Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the historic and momentous election last week of Senator Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America. I have been a fan of Barack Obama since I first heard him speak at the Democratic convention in 2004, while I was working at the United Nations in New York. This election result is a victory for reason, for calm and dignified leadership and for hope in the face of serious national and global challenges. I also pay tribute to the noble and gracious words of Senator John McCain in his concession speech. In honour of the occasion I would like to read a poem from Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney, from The Cure at Troy:

Human beings suffer,

they torture one another,

they get hurt and get hard.

No poem or play or song

can fully right a wrong

inflicted or endured.

The innocent in gaols

beat on their bars together.

A hunger-striker’s father

stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change

on the far side of revenge.

Believe that a further shore

is reachable from here.

Believe in miracles

and cures and healing wells.

Call the miracle self-healing:

The utter self-revealing

double-take of feeling.

If there’s fire on the mountain

Or lightning and storm

And a god speaks from the sky

That means someone is hearingthe outcry and the birth-cryof new life at its term.