Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The address-in-reply is an opportunity to look back on the election campaign and the foundation that it laid for the coming parliament. Reflecting on the Prime Minister's leadership over the last 12 months does feel a little bit like speaking into a void, because we do have a leadership void in Australian politics today on the conservative side. This is a Prime Minister who showed, during the last election campaign, that he could not sell a coffee on Collins Street. His message of jobs and growth sounded appealing to the population, until you scratched the surface and saw what was underneath it.

What we have been seeing since the election campaign is an iron-clad rule of politics making itself felt, and that is that politics abhors a power vacuum. Unsurprisingly, in the void left by the Prime Minister a rogues' gallery of ideological extremists have set up shop. Both inside and outside the coalition party room, power sits not with the sensible centre that was promoted by the Prime Minister but with the seriously unhinged. The coalition, and this government, have been taken over by extremists. The Australian public cannot get a look-in in the coalition party room. All the coalition are interested in is their own ideological obsessions. They are obsessed with internal power plays and tilting at ideological windmills.

The Turnbull-Hanson government—the Liberal-National-One Nation government—has utterly decoupled itself from the interests of the Australian public. It is being led by the nose by the extremist end of Australian politics. We know that the Prime Minister is being led by the extremists in his party room instead of leading them. Indeed, the sexual tension between the extreme right of the Liberal Party and One Nation grew significantly after the first week in parliament.

We saw the member for Dawson state that One Nation '... were not looking at ousting an MP who was advocating the same sort of views espoused by One Nation. That was his explanation for why One Nation did not contest his seat. And further: 'The views of One Nation to a degree are the views of many in the rank and file of the Liberal-National Party.' Again, there was no rebuke from the Prime Minister, no ideological correction, no leadership to say that the party that he leads is not the party of the views of One Nation. The Prime Minister remained mute. With no rebuke from the Prime Minister, Senator Bernardi even went so far as to suggest:

One Nation and others who are saying the things that I think the Liberal Party should be saying, with a bit more nuance and maybe a little bit more delicacy.

This is Malcolm Turnbull's Liberal National party, a party of MPs proudly proclaiming that they are: '…advocating the same sort of views espoused by One Nation' and that they 'should be saying the same things as One Nation' but maybe with a little bit more spin and a little bit more political sophistication glossed over the top. That would be perfect for the leadership of this Prime Minister.

Again, the Prime Minister has been absent from the field and the void has been filled. We saw this particularly on the issue of asylum seekers in the last federal election. The last federal election will be remembered by future generations as the election that brought One Nation and its brand of politics back into this place. They came in through a door left open by this Prime Minister, a Prime Minister who allowed his immigration minister to claim that 'illiterate and innumerate' refugees would both 'take Australian jobs' and 'languish on the dole' without rebuke and in fact with endorsement. Indeed the Prime Minister barely paused to wipe the immigration minister's saliva from the dog whistle before giving it a blast himself.

The Prime Minister allowed the member for Dawson to publicly oppose the resettlement of any Muslim refugees in his electorate because: 'These refugees will either fill jobs Australian workers can do or they will be on welfare, paid for by more taxes from Australian workers.' Again, it was without rebuke. This is a Prime Minister being led by the nose by extremists both inside and outside the parliament. It has continued after the election of course.

We have endured the farce of the PM and the immigration minister engaging in the pantomime of demanding that Labor commit to supporting extraordinary legislation sight unseen that would ban asylum seekers from Australia permanently regardless of whether they had been resettled in a third country—United States, Canada, wherever—indeed, regardless of whether they had received citizenship of another country. Without briefing or explanation, they demanded that Labor support the legislation. They clearly did not even brief their own ministers on what the legislation would do as the health minister managed to quickly contradict the Prime Minister on the scope of its application. Whatever else may be said about the legislation, it was clearly a transparent political stunt—a stunt that uses some of the world's most vulnerable people as political boogie men.

Unlike the Prime Minister, the Labor party does not run when called to heel by extremists. We engage with issues on their merits guided by our principles with the objective of discharging Australia's international obligations while at the same time sending a clear message to those considering risking their own lives or the lives of their children by coming to Australia by boat, not to bother.

We see the same pattern with the government's obsession with section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. For most Australians, the 'right to be a bigot' as the Attorney General famously put it, is not a bbq stopper. We are comfortable living in the most successful multicultural nation on earth and we understand that some minor restraints on more extreme expressions of racial abuse have helped to strengthen our community's social cohesion. But this is not the case inside coalition party rooms that have been taken over by glibertarian extremists with a very narrow obsession about one specific limited restraint on speech.

The mere mention of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act in coalition circles is like adding a drop of blood into shark infested waters. It produces a frothing, churning beneath the water's surface in the bowels of the coalition party room. Coalition MPs take complete leave of their senses when they are asked to consider limits on racist hate speech. Whether it is through ignorance or ill-intent, their public comments reflect no understanding of how section 18C actually operates. Like excited undergraduates, they see the section and they shout, 'This is a restriction on free speech. I have identified it!' They are completely incapable of considering how we might go about balancing competing public interests in this space. They carry on as though the threshold for contravening the section is a trivial question of whether the speech 'offends' or insults', ignoring the body of case law that has made it clear that the section does not extend to speech that constitutes 'mere slights' but instead requires 'profound and serious effects'. They act like any unsuspecting member of the public engaging in good faith political debate could be caught by the provision, ignoring utterly section 18D of the act that contains exemptions designed to protect exactly this behaviour and protecting from the reach of the act artistic works, scientific debate and fair comment on matters of public interest.

They say that 'the process is the punishment' as though a complaint to the Human Rights Commission under section 18C triggers some kind of modern star chamber. The reality is far from it. The Human Rights Commission's focus is on resolving disputes so parties can avoid court proceedings. Of complaints where conciliation was attempted, 76 per cent were successfully resolved in 2015-16. In the 2015-16 reporting year the average time it took the commission to finalise a complaint through conciliation was three months. In that same reporting year 94 per cent of surveyed parties said that they were satisfied with the commission's service. To be blunt, the process under 18C is far better than what a respondent would confront in a defamation proceeding. They have built the biggest strawman since, well, Burning Man, and they dance around their creation in fervours of ideological rapture. As they saying goes, you should dance like no-one's watching, and coalition MPs dance around section 18C without a care for what anyone in the Australian public watching them might think.

Indeed, in the very first week of this parliament, before the Governor-General's speech had even been delivered all but one of the coalition Senate backbench joined with One Nation to sign a notice of motion to gut section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. This extraordinary policy intervention did not appear in the Governor-General's speech. Why? Because this was an agenda being imposed on this Prime Minister by the extremists in his party room. They were willing to utterly humiliate their supposed leader, the Prime Minister, in the first week after his first election in the name of this 18C strawman. Why is it racist speech that gets the coalition going?

Why were the party room dissidents not barking when Malcolm Turnbull's former chief of staff launched defamation proceedings over an insulting televised comedy act?

They lay doggo when the member for Warringah and Peter Costello sued an Australian author for writing offensive falsehoods about their wives. The guard dogs of free speech were silent when the former Treasurer Joe Hockey sued The Sydney Morning Herald for its reporting on his fundraising activities. Where were the full-page newspaper ads from the IPA during any of these restraints on free speech? No-one has suggested dismantling the law of defamation every time a defamation plaintiff loses a case. Not even when a bloke sues a newspaper over the depiction of his mullet—

Debate interrupted.

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