Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

Excuse me. I am sure you will have your chance. There are many other cases that are just like that. And you can read them all. You can read the cases, the summaries of them, that have gone before the Human Rights Commission. So when someone says you have a right to be a bigot I assume what they are saying is that this is okay, that it is okay for a person to be subject to that when they go shopping, when they go out in their backyard or when they get on a train. I can assure you it happens in our communities. We all know people who tell us of abuse they have received because they look different, they come from another part of the world, they have an accent that makes them stand out and they deal with this kind of abuse on a regular basis. It affects lives. And we in this place have an obligation to protect people from this kind of abuse.

The recommendations the committee has put forward are quite good. We could argue the detail of some of them but, essentially, what the committee has said is that there are not the grounds for changes to 18C and 18D but there are grounds to change the process, even though the number that end up in court are quite small.

Mr Morris, the lawyer who represented the QUT students, said these changes would do the job. They would level the playing field between both sides of the argument and they would reduce vexatious complaints. I would point out too that the Human Rights Commission has been asking for changes in the process for quite some time, so they are quite comfortable as well with improving the process to remove vexatious claims.

I will state it again: 2,000 complaints. That is about 100 a year. Five per year end up in court and there were three last year. This is not a massive landslide and we should protect people's rights to be protected from poison.

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