Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Every year on 3 December, the International Day of People with Disability, I hold the Blair Disability Links expo in the Brassall Shopping Centre in Ipswich. The event is organised and very ably run by Kylie Stoneman from my electorate office. Kylie has been running the event since our inaugural expo was held in 2010, and, although this year parliamentary duties prevent me from being there, I am sure she has everything under control as I speak here today. The event would not be such a resounding success without the support of local organisations such as Focal Extended, Our House, Allara, Ipswich Stroke Support Group, and FSG Australia Ipswich, just to name a few. Also, wider organisations like MAC1 and Carers Queensland are involved.

A key component of Blair Disability Links is the Blair Disability Links information kit, which I update and relaunch each year. It outlines all the disability support groups locally and in South-East Queensland relevant to Blair. The kit consists of details and contacts for a wide variety of disability groups across Ipswich, the Somerset region, South-East Queensland and, indeed, beyond. Since its inception, we have distributed about 10,000 copies of the Blair Disability Links information kit through service providers and at my mobile offices, and people have called at my office especially to request a copy of it. This is very important, because in my electorate we have 3,800 people with disabilities and about 4,300 carers.

My colleague Senator Jan McLucas, who was Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Carers at the time, attended and launched the inaugural Blair Disability Links event in 2010. About a dozen disability service providers attended our first year. That doubled the next year, and last year we had 500 people attending on the day, to the benefit also of businesses in the Brassall Shopping Centre. This year about 40 service providers are holding stalls tomorrow. The Blair Disability Links event has become a very important one in my electorate. Not only do service providers get the opportunity to display their services and chat directly to people and provide guidance and information; they have the additional advantage of being able to network with each other. A familiar theme among the service providers and their clients is their shared excitement about the rollout of the former federal Labor government's National Disability Insurance Scheme.

I acknowledge and thank all the service providers who participate in Blair Disability Links and who work hard to improve and enhance the lives of people living with disability in the Ipswich and Somerset regions. I hope the coalition government honours our previous commitment to make Ipswich the home of a regional office for DisabilityCare Australia in the future. (Time expired)

Malcolm Turnbull (Wentworth, Liberal Party, Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As honourable members will be aware tonight is the sixth night of Hanukkah, an important Jewish festival which celebrates the success of the Jewish people in reconsecrating the temple in Jerusalem in about 165 BCE, which had been defiled by the Hellenistic monarchy in Syria, which at that stage was ruling Judea and that part of the world. Judas Maccabeus and his supporters rebelled, and when they finally recaptured the temple they did not have enough sanctified oil to burn for more than one night—and they had to keep it burning for eight nights. The miracle of Hanukkah is that this one flask of oil burned for eight nights. It is celebrated by the Jewish people, and honoured by all people, as an example of Jewish courage, indomitability, resilience and of course the hope of the Jewish people always to be a light unto the world. When you consider that the two great monotheistic religions of the world, Christianity and Islam, are both directly derived from Judaism, there is some considerable force in that.

But in the midst of all this light there can sometimes be, and regrettably all too often is, darkness. On 25 October in my electorate of Wentworth there was an attack on some Jewish families who were returning home after their traditional Shabbat dinner on Friday night. They were attacked by a group of eight men who abused them with racial slurs and anti-Semitic language. It left one of them, 66-year-old Eli Behar, unconscious with internal bleeding in his head; his wife, of a similar age, was also injured. Their son Shlomo had a finger broken and required stitches in his head. Two others were also injured and abused in this attack.

Everybody has condemned this attack, and it is important that we always do that. Racial attacks, racism, racial abuse—whether against Jews or anybody else—are utterly unacceptable in our society. So, as we celebrate and honour the festival of Hanukkah, it is important to remember that, just as we celebrate that light and that indomitable spirit of the Jewish people, we stand up and oppose racism and racial abuse—in whatever form, against whomever, by whomever—in our society.