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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2020-06-17 Daily Xml
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Refugee Week

Mr SZAKACS (Cheltenham) (15:23): This week is Refugee Week, and I would like to take this important opportunity today to speak about the importance this has to me and the community that I represent in Cheltenham. This issue is very close to me, as the son of a refugee, and others in this chamber, including the Leader of the Opposition.

Since 1788, many millions of people have crossed the seas to call Australia home, seeking refuge or as migrants. In that journey, it is impossible for us not to recognise the effect that colonisation has had on the First Peoples of this country. This effect is often traumatic and deeply held. It also reminds us that we are all migrants in this great nation of ours.

Refugee Week, at its core, is an opportunity for us to tell stories. I could tell the stories of the hundreds of people in my electorate of Cheltenham who have sought refuge in Australia. Migration is arguably and undeniably almost the greatest success story that our state tells. It is extraordinary and, frankly, it is hard to find a community in this state that lives it more wholly and solely than the great western suburbs community that I represent.

But today, briefly, I am going to tell the story of my dad, a refugee who crossed those seas seeking that safety and refuge as so many others did—in fact, almost one million people—in finding their way to Australia. He was a revolutionary. He was part of the student-led uprising in Hungary in 1956. He was part of a movement that picked up arms and fought for safety, for freedom, for something as simple as the minimum wage. They fought an extraordinary oppressor in the Soviet Communists. Today, on my chest, I wear the colours that my dad wore whilst he was fighting during that revolution some 64 years ago. It was one of the very few things that he was able to escape with when he left Hungary across the border into Austria.

He fled Hungary on 4 November 1956, 12 days after the revolution started, the very night that the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest. He escaped that night through the border into Austria. He was caught at the border. He was imprisoned. My dad is as tough as nails but, to this day, he is terrified of German shepherds because he was caught by a German shepherd at the border. He miraculously escaped again and found his way into the loving embrace of the Red Cross in Austria.

I had always asked my dad why Australia, as it was such a long way away. He would tell me it was because of the weather, the beautiful women and the beaches. The truth is much more sobering. The very last thing my grandfather, also a Joseph, ever said to my dad face to face was, 'Go. Leave. Get as far away from here as you can and never come back,' and that is why my story is an Australian story.

I am in this chamber today speaking about my father's story but it is a story that is replicated family upon family, individual upon individual, because migration is the greatest story we have to tell. But equally important to these stories are the stories that we must be honest about regarding modern-day experiences for refugees—the stories of offshore detention, sometimes indefinitely on a phosphate island in the middle of the Pacific; the stories of a slogan replacing a refugee policy like 'Stop the boats'; the truth that my dad—a tall, white, handsome, blond man, a Catholic man—had a deeply different experience as a refugee in this country than modern-day refugees who are fleeing from other countries.

Time expired.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Member for Cheltenham, I am going to allow you to continue.

Mr SZAKACS: Thank you, Deputy Speaker, for your indulgence. It is these stories that we must confront honestly if we can give true meaning to the stories of those who have built our nation as refugees. It is the story that refugees were able to fight for and win basic health care, only for that then to be taken away by the federal parliament. These are the stories which my dad did not experience, again, if I am being honest, because he was a white Anglo-Saxon man coming at the right time to the right country. It is something that I also cannot quite comprehend because the most grief that I copped as a first-generation Australian growing up was because I had red hair, not because I was a European.

It is incumbent upon me to use my voice in this house to speak about my dad's story because, in talking about my dad's story and my story, I seek to empower the stories of all refugees who are not heard in here. It is potentially the fact that I stand in this place and have the political freedom to speak about this story that is the most subtle but profound illustration of the freedom that my dad found in the loving embrace of this country.

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