Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If there were actually a conversation going in the normal business of government, many of these issues would have been fixed. They would not have needed a parliamentary inquiry with 420 submissions, nine days of public hearings over several months all over the country, and 200 pages. They could have just done it as the normal business of government, because many of these suggestions are exactly what they have been calling for. Fantastic—the parliament agrees. The only omission in the report in that sense is an apology to her for the way that many members opposite, particularly your senators, have spoken to her and treated her when she appears in this place to do her job.

With regard to 18C, there is no case for change. The report makes that clear. The best those opposite could come up with was to say, 'Well, on one hand, someone said this, and on the other hand, someone said that. But we don't need to do anything, because there is no problem with the law.' Section 18C is settled jurisprudence. The deputy secretary of the Attorney-General's Department said so. He quoted Justice Kiefel: only 'profound and serious effects', not 'mere slights', can be prosecuted under this law. The deputy secretary also said:

… any time you change a judicially well understood set of terms, you will create an incentive … to then relitigate …

So fiddling around with these words is a fantasy from the IPA: 'We will cross this word out and we will add this word in. Maybe we will write "harass" instead of "insult." That will be cute; we have done something.' All that would do is cause another decade of legal cases to try and figure out what the parliament meant by that word change. It is completely unnecessary.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 11:24 to 11:47

We have established that there is no case for change. Despite this, for years and years the government has been intent on scaring multicultural Australia. This is not an intellectual exercise, much as it may feel so to the IPA, writing their little essays on their whiteboards or wherever the collective brain cell resides. People are genuinely scared.

During this debate—in December, I think—I hosted a public meeting in Dandenong, along with the member for Isaacs. We had, at very short notice, about 250 people turn up. It was advertised publicly on Facebook, not stacked with supporters. We heard tale after tale of real-life racism that people in our communities experience. As the member for Brand was saying, that is something we could be talking about. We heard people complain that their community groups, which used to get support from the Human Rights Commission for antiracism campaigns, have no funding and support. Instead, the government's resources and the parliament's time are diverted to this intellectual frolic of thinking, 'How can we water down the race protection laws so that people can say more racist things?'

It is not just because stuff happens in society. We also heard from people who directly related the racist incidents that they had experienced on the street and on the bus to these inquiries. Leadership matters. People in society, human beings, take their signals as to what is acceptable behaviour from their leaders. It may not seem that way, given the way we behave here at times, but people in the community take cues from political leaders. People in schools take cues from leaders of schools. And this parliament spending year after year debating whether it is okay to say more racist things has real-world impacts in the community. Funnily enough, not one person at that public meeting—not one person—spoke up in favour of watering down 18C.

At a political level we have no resolution for the government. The government MPs , as you can see from this report, could not agree on a position. They are hopelessly divided. As Australia knows, they are out of touch. This is not a barbecue stopper. Even the Deputy Prime Minister admitted, yesterday, that when people in his electorate drag him into a shed—goodness only knows what happens then; the proverbial shed—they do not talk to him about this.

This is not a priority for people in the real world, outside the right wing of the Liberal Party. People on our side and in my community want to know where their jobs are coming from. They want to know how their kids are going to get a decent education when school funding is cut: $29 million my electorate will lose, when the Gonski money goes. They want to know how their kids can go to hospital. They want to know how we are going to compromise—like grown-ups—and put the budget back on a sustainable path. But no, the government is arguing over how to let people say more racist things.

What happens now with 18C? Unfortunately, people must still be concerned despite the fact this report paints no case for change. Given we are in a coalition party room meeting, it is up to the Prime Minister, apparently. And that atmosphere is febrile. The member for Berowra explained to us that the debate is finished. It is over. The report has killed it. I do not know whether he has talked to Senator Paterson who has said, 'We're going! The case has been made out. We're going to fight to the death.'

It's kind of like the zombie budget cuts, isn't it?—except you can kill a zombie. You have to cut their brains out. It is hard to get through the cranium but you can kill a zombie. Unfortunately, it appears there is no brain cell in the government, so you cannot kill these measures. We could go on with the other analogies: the Monty Python dead parrot and the knights who say, 'Nae, T'is but a flesh wound.' They might say, 'We've taken a bit off the right wing of the Liberal Party but still we go on.' This is red meat to the base.

When you sit on our side of the chamber and look across, you see behind the Prime Minister a reasonable balance of modern Australia. You have some women—and then you look around and there is this whole segment where you see the same bloke. Sometimes he is 30, sometimes he is 40 and sometimes he is 50, but it is the same white bloke in a blue suit having this intellectual debate about whether people should be allowed to say more racist things in our communities.

Perhaps this report will actually be good enough. Perhaps, for once, the chair of the committee will not be a misnomer. What else did we learn from the report? We learnt that the case for change its about what is unsaid, apparently. It is a chilling effect. Have you got the little emails that are coming in now? They are: 'The last desperate cry of the IPA'? 'Someone's pressed a button,' and 'There's a chilling effect.' But what did the inquiry hear? Multiple witnesses, when pressed, could not provide even one example of things that could not be published. Hundreds of thousands of cartoons. One complaint. One person said, 'Well, there were a few Andrew Bolt articles that we probably reconsidered.'

That probably shows the law is working fine, if it gets people to stop and think before firing off more racist rants. There is nothing of substance. Racism is always about—and Australia is no different—most people are good and some are racist. We forget the lessons of history at our peril. Racist hate speech drives racist violence, and these laws must stay.

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