I rise tonight with sadness, love and gratitude—sadness at the sudden death of Sarah Carter. Sarah, as others in the Senate and the other place have highlighted, was an extraordinary human. I rise on my own behalf as well as having my colleagues Graham Perrett MP and Tania Lawrence MP associate themselves with these remarks. But many other coalition and other senators and members have spoken about her too.
We had the great privilege of travelling with Sarah in Kenya with Save the Children. Unsurprisingly to me—Sarah was in the Labor Party—she had this wonderful capacity to communicate, which is why people like Michael McCormack and so many others have paid tribute to her. But she wasn't just there to communicate about herself; she was there to elevate others. In our journey around Kenya and on the many other trips that she facilitated for other MPs, she elevated the voices of families living on meagre food rations in Kenyan refugee camps; those who regained sight through the Fred Hollows Foundation; communities in Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and PNG with no access to roads, drinkable water or health care; and mothers with cervical cancer and no home.
Throughout Sarah's life she was an absolutely dedicated community advocate, and I know that the shock of her passing to her colleagues, her friends and her family is absolutely unfathomable, and I pay particular tribute to her colleagues at Save the Children.
She spoke up very strongly for the community of Maribyrnong, which she served for a long time as a councillor and mayor. She stood up for the children of Gaza and their desperate need for more aid, and the access of aid into Gaza for children. Sarah taught me a great deal during my trip to Kenya in 2022. She supported Save the Children to reveal the lives of others in a way that called other people, including in this place, including in governments, to action. She called on us to do more. And, in her name, we should.
In speaking tonight, I want to make visible the many causes that she stood for. She wanted all those she stood up for to be able to make their own direct plea to Australia for our support for them to have a better life. She always reminded me of the power to bring people together to find solutions, and I have to say it's the opposite of what our colleague Senator Hanson has said to the chamber tonight.
I recall, while I was sitting on the bus with her in Kenya, we looked outside the bus and saw poverty passing us by. We spoke about our numerous IVF cycles, her frustration at the IVF cycles in Victoria during COVID, my gratitude at successfully becoming a parent and her processing her grief that hers had, thus far, not been successful. I want to pay tribute to her standing up for the right and ability of women to access IVF.
Perhaps surprisingly for some who didn't know of Sarah's medical diagnosis, we spoke of her own knowledge that she had been diagnosed with a clot. I don't have the terminology right, but it was something that could cause an aneurysm that could kill her, and it had a likelihood of doing so in the future. I say this not for any particular gratuitous reason, to highlight her cause of death, but really to say that Sarah was one of those people who was able to elevate the circumstances of other people and our capacity to do something about them even when she knew she could do nothing about her own diagnosis.
