Tony Abbott (Warringah, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The problem that this House is wrestling with today is the absence of detailed consideration of freedom of speech, of conscience and of religion, which both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition promised would be given to us before this bill was finalised. That is the problem. A promise was made by the leaders of this parliament and the promise has not adequately been delivered upon, and that is why this parliament is now being called upon to deal with this on the run, as it were, because the promises made from the top were not adequately delivered on.

Let me make a couple of observations. I have never before heard members of this House showing such supine respect to another place. Why is it that, simply because something has been passed in the Senate, these are tablets of stone handed down from the mountain top beyond any question or consideration or delay by this House? Please. What would Paul Keating think of the supineness of this House of Representatives in the face of those in the other place across the corridor? We have a problem now, and I would ask those in doubt about this amendment or perhaps inclined to oppose this amendment to consider the actual facts.

The Archbishop of Hobart put out a pamphlet—he did nothing radical; he did nothing out of line. He simply asserted the traditional Christian teaching on marriage and he spent months being officially bullied and officially persecuted before the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Tribunal. A Canberra teenager who dared to place on social media her support for traditional marriage was sacked. Parents have been lied to about the content of curriculum their children are exposed to, and now that same curriculum is becoming compulsory in the state of Victoria. We have a problem and we must address it now. We must do what both the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition said would be done but as yet has not been done. If that means a conference between the supporters of the Dean Smith bill and the supporters of the amendments to try to refine the amendments to something more acceptable, let that happen. If it means that things need to go back to the Senate for a couple of hours, let that happen. The last thing we should want to do is to subject Australians to new forms of discrimination in place of old ones that are rightly gone. We do not want to see politically correct discrimination substituted for old traditional discriminations, which this House is rightly rejecting. And we can't wait for the Ruddock committee to report. If there is a gap in our rights and freedom, if there is a gap in our protections, let it be filled now. Injustices are happening this day; let us deal with them now. Let's not kick it all off into the long grass, which is what I suspect some of the critics of these amendments would like to do.

We need to ask ourselves this fundamental question: do we want today to be a day of unity, or do we want today to be a day of division? I accept that the Australian people have spoken. I accept that as a society we have moved on from the attitudes of previous decades. But we have not moved on, and we should never move on, from the fundamental rights to freedom of conscience, freedom of speech and freedom of religion, and parental choice, and that is all these amendments are seeking to protect.

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