Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for External Territories) Share this | Hansard source

Firstly, I commend the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights for its report. Whilst I note that it was effectively silent on sections 18C and 18D of the act, not making a recommendation was a smart thing. I do not believe there is really any appetite in this parliament for us to take on that issue, and we should not.

I was first elected to this place 30 years ago in July. Immediately prior to becoming a member of parliament I was employed to work for the now senator Patrick Dodson at the Central Land Council in Alice Springs. Prior to that, I worked with a great Australian, Dr HC (Nugget) Coombs, in the Central Desert. I am a bloke from Narrabundah. I was brought up here in Canberra. These jobs took me into the Northern Territory. With Nugget, I was employed to work with Pitjantjatjara people in the Central Desert in a very small community which in those days was roughly 12 hours on a dirt road southwest of Alice Springs in South Australia—in the corner of South Australia, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Because of the nature of communications in the bush in those days, there no smart phones—no phones to speak of at all. You would probably remember those days. The Royal Flying Doctor's sked was the only way you could communicate. You had to travel to see people. Almost always when I was travelling around the bush, although I had learnt Pitjantjatjara as a precursor to starting this work, I used to travel with an Aboriginal person.

This particular week we left Alice Springs together, drove out into the bush and were away for three or four days. Neither of us showered and we slept rough in the swag under the stars. It was just fantastic, with great company, many laughs and a lot of stories. On driving back we called into a roadhouse—I will not mention the roadhouse—to get breakfast. The two of us walked in—both as scruffy as one another, both unclean—and the people in this particular roadhouse refused to serve my Aboriginal friend. There was no difference between us, just the colour of our skin. So of course we immediately left.

A little while later, when I was working for the Central Land Council, I had a rather odd situation emerge. We went to the land council meeting at Kalkarindji, as I recall. It was a large meeting. I was driving back with a good friend of mine, a land council lawyer, and we stopped at a roadhouse to get a feed. The roadhouse operator refused to feed us, refused to serve us, because we worked for the land council—perverse, really perverse. That tells a story really about the nature of racism that has existed in parts of our country for far too long.

In the early eighties there was a land claim, with Nitmiluk National Park being talked about. I was working as a schoolteacher. In Katherine there was a claim over the Katherine Gorge, a Nitmiluk claim. There was a campaign of 'rights for whites'. I do not know whether you remember those days, but I remember them vividly, with all sorts of pejorative, insulting terms being used about Aboriginal people and their rights to land. You will recall the discussions in the mid-eighties—'83 to '84—around national land rights and the maps which were shown in Western Australia by, of all people, Brian Burke about blackfellas 'claiming your land'—pure racism. And then—

An honourable member: Bucketloads of extinguishment.

'Bucketloads of extinguishment' by the then Deputy Prime Minister of this country, Tim Fischer, after the Native Title Act was passed and after the Wik claim. That was language which was replete in this parliament. We have come a long way since, thankfully. Those days are past us. But it is little wonder people want the protections of 18C and 18D. Why should they not want those protections? This still exists. People with hate in their hearts are prepared to insult and demean because of race. It is not only Aboriginal people or Torres Strait Islander people; it could be a Chinese person, someone from South-East Asia or someone from Africa. We know it happens, and somehow or other the rights of those people to say what they like to whom they like about what they like need to be protected. I do not think so.

We live in a wonderful country. We are proud of our multiculturalism. There have been many struggles over the years to combat the differences that have been perpetrated and swelled up as a result of people getting rights—in the first instance, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. We should applaud that. It was less than a century ago that we had the Coniston massacre. We cannot justify these things, just as we cannot justify hate speech.

It is true that I think that the committee picks up in a very good way recommendations to change the way in which complaints are dealt with by the Human Rights Commission, and it proposes procedural changes and protections which will mean vexatious claims just get thrown out the door. It will make people justify what they are doing. It provides the capacity that, if a lawyer makes a claim, they are going to be held accountable under these recommendations. So these recommendations are good, and the committee ought to be congratulated for them.

Recommendation 2 of the committee says:

Recognising the profound impacts of serious forms of racism, the committee recommends that leaders of the Australian community and politicians exercise their freedom of speech to identify and condemn racially hateful and discriminatory speech where it occurs in public.

And we should. We have a responsibility to call it out, and we should. We should none of us take a backward step when we see someone being racially vilified or attacked in public or in the street because of the colour of their skin, because of their religion, because they are male, because they are female or because they might be gay. We cannot tolerate it, and we should not.

I suspect the Prime Minister, in his heart of hearts, does not want to go anywhere near changing this act, and I would say to him: don't, because if you do you will open a Pandora's box and you will not be able to put the lid back on. You will provide succour to some of the most virulent grubs in the country, and we should not do that. I respect the right of members of parliament to have different points of view and to articulate those points of view in this parliament, but I respectfully say to them: think very, very hard about going down the course of trying to change 18C.

As we know, 18D sets out the parameters within which section 18C functions and overrides 18C any time it applies, providing that 18C does not render unlawful anything said or done reasonably and in good faith in the course of what might be summarised as public debate or fair comment, including artistic expression. That is a good protection and we should have it. We should have the right to say things strongly, absolutely. But there is no room for hate speech or vilification.

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