Wednesday, 8 February 2023

 Brad BATTIN (Berwick) (09:40): I rise on behalf of communities out in the Berwick electorate. I am very proud to represent such a multicultural community where we have got people from different faiths and different countries who all work together as one to try and achieve some fantastic outcomes. Recently in Victoria we have seen some unrest, particularly between Hindu and Sikh communities, and I have been working with those communities in my electorate to try and find a way so that we do not have the conflict that we are seeing over in India brought here to Australia. We as a state survive on the fact that we can work well together. We have got a wonderful democracy, and when we do have issues or differences we can sit down, discuss them and put a message out.

I call on the leaders of both the Hindu and Sikh communities in my electorate to join together and ensure that we can have that one message, and that one message is: whilst we are going to have differences – and they do back in India at the moment – we can work together to ensure that we have a statement to call people to team up as one and have one strong statement to say that the violence and the graffiti and criminal damage we have seen on temples here in our state is not acceptable. We must protect places of worship. We must ensure that people have the confidence that it is a safe place, and the only way to do that is for all the leaders to join together, no matter which side they are on, and turn around to their communities and say how important it is to unite, to work together and ensure that there is no violence, no criminal damage and that places of worship are the safe places they promise to be.