Hazara Community

The Hon. A. PICCOLO (Light) (15:17): The tragedy in Christchurch, New Zealand, last week highlighted a number of issues that we as a community, in Australia and across the globe, need to address. Firstly, it highlighted how much work the world community has to undertake if we are going to deal with political extremism in an effective way and, secondly, that extremism comes with many ugly faces. The event, as tragic and beyond belief as it was, brought to the fore the plight of refugees and the battles they face daily.

Despite the misinformation published by the popular media, the biggest group of people affected by the politicised and ideological version of Islam are Muslims themselves. While I do not wish in any way to diminish the suffering and pain experienced by non-Muslims by this version of Islam, across the world Muslims continue to wear the burden of this corrupted form of Islam. When you engage with members in our local communities and hear their stories, you soon learn about the continuing suffering experienced by Muslims around the world at the hands of this corrupted reading of the Koran.

Today, I would like to take a few moments to mention a group of refugees in our community whose families and friends still experience discrimination and violence by those who purport to do so in the name of Islam. Their purported adherence to Islam is no better than those who resort to violence and call themselves Christians. The Hazara people, numbering around 5,000 in South Australia, live predominantly north of the city, in the Riverland and around Naracoorte. Their community continues to suffer in their homeland of Afghanistan and in refugee communities in Pakistan, Iran and Yemen, among other countries.

The persecution of the Hazara people goes back to the late 1900s, when King Abdur Rahman Khan ordered the killing of all Hazara in central Afghanistan, causing waves of migration to Pakistan and Iran at the time. This kind of marginalisation of the Hazara people has never stopped; it continues to this day. Prior to this systematic persecution, the Hazara people constituted 90 per cent of the Afghan population. This has subsequently decreased to around 20 per cent today.

The Hazara were later discriminated against under the Taliban and were denied political, social, economic and religious rights. The Taliban consider Hazara and Shiites to be infidels. This persecution led to further Hazara migration from Afghanistan. The Hazara have migrated and continue to seek refuge in Australia and other Western countries to escape this ongoing persecution. The current Western-backed government in Kabul has unfortunately been incapable of stopping the ongoing persecution of the Hazara people.

The Hazara community in South Australia is hardworking and enterprising and makes significant contributions in both business and community life, particularly in sport. In fact, a young man in the northern suburbs who lives in the electorate of Taylor within the City of Playford was recently elected to that council. He was born in Afghanistan. The Hazara people quite rightly seek to be heard by Australian governments on the plight of their families in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

As a community, we should support their call. If we can learn one lesson from the tragedy of last Friday in Christchurch, it is that, when we turn a blind eye to injustice anywhere in the world we do an injustice to humanity everywhere. As I mentioned earlier, there are currently a little more than 5,000 Hazara living in South Australia. Many of them have businesses in retail, construction, and food and hospitality.

Many Hazara also work on farms and in abattoirs, etc., in rural areas, making significant and important economic, cultural and social contributions to those rural communities. On that note, I would like to commend the mayor of the Naracoorte council for her contribution in trying to get these communities to integrate. There are many Hazara families in South Australia who still have family members and relatives living in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In South Australia, they experience ongoing anxiety and stress as they fear for the lives of their loved ones.

Those families will work better if they are together in a peaceful environment. Our community would be enriched by their contributions in the same way that we have benefited from the contributions made by migrants in the past, such as my own family and many families from Italy, Greece and right across Europe and other parts of the world. We must not allow our migration and cultural policies to be dictated by ignorance and bigotry but rather by our faith in the goodness of humanity because, while we are all different, we are also all fundamentally the same.