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

I rise to support this motion. I realise that when people refer to ethnically diverse communities in Australia perhaps not that many might immediately think of my home electorate of the federal seat of Perth. But I can assure you that there are very strong migrant communities all throughout my electorate that have added immeasurably to the vibrancy of our local community and have done so for decades, if not hundreds of years. I immediately think of the Glendi Greek Festival that I attended late last year in Northbridge, the Chinese New Year parade, the Vietnamese community's amazing dinners that I am invited to, the Macedonian community coming together to build a new church in North Perth, the Nepalese community fundraiser I went to last year or the WA Italian Club reception only a few weeks ago.

From that, I suspect you get the impression quite clearly and quite rightly that the federal seat of Perth, indeed, is an incredibly vibrant ethnic community. How dull would life be without these wonderful events? So I pay tribute to migrant and ethnic communities in Perth and thank them for the contribution they have made not just to caring for each other but also to the richness, vibrancy and diversity of Perth more broadly.

Tuesday last week was Harmony Day—a day when the nation chooses to celebrate our diversity. By way of a history lesson, Harmony Day was invented by John Howard to try to mainstream politics around migrant communities for two key reasons. He did this, firstly, in an attempt to mitigate the appeal of Pauline Hanson 1.0. Secondly, he wanted to wrest migrants' votes off the Labor Party by presenting the Liberal Party as the friend of diversity. Certainly the Liberal Party under John Howard had a degree of success on both counts, although, sadly, both now appear to have fallen away. Indeed, the Liberal Party, egged on by hard-right conservatives, are now again seeking to weaken race hate laws. They also now have an appeasement policy towards Pauline Hanson 2.0—particularly if the recent Western Australian experience is anything to go by.

Listening to the Prime Minister last week, his Orwellian newspeak that I suspect even he had difficulty believing, insisting that weakening section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act was actually strengthening it, was, with respect, pathetic. War is peace, ignorance is strength, freedom is slavery and, now, racism is diversity—I mean, please! The fact that the Prime Minister introduced this short-sighted, divisive amendment on Harmony Day just adds insult to injury. I do not know what is worse—if he did not realise it was Harmony Day or if he knew and did it anyway.

Let's get real, though. I suspect the Prime Minister actually wants this bill to fail in the Senate. I think he lost a vote in his own cabinet and wants to kill off the bill before it reaches the House. Certainly the member for Bennelong will not want to have to vote for the bill—perceptions of racism, after all, are part of what lost the Liberals the seat in 2007—and nor will the members for Reid, Banks and Chisholm with their ethnically diverse electorates and wafer-thin margins. I would say to those honourable members: be very, very careful what you wish for. For every racist and divisive vote the Liberal Party tries to court, there is a multitude of anti-racist Australians whose support you will lose. I would say this to the Prime Minister: you must no longer have an attitude of tolerance and appeasement towards the bigots in your party's far-right ranks. People are starting to notice.

I am an Anglo-Saxon, white male who has never, ever had to fall victim to racism or prejudice. But, in a sense, that is the point. The issues that confront our migrant communities do not just impact upon those communities; they affect us all. Racism, wherever it occurs, does not just harm its direct victims; rather, it demeans us all. For so long as we tolerate the notion that, in order to give bigots the right to exercise their so-called freedom of speech in a way that risks those who are vulnerable in our community, those ethnic communities who have had to work so hard to overcome perceptions of racism must simply fall back into a category where they are potentially maligned does us as a community and society no good at all. I will never stop calling out racism when I see it, and I see it in the eyes of the rich white men proposing these changes to 18C. (Time expired)

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