publicly and often of what I had seen in Israel, the horror of 7 October, the slaughter of innocent people in their homes and the rape and mutilation of women—the targeting, in particular, of those who had sought to live in peace with the people of Gaza in the border-town kibbutzim. And then the letters started coming in, first a trickle and then a flood of gratitude that somebody, anybody, was speaking out for the Jewish people not only in Israel but here in Australia, where they needed to hear it. The nature of the letters is best summed up by the one from Amy from Melbourne, who said:

My young family moved to Melbourne from the States in 2010 for what we thought would be a few years… We never went back—partly because the Melbourne Jewish community has been an unbelievable safe and supportive place for us to live…

I have felt rocked to my core since the 7th of October…

I watched your interview on Sky News and for the first time in months really felt safe.

You speaking out means everything to me…

Others who wrote to me spoke of a possible return to Israel, despite the war and despite the danger, in the hope that they would feel safer there than they were feeling in Melbourne and Sydney.

In my very first words in this place, in my maiden speech, I pondered: what happens here in this parliament and in this country when we find ourselves surrounded on these benches by men and women who have never read Primo Levi's If This Is a Man? On 14 December I realised that day had already come.

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