Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am going to start my grievance by talking about something positive, just to lay the context!

I had the best weekend. On Friday night—or it might have been Saturday night—I went to a Sufi concert and I heard a great band called the Australian Qawwali Party, a group of Australian boys who perform Sufi music. If you have not heard Sufi music, Madam Deputy Speaker, you should: it stays with you for days and helps you deal with whatever comes! It is quite remarkable.

The next day I went to an Eid festival, Eid al-Adha, for the festival of the sacrifice, and watched some Pakistani-Australian boys dance their traditional dances. Then I went on to meet Rohullah Hussaini, who is a young Hazara refugee, recently granted permanent residence, having arrived here by boat when he was 14. He is riding a bicycle from Swan Hill, through Melbourne to Sydney and to Canberra. Then I went off to an Ahmadiyah youth festival, which also included on the panel people of Jewish, Kenyan and Somali backgrounds—you name it. I have spent the weekend with the world in my community, and it was a wonderful place to be.

It is of great concern to me that in the last few days, perhaps through some careless words of members of the government, there has been an impression given that some people in this place do not welcome the people that I spent time with over the weekend. I am not going to go into the details; I think that we have all heard some of those statements. It causes me considerable pain that some of these extraordinary young men, who are making lives for themselves, might feel that they are unwelcome. So I want to share with you, as my grievance, the understanding that I get from my community, because of the extraordinary position that I hold and the fact that, as a member of parliament, I get invited in in ways that others do not. I get to see this extraordinary place that we call Parramatta in a way that most do not.

I am a musician by birth, really—

An honourable member: A very talented one too!

When I practice, I am not too bad! But I am a musician by birth, and I was trained in the classical Western tradition. I started learning when I was three. I gave my first recital when I was six. I practised anywhere between two and three hours a day all through primary school and high school and eight hours a day for quite a few years after that. When you study a tradition which draws on 1,000 years at least of that tradition, you really are working with something that human beings have made quite extraordinary. As you get closer and closer to the mountain you are trying to climb, you realise that you are nowhere near it; you realise that you are in the foothills and that you will never reach the top of that mountain, so great is the combined human endeavour.

Then, when I was about 21, I met a man called Ashok Roy, who was a very fine Carnatic musician. He played the sarod. He has passed away now. I heard Ashok play and I thought, 'Oh my God, there's another mountain!'

A thousand years have gone into my mountain and my life and here is a man who has drawn on more thousands than that to perfect this form, which is equal in its difficulty and complexity, and in its history, to Western classical music. Here I was, for the first time, really understanding that it takes a lifetime to be good at being one person, and there I could sit and share this moment of someone else's life who drew on thousands of years.

For me, that is the experience when I meet a person who comes from a different cultural background. When I meet a person who comes from the Hindu background, that draws on thousands of years, when I hear them speak whatever language is theirs—particularly if they come from India it could be one of many—I know that thousands of years have gone into that community working out how they engage with each other and how they build good lives.

It is not just the complexity of what a good person is or is not; it is simple things, like how far away you are when you make eye contact. That is more or less dependent on how well you know them. How long you pause and the inflection in your voice—a whole range of things that you see children learn when they are very young when they are really struggling every day to learn the complexities of culture that we carry in us as if they were the norm.

I sit in a community where I can access and share the wisdom of thousands of years that exist in the lives of the people who are my neighbours. I met a young man recently who, at the age of 18, was about pretty much equal in Hindi and English, and I thought—good parents. They raised him in Australia to be able to speak equally the language of his parents and the language of his new home. He was telling me how sometimes he can express a concept in English but he cannot express it in Hindi, and sometimes he can say something in Hindi but there are no English words. It reminded me of when I realised that even the Hindi greeting of 'namaste' has no actual English translation. The closest we can come to it is, 'My spirit sees your spirit'. But in the Hindu faith 'spirit' has a different meaning and 'sees you' has a different meaning. As a Western girl in the English tradition, I will never really understand what that means any more than I will understand 'geewarimi nullawlla' which is 'stay and rest a while' in Dharug, which is the language that was spoken in my electorate for many thousands of years.

We are perhaps one of the most fortunate countries in the world, because we opened our doors and the world came in. We invited it in, and it settled here with its culture and its history and its traditions and its understandings of the world from slightly different perspectives. A phrase that I use often to remind myself is, 'Know who I am and be good at it'. It means one thing to a person from the West and it means something completely different to a Hindu. It means something completely different to a person of the Hindu faith. I have an inkling, now, of what that means to people who come from this incredibly successful and strong cultural background. It is the same as religion: we have much to learn from each other.

Again, I have a very diverse community. Each time I visit a religious location, or meet the religious leaders, I learn something. My Buddhist community gave me a glass lotus flower, probably several years ago, and I used to carry it around in my handbag for quite some time because they said to me when they gave it to me that a lotus flower, like politicians, lives in the slime and the mud, but the lotus flower remains pure. For quite some time, I carried this lotus flower around. Again, there are thousands of years of tradition behind that very simple statement. A person who does not come from that tradition cannot live that life—from the time of birth learn that culture and carry it within you. But you can visit it, because your neighbours have it and they will share with you what they can.

The Hindu community gave me a Ganesha. There is a Ganesha festival in Parramatta next week, where I hope we will be able to submerge the Ganesha in the Parramatta River. But if not, we will eventually be able to do that. When they gave me a Ganesha they said to me, 'This is the god for overcoming obstacles within'. Again, it is a really interesting tradition. It means an incredible amount to the Hindu community, that notion that the greatest obstacles are within and that all the battles in the stories that you read that come from the Gita are about these mythical battles between the good and evil is in us. It is a really interesting religion.

I spent the weekend with my Muslim community—almost entirely with young boys, I have to note. I noticed that my Facebook page had photo after photo of me spending time with the various young boys in my Muslim community, and they are a wonderful lot. But they taught me something too, which I think is really interesting. I was talking to one of the young parents once during Ramadan and I asked him whether his six-year-old had started fasting yet and he said: 'No, but he's practising. He's learning restraint. He fasted for half an hour before breakfast today; he just put it off for half an hour. So he's learning restraint.' So there you have a religion where, right from a young age, they practise and learn restraint as a technique. In Ramadan it is the person who lives the simple life that is the hero—not the person who achieves a great deal but the person who achieves simplicity and humility in their life. Again, these are incredibly complex notions that have developed within those cultural backgrounds for hundreds of years to get to the point where they are today, where they can walk into my community and I can sit down with them and I can look in the window at thousands of years of history and tradition and see a tiny bit of what it is. It makes me richer; it makes us richer. For those in this House that are afraid of difference, just remember that understanding difference is also incredibly powerful. Understanding difference is also the answer; it is not just the problem. My community has that answer in spades. We are extraordinary, we have the world in us and it makes us rich.