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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-03-31 Daily Xml
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Hazara Community

Mr SZAKACS (Cheltenham) (15:54): I rise to speak about a couple of issues both locally and within our multicultural communities. Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the launch of a fantastic research report that was a partnership between the Multicultural Communities Council of South Australia, Charles Sturt University and the University of South Australia. It was a research report which examined the footprint that refugees, and particularly members of the Hazara community, have here in South Australia.

The research report was entitled Refugees Rejuvenating and Connecting Communities. It was an analysis of the social, cultural and economic contributions of Hazara humanitarian migrants in the Port Adelaide Enfield area of Adelaide in South Australia. Mr Speaker, as I am sure you know and other members of this house know, the Hazara are an ethnic minority largely from Afghanistan. They have been persecuted over generations. We are lucky enough to live in a state, here in South Australia, that has thrown its arms open to this community. We have thrown our arms open to them and others in the pursuit of safety.

What I was very proud to see in the launch of this research project recently was the attempt to articulate the stories and heartfelt contributions of local members of the Hazara community, who now number around 6,000 in South Australia, centred predominantly by numbers in the City of Port Adelaide Enfield. As they often are in this space, the Multicultural Communities Council of South Australia have shown outstanding leadership in continuing to drive the debate and to put before us, as representatives in the community and policy leaders, a vision for a fairer and more just community for our migrants, and in the reverse and also in the traverse what those migrants contribute to South Australia at large.

There were four main themes of this research. One was the analysis and extent to which the contributions of migrants, particularly in the Hazara community, are both visible but often at times unseen. The recommendations that came from this report were to better see and articulate those unseen contributions from members of our migrant community. It also analysed the place and the part that various people and organisations play in building bridges and effectively being the social glue in these communities and analysed the role that sport plays in migrant communities, particularly the vibrancy of the Hazara and their contribution to many sports in our communities.

It also looked at and analysed the contributions migrants make to their new culture. First is the tension at times around continuing to build and grow the culture they own and know and left behind under circumstances that are still deeply painful and traumatic for them. Finally, it reviewed and looked at the dynamic nature of the way that multicultural communities, the Hazara community, integrate and evolve and grow and the dynamic nature in which migrants continue to contribute to our community.

Recently, I also had the pleasure of meeting with some delegates from the United Workers Union who wanted to speak to me. I was very proud to hear from them about their fights for job security during this pandemic. These are essential workers, frontline workers and people who cook our hospital meals and move us around the hospitals, the technicians, the aged-care workers.

What they are fighting for is job security and what they are fighting against is a government who are saying one thing around their respect for frontline and essential workers but doing something entirely different when it comes to bargaining and negotiations. What I stand here today to call on is for the Marshall government to put their money where their mouth is and treat these essential workers the way they are saying they should be treated.

Time expired.

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