Julie-Ann Campbell (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

A very special thing happened in 2026—a very rare thing. We saw a thing that many people have never seen before—indeed, that no living person has seen before—because this year we saw the coalescence of Lunar New Year, of Lent and of Ramadan. These are celebrations that are felt widely and strongly in my local community, a local community that is the most multicultural in all of Queensland. In the seat of Moreton, 39.1 per cent of people were born overseas and 35.9 per cent of people speak a language other than English at home. We have so many different ethnicities and faiths that we celebrate in our community together. So it doesn't matter whether you say, 'Xin nian kuai le,' whether you say, 'Eid Mubarak' or whether you're about to say, 'Happy Easter.' These are all celebrations that bring our southside community in Brisbane together, and it's a celebration of what makes us so unique and strong. These celebrations are not so dissimilar, because each and every one of them brings together our community, brings together friends and brings together the family, and we celebrate with food, often too much food. I think what they really demonstrate is that our similarities are so many more than our differences.

I want to take the opportunity to thank the member for Barton for bringing this important private members' business to this place, because not only is it an opportunity to showcase our own local communities, but it's also an opportunity to ensure that their voices are heard in this place, in the nation's capital. I'm incredibly proud to be an Australian of Chinese heritage, and I'm incredibly proud that, along with the member for Barton and so many others, the government benches look like Australia. They're what Australia looks like. We have all different heritages, but we come together with the same values, and those values are Australian values.

From my local electorate, I want to showcase just a few of the fantastic events that local organisations have been running. Just last weekend, we celebrated Eid, and we celebrated it with Crescent AusIndia with Yousuf, who heads up that organisation, and it was held at the Islamic College of Brisbane, a college, like so many schools, where the kids come together as a community and help cook food. They're actually very good at futsal, and their champion futsal players are their women's side. The person who leads that school is Ali Kadri. At Crescent AusIndia's Eid festival, we got to hear the electric sitar. We also got to eat at Baskin-Robbins ice cream while we were there too. It's that moulding of things within our community that makes it special.

We got to celebrate Chinese New Year at the Chung Tian Temple with the Venerable Manwang and President Michelle Lo. It's an enormous temple. While we were there, we signed new bricks that are going to go towards making the next extension of that temple to make it bigger and better and to make sure that more people can be welcomed through its doors. There was lion dancing, and there was food, and there were people from all across our community who made it special. This Easter, my daughter Margaret has already got her Easter basket selected and placed out so that, when we go to all of the local Easter egg hunts put on by local churches, she'll have the opportunity to go and visit both an Easter Bunny and the kind volunteers putting those events on.

We know that it's a challenging time across the globe, but celebrating and bringing people together—those solutions are local. They're special. They help with social cohesion, and they're the antidote that we need to a rising temperature in this globe.

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