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

I would like to congratulate the Merrylands Soccer Football Club premier league team for their success not only on the field but in making our community a better place. Most of the team are refugees from Sierra Leone, including their coach, Sam Sesay, who arrived in Australia in 2001. In 2015, Sam formed Parra United, a community group to foster African youth and adult development, doing their bit to build a community where all people reach their full potential. They do this through sport and recreational activities as they believe sport can be a vessel to bring people together and foster inclusion. At that time, many of the boys played for different clubs but dreamed of playing in the premier league together. So Sam and the boys approached Merrylands and, in this, their first year as a team, they made it to the Granville and Districts Soccer Football Association premier league grand final. They're not only winning hearts; with their new club Merrylands SFC, where they coach junior players and support their club's coaches, they are making a difference. The team hopes their story will inspire the community and promote cultural diversity and integration. I'd like to thank all of the Merrylands SFC Premier League players and their coach, Sam Sesay, for their commitment to our community. They lost the finals, unfortunately, but they'll be back next year.

On the weekend, I went to an extraordinary event and I met a man called Nathan Rajan, who started a Tamil school 30 years ago at Darcy Road in Wentworthville. It now has over 650 students and hundreds of teachers and parents that work to ensure that their children can speak Tamil. I attended a celebration of the annual Kalai Vizha festival in Blacktown and, as usual, these wonderful young Aussie Tamil kids were up there in their costumes stamping their feet, singing their Tamil songs and performing Tamil dramas with gusto—that's the only way to describe it. The thing you notice most is how much they're enjoying it. These kids love learning Tamil.

So I'd like to thank all of the parents, all of the past students and all of the teachers who have worked over the past 30 years to make this school the success that it is. It's not just about having fun for the kids. It's about ensuring that they speak the language of their grandparents and that they understand the culture and philosophy that underpins their parents and their lives. I'd also like to thank the current President Kathirgamanathan Narenthiranathan for inviting me to be part of the festival, and I congratulate all the children for their wonderful performances. Like so many of the parents, I had my mobile phone out. You'd look at the audience and what you saw was a whole stack of parents documenting the moment when their children got up to celebrate not only who they are in this country but their history and the culture of their parents.