Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say I find aspects of this debate like entering an alternative universe. When people come to parliament they look at the different challenges that are happening across Australia and choose, in different ways, the victims whose causes they will champion. Different people on both sides of the House will find people genuinely in need. But to have a situation now where there is a core group of government MPs where the victims they most want to champion, look after and try to help from their plight are racist people who are not allowed to say enough is one of the most—possibly the most—bizarre thing I have ever seen in my time as a member of parliament.

Amending a law, any law, as this committee has considered, does not happen in a vacuum. It happens from whatever the starting point is already. Any amendment that involves changing the language of sections 18C and 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act is not an amendment that just says, 'Okay, let's just imagine something to be consistent with other pieces of legislation.' No, it changes where the threshold is now and allows to be said things that are currently not permitted to be said. That is why during this discussion I have repeatedly—not just today in this parliament but as this debate has dragged on for months and years—continued to pose the question: if you want to change the threshold, what is it that you want people to be allowed to say that they are not allowed to say already? Because in any amendment to this section the courts will give meaning to the amendment. If the intention is to allow more so-called freedom of speech then the courts will allow to be said things that are currently not being allowed to be said.

It is no good for those opposite to say, 'Oh well, it's a Bill Leak cartoon and the situation with the QUT students,' because it has already been determined that those cases were not an offence under the act. That has been agreed. Changing the threshold does nothing for things that are already not caught by the act—that has nothing to do with it. People can make as many speeches about Bill Leak and the QUT students as they want. All they are doing is defending the current legislation. That is an argument in favour of some of the recommendations that have come through this report about streamlining processes, and Labor will have a constructive approach to streamlining processes on any piece of legislation, on any tribunal, on any court. But to say that Bill Leak and the QUT case are the problem, when it has been explicitly agreed that sections 18C and 18D combined mean those examples are not caught by it, adds nothing to the debate.

What we have seen from a number of the speakers in this debate is something that is hard to describe in terms other than those of self-entitled, born-to-rule arrogance. That is what we have seen. Most of us who have spoken in this debate—not everybody but most of us who have spoken in this debate, and me included—will go through our entire lives in Australia without ever being the target of racial abuse. It was not the case for people of my heritage 100 years ago, but it has been the case for a while. We will go through life without experiencing racial hatred targeted at us. The main way we see it is when we are in a public space and we might witness it or, more often for many people, when something is happening on a train or in a shopping centre and someone thinks to video it. What we see and are horrified to see is something that for many Australians is their lived day-to-day experience. And that is under the current law! So to people who say, 'It's just words. We need freedom of speech. It is just words; words can't harm you,' I say, 'Tell that to the woman who goes home in tears after being abused on the train because of the way she is dressed. Tell that to the child who goes home trembling after they have witnessed that treatment that their parents receive in a shopping centre. Tell them it's just words.'

These issues are real, and those opposite who argue that it is just words—it is not everybody opposite who argues that case—do not argue the same when we are talking about defamation law. They do not argue the same when we are talking about whether or not a whistle blower should be allowed to state what has happened within a government department. They do not argue the same when we are talking about whether an employee should be able to tell their story if there is an employment contract that says they are not allowed to. They certainly do not apply the same principle of 'it's all about freedom of speech' when a non-government organisation reaches a contract with the Commonwealth government and part of the contract is to prevent it from speaking out. So why do they suddenly find freedom of speech when it involves multicultural communities, when the person who will be harmed will never be them?

That is why Labor will never support any amendment to the Racial Discrimination Act where the outcome of that amendment is more racial hatred. We will never support a lowering of the benchmark in the name of consistency with other acts, because the courts will have to give meaning to it and the only outcome will be more racial hatred in Australia. We keep hearing from the P   rime Minister and others—and we hear it from members of the opposition and we hear it from crossbenchers, and it is a good thing when people celebrate it—that we are the most successful multicultural country in the world, but it does not happen by accident. It happens when members of parliament prioritise the person who might be the target of racial discrimination over the bigot and when we prioritise the person who will receive the abuse over the person dishing out the abuse.

This entire debate has been brought to the parliament because we have a little ginger group within the Liberal Party party room who want to prioritise the abuser. How on earth does anyone look at the vision of someone being abused on the train and think, 'The person we need to help is the person dishing out the abuse, because they just weren't allowed to say enough'? When you have a society of people of many cultural backgrounds, there are three ways you can organise it. I use the image of how you organise food. If you separate your ingredients on the table, you have a segregation model, and no-one is proposing that. When you whack everything into the blender and expect it to come out with a puree or some sort of soup, you have an assimilation model, and we do have members of the parliament wanting that. When you create a salad where every ingredient is allowed to keep its own integrity and you get a national flavour out of it, you have a multicultural country, a multicultural Australia. And that is what used to be viewed—even under the years of the Howard government, the Fraser government before them, and certainly Labor governments—as a right and decent vision for Australia.

But now we have an Attorney-General saying there is a right to be a bigot. We have members of the Liberal Party party room seeing the key victims they want to defend in our society as being the people who just are not allowed to say enough racist things. Do not think the megaphone that people are offered in this parliament is not loud. It is really loud, and the people who need our help and protection hear what is being said. And the people who want to extol their bigotry and undermine people for their race, their cultural background and their heritage hear what is being said here as well, and they are armed by what is being said here as well. Our words matter, and the words that are said in the public square matter, and the words that are said on the train, bus or tram matter, and the words that are said in the shopping centre matter. We should never, as a parliament, look at the levels of racism that come from a small minority in this country and say, 'We want to let them say more.'

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