Last week was a really difficult and dark one for our country. I finished that week with the member for Holt. She invited me to her community to celebrate the first of what will be many Diwali events. It was a beautiful night with music and dancing and laughing and togetherness. For Hindu families, Diwali celebrates Lord Rama's return home, and, for Sikh families, it marks Guru Hargobind Sahib Ji's release from captivity and the freedom that he secured for others. They're different stories and different cultures, but they share the same message: lightness over dark and the triumph of kindness over hate and understanding over ignorance.

We saw this unspeakable act of violence and aggression occur on Monday, and, on Friday, I stood on that beautiful, warm Melbourne night on the growing outskirts of Melbourne, and we lit sparklers and we ate homemade sweet treats, and that community sent me back to Canberra full of their thoughts and their well wishes for Helen Haines. That's Australia, and that's the energy and the vigour and the beauty of south-east Melbourne that I get to bring into this chamber week after week.

I feel very lucky, as I think almost all of us do in this chamber, to say that the member for Indi wasn't just a colleague; she was a friend. Helen has an amazing passion for housing in the regions, and I was lucky to work with her on this topic over a number of years. She would come into my office, always bringing volunteers from her community to come and observe the meeting and understand how they could advocate for the things their community needed. She treated me like a person. Helen would always come through first asking about my husband, about my children, about my family before we got down to business, and then we would get down to business. Helen was warm.

Someone talked a little bit earlier about how she's a nurse. She wasn't just a nurse; she was a midwife. If you've ever been through a difficult labour—perhaps not you, Speaker, but I've been through a couple—Helen Haines is the person you would want next to you, holding your hand, not just warmly, empathically sharing the experience with you but making you believe that you could do a big and hard thing. That's how she made me feel too as a government minister about a topic that she cared about very passionately.

I feel strongly that the discussion we're having right now shouldn't be just centred on politics and politicians. What is going on in our country right now is not about the people who sit in this chamber or even just the institution of our democracy. We're living in a time where our social fabric is being stretched. It's being pushed and pulled in every direction. I think about our teachers and the interactions that they're increasingly having, about our nurses, our medical staff around the country, about our retail workers—anyone who has a job that puts them at a direct interface with the public is experiencing some version of this. We've got an opportunity here to take stock of the way we are treating each other in Australia at the moment and chart a pathway back to the egalitarian civility that makes our country so unique and special. The MPs who've spoken today have shared a strong view that that's what we need to do together.

I want to say something to Helen's staff. We heard the read a statement from Kaz on behalf of Helen's team during the week. I just want to thank you and just say I cannot imagine what you've gone through over this last week. I've never really understood this, but there's a bit of a sense of malign sometimes about being a political staffer. The truth is that these staffers are the best and most loyal servants of our democracy. I say, to every staffer—if you're a ministerial staffer, a shadow ministerial staffer—working on the front line of an electorate office, we thank you and we acknowledge the deep difficulty of the work that you are having to do. Speaker, I'm sure your staff are in the same position. I mean, the things that my staff have to do to protect me from some of the things that are out there and the abusive phone calls they need to deal with. They are the people who trawl through my social media trying to find the difference between a vitriolic message and something that's got a death threat or a rape threat that needs to be reported. You're doing amazing work for us, and I just want you to know how much we appreciate that.

To the people of Wangaratta: what's happened to Helen is not what defines you. It is the acts of incredible community, neighbourliness and heroism. The people of Wangaratta saved Helen Haines's life, and we will be forever grateful to them for that. Like others who've spoken today, I can't wait to see Helen. I can't wait to see her back in this chamber where she belongs, bringing that fierce, warm advocacy into the chamber for the subjects that she was most passionate about. Get well, Helen. The people of Hotham are pulling for you 100 per cent.