Tim Hammond (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Guess what the balance of members on your side actually arrived at? A conclusion that picked up the recommendations of the discrimination commissioner to say that the process and procedure can be improved. They went to great lengths—I see that the honourable member for Moore is here, and I am sure he will know as well as anyone—to set out in 22 recommendations how this process can be improved. So what we see here are suggestions, backed in by the commission, about how the procedure can be improved. At no stage is there a suggestion here, amongst those procedural recommendations, that the provision of the act is not doing what is intended.

Let us move on to the other one that constantly gets a run as to why the rights of citizens in this country are so offended by the construction of sections 18C and 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act: the famous Bill Leak cartoon. Let us unpack that a little further as well. Guess what. That case did not get up either. Are you seeing a pattern here, Madam Deputy Speaker? The two most egregious examples of offence that the conservatives like to roll out time and time again were both found not to offend the relevant provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act.

That then leads us to ask a further question, and that is: what is really behind what is going on here? I suspect what we see is mischief at a couple of levels. Time and time again, we see members on the other side, with furious frustration, vent about how the provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act are too tightly wound to allow people just to speak their minds. It gets back to that phrase that can never be forgotten. It was uttered by, unbelievably, our current Attorney-General, who, quite frankly, should know a lot better than to express such a view:

People do have a right to be bigots, you know.

What I cannot work out about that approach is how it possibly does anything to complement or to back in what we like to think is an Australian way of treating our fellow community members. It reveals such a flawed analysis of what a common level of decency actually entails, that, if those on the far right and those who defend the right of someone to be a bigot had their way, we would lose that precious safety net that we have, that is working perfectly well and that we have proudly backed in for at least the last 20 years.

I cannot help but think that this approach, this analysis, by those on the other side is so fundamentally flawed it comes to this. According to my notes of what the member for Hughes said when he was postulating his own way for how this could be fixed, he said that the act should be amended in order to curtail any offences under the Racial Discrimination Act for any 'uttered incidents that might relate to physical violence'. That is what he said, and I made a very careful note of that, because it just underpins how badly they do not get it. They just do not get it.

An honourable member: It is about language.

Not only is it about language but it is about not having any real clue, any real sense of empathy, as to what it is actually like to walk on the other side of the street. And I will not stand here and pontificate or pretend to know what it is like.

Honourable members interjecting—

I delight in the laughter on the other side, because it just underpins how little you get it—how little you can even possibly claim to understand what life must be like to be treated, from the word go, as if you do not really match up or measure up to someone else in the community. We judge ourselves by the way in which we treat the most vulnerable members of our community, and if you have your way—which is not the way of this committee, because it did not go down this road, to its credit—you will release the chance of any real prospect of ensuring that we treat our most vulnerable members of the community with any sense of decency. The problem with the conservative far right is that every word that comes out of their mouths just confirms to me that they do not get what it is like to protect the most vulnerable members of their community, and I am seeing no sign of that improving.

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