Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about my constituent Mrs Dorette Sayegh, an exceptional woman who recently celebrated her 80th birthday. Dorette lives in Greenvale Lakes in my electorate, and I was honoured to have been invited to share this very important milestone with her and her family. Dorette's elegance, her calm and her inspirational zest for life were palpable on that day. She not only has the distinction of being the first woman to qualify as a dentist in her home town of Basra, Iraq, but has also recently overcame breast cancer.

Dorette's family is typical of the many Iraqi families that live in my electorate. Overall, this well-qualified and loving family consists of six children, 10 grandchildren and a great-granddaughter named Josie. There are three doctors, a dentist, a chemist and a secondary school teacher amongst them. Although Dorette's story is individual and unique, it also has a common thread that runs through the emerging Iraqi Chaldean migrant communities she represents. This gracious lady's story begins in Basra, southern Iraq, where she was born to a Chaldean mother and an Anglo-Indian father. Dorette's father, Abdulmaseeh Samueal, passed away when she was six months old, and her mother, Regina, remarried years later but never had any other children. The family, especially her mother and aunt, who were both nurses, always encouraged Dorette to get an education. It was this encouragement that saw her become the first female dentist in Basra.

Dorette worked long hours in the public hospital system and saw up to 60 patients on any given day, but she was always very proud to be of service to her community. It was during that time that she met and married Afram, a doctor she met at college and who later became the director-general of the military hospital in Iraq. The couple had six children, three boys and three girls. For a while, life did seem to be on track, until the war broke out in Iraq and the uncertain future of the country forced them to flee and literally scatter across the globe—to New Zealand, to Sweden, to Canada and to America. Dorette's daughter Raghad and her husband, Dr Iamir Maloka, came to Australia in 2005 under the skilled migration program and settled in Melbourne. Worried about the welfare of their parents, Dorette and Afram, in Syria, Raghad and Iamir sponsored the elderly couple under the humanitarian visa program to come to Australia in 2009. For Afram and Dorette, their arrival in Australia was like arriving in paradise. They were overcome with how safe the streets were, the peaceful communities that they now lived amongst and, above all, what they perceived to be the government's very caring attitude towards them.

This family is a wonderful example of the calibre of people who are coming here from Iraq, mostly under the refugee and humanitarian program. I have on many occasions through my work on the Migration Committee drawn attention to the need for us and the government to recognise overseas qualifications and the importance of enabling capable people to make a contribution to Australia.