Mr ANDREWS (10:44 PM) —I wish to acknowledge tonight the recent celebration of the Persian New Year by the Iranian community in Australia. This new year festival is traditionally celebrated with a festival of fire. I acknowledge the celebration tonight because many of the Iranian community in Melbourne live in the electorate of Menzies. About a thousand people attended the traditional celebration called the Charhar Shanbeh Soori or Festival of Fire at the Doncaster Municipal Park on 13 March. Nowrooz, which means `a new day' in the Farsi language, is part of the traditional celebrations of the Iranian people. Nowrooz comes from the Zoroastrian religion—the traditional religion of old Persia—and includes the worship of fire which continues to be part of the modern Nowrooz celebrations.

The House may be interested to know that the Zoroastrians of Iran were originally members of the Indo-European family known as the Aryans. They called themselves Zoroastrians because they believed in the teachings of the first Aryan prophet, Zarathushtra. According to their doctrines, Zarathushtra, who was born in Iran about 8,000 years before Christ, was the first prophet to preach a monotheistic religion. He revealed that there was only one God, Ahura Mazda, and that life in the physical world was a battle between good and evil. As per man's actions, he would either cross the Chinvato Peretu or the sword bridge after death and reach Heaven or fall from it and go to the abode of the evil one. In the final days, there would be a battle between good and evil in which evil would be vanquished and the world would be purified by a bath of molten metal. Mazda would then judge the world, resurrect the dead and establish his kingdom on earth. From that very brief description, you can see that there are great similarities between Zoroastrian religion and other great religions of the world, namely, Judaism and Christianity.

The new year festival of the Iranian people was celebrated on 21 March, after which there was a period of 13 days. On the 13th day there is another celebration by the community in which they go out into nature and throw grains like wheat or barley into a river or flowing water, which symbolises for them the cycle of nature. This festival occurred last Sunday, with a marvellous celebration in Finns Reserve in Manningham where, again, there were about a thousand people from the Iranian community in Melbourne enjoying the beautiful weather. This is a small community. There are only about 30,000 Iranians in Australia, with about 7,000 in Victoria and most of them living in Melbourne. It is a small community. They are a very proud and a very educated people by the standards of migrants to Australia. The unemployment rate amongst people in the Iranian community is quite low compared with others from ethnic backgrounds.

It is a great celebration for them on this day and an occasion that should be remarked upon in the House of Representatives. I take this opportunity to note the recent festivities and to congratulate Mostafa Abedi Tani and other members of the Iranian society in Victoria for the way in which they continue to contribute not only to the community in Menzies but to Australian society generally.