David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will start by saying I'd like to associate myself with the comments from Senator Scarr about Petro Georgiou. May he rest in decency.

Just today my office received direct communication from an Australian doctor who's serving in Gaza. I can't do justice to the contribution that she gave other than by simply reading it on the record here:

My name is Saira Hussain. I am a consultant anaesthetist from Australia.

I have been volunteering as Nasser Medical Complex for the last three weeks.

I previously was here in October 2024.

In the last three weeks during my deployment here, due to the Israeli-imposed blockade of food, water, fuel and medical supplies, I can confidently state that what we are seeing amounts to more than a genocide.

I don't see malnutrition or hunger. I see the enforced starvation of children and adults. I watch the injured suffer through infections due to the lack of appropriate antibiotics and wounds infested with maggots due to unsanitary conditions because of the lack of clean water.

In the hospital—I see the results of the deliberate killing by targeted shooting from the Israeli military and foreign contractors that man the GHF aid distribution sites.

These are targeted shootings in the head and the groin, in the chest and in the neck.

I see displacement time and again, even in the short time here, of tens of thousands of people from their temporary makeshift homes and tents towards the sea.

The Australian government must do everything in its power to halt this barbarism now.

I want to thank Dr Hussain and all of the medical teams who put their lives at risk to go to Gaza to provide support in such extraordinarily brutal conditions. We have certain obligations when these words come to us. We need to hear them, we need to acknowledge them, we need to believe them, and then we need to act on them.

On 11 July 2025, I had the sombre honour, on the invitation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bosnia and Herzegovina, to participate in the commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Srebrenica. That is the only genocide committed on European soil since the Second World War. The commemoration was held at a Srebrenica Memorial Center in Potocari in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The highest courts of the United Nations, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, have confirmed in their findings that genocide was committed against Bosniaks in the UN safe area of Srebrenica.

When I went to the commemoration, we heard government after government say how they had failed to stop the genocide in Srebrenica and how they were aware of it happening in real time. They also spoke of how the UN failed the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina. What was meant to be a safe area was effectively abandoned to a brutal attack upon thousands and thousands of civilians.

I was in the former factory where the presentation and the speeches were being made, and in that very same former factory the most obscene violence—sexual and physical violence and murders—had occurred just 30 years ago. It was chilling and extraordinarily moving to be in that space. But for all of the speeches we heard—governments that said that never again would they allow a genocide, never again would they let this happen—I have to tell you that the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina couldn't help but reflect on the reality of the genocide happening in Palestine. I want to express my enormous admiration for the mothers of Srebrenica who not only are speaking for their sons lost in the appalling genocide in Srebrenica; but they are making the connection to Palestine too.

I want to give my genuine thanks to the Amir Sahinovic, Honorary Consul of Bosnia and Herzegovina, for his assistance and support in my attendance. I want to thank Sanel Begic, a member of the Bosnian Australian community. He was extremely generous to me and my wife, Patricia, in our time in both Sarajevo and Srebrenica. I particularly want to say to the Bosnian Australian community that we must never forget this genocide. We must never permit genocide denial to happen. It happened; we believe it, but we must commit, as a nation and as a planet, to never let it happen again.