Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the Opposition for moving this motion and I thank all of the speakers who've supported it. On behalf of everyone who lives in Melbourne and on behalf of the Greens, I wholeheartedly endorse it.

I want to tell the parliament about Sondos. I met her a little while ago, when she was 11. She goes to Carlton Primary School in my electorate. She was running in the 800 metres in the athletics carnival and, halfway through the race, someone yelled out to her: 'You're a terrorist. Go home.' They yelled that out to her because she had a hijab. She broke down and was unable to finish the race. She went home and talked to her family. One of her fellow students told me that, in their family, who are Sondos' neighbours, when someone heard a speech from a member of parliament a couple of years ago about Muslims no longer being welcome here, they said, 'Does that mean that we have to move countries now?' That, of course, had been their experience before coming to Australia. When someone from a different political grouping to you gets into parliament, then it means you are no longer safe in your home and you might have to move.

When I walk down the streets of Melbourne, I never have to worry about getting stopped and searched. When I walk down the streets with my friends, I never worry about people thinking that maybe we're a gang. When I get in robust political debate, I never hear the epithet thrown at me, 'Go back to where you came from.' But these things happen to people in Melbourne and right around the country every day, and they happen because of the colour of their skin or because of their religion, and, when they happen, they hurt. When those words are uttered by someone who is in parliament, that hurt is multiplied a thousandfold. What I wish the senator who made those comments realised—and perhaps he does, which worries me even more—is that, when he makes those comments, not only does it cause people and their families to hurt, to retreat and to shrink, but it opens the door to violence.

Just over a decade ago, in Melbourne, there was a young man, and I'll call him an Australian. He was South Sudanese in terms of his family's origin, but he was actually an Australian citizen. His skin was black and he was in his 20s. He was beaten to death by a white Australian, who said, during the course of the attack, that he wanted to take his town back. And I've been hearing reports in recent times, from the outer suburbs of Melbourne, of people who are now finding themselves in hospital and whose assailants have said similar things to them. They say, in essence, 'I'm beating you up because you're black.'

When people in parliament stand up and use, as has been said, what can only be described as white supremacist, proto-fascist, neo-Nazi language, and they start to say, 'We want a country where the only people welcome in that country are welcome on the basis of a certain race,' we open the door to hate and we open the door to violence. And it warms my heart no end to see this parliament uniting to send the strongest possible message to everyone sitting in their lounge rooms, their schools or their workplaces who are listening to and are hurt by the comments that have been made today. The message that is being sent is very, very clear. We stand with you. We do not accept what has been said. If you are hurting as a result of what you're reading or hearing today, know that the whole parliament stands with you. We hear your hurt, and we are doing everything we possibly can to stamp it out.

We are entering, I fear and I worry, a potentially dangerous period in our country. That is why this is so important. We're entering a potentially dangerous period in which white supremacists are signalling to each other from our TV screens and our parliaments and making calls that they hope that other people will hear. You only need to look at what is happening around the rest of the world to see where that ends: it ends in hurt and it ends in death. Today's action—this motion and the unanimous support that it is receiving—is, I hope, a bulwark against Australia sliding down that path.

I want to make a plea to the senator but also to everyone else: please tone down the rhetoric around African gangs—please. It is going to result in people dying. It has before, and it will again. As someone who has gone to many, many events in Victoria and in Melbourne over the years that I've been here, one of the things that I enjoyed the most and that warmed my heart the most was going to the events where, at the time, the state Liberal minister from the Liberal government would get up at the events and say, 'One of the good things about Victoria is that you'll never find people who will use race to try to win votes. We have differences of opinions about other things, but you won't find us using that.' I hope we can maintain that not just in Victoria but right around the country. If this unique moment in parliament gives us the opportunity to stop and reflect, I hope we can reflect on the things that we say over the coming months in the course of our political contests.

I also want to, lastly, just say that we've been trading barbs about a number of things over recent weeks, but I listened very closely to what the member for Kooyong said this morning when he was asked about the senator's speech yesterday. He said a number of very, very good and important things. One of them is especially worth reflecting on. When asked about the use of the awful phrase 'the final solution', the member for Kooyong invited the senator to go to the Holocaust museum and perhaps have a discussion with people there. Amongst all the other things that the senator should do and that everyone should do, I think that's something that the senator should do and something that everyone should do. When you have spoken with someone who has survived the Holocaust, you know that the only way that this will never happen again is if every single one of us is vigilant in everything we say and everything we do and we stamp it out at the first sign of it happening. If they've done that, there is no way that words like that could fall from someone's lips. We are in a dangerous situation because, as we get to the point where the last of the survivors leave us, it opens up the space. Unless those of us in this parliament and everyone else continue to do the remembering, it opens up the space for people like that to be able to use those words and it not have the same kind of firm response, which is why I am so pleased with what this parliament is doing today.

Lastly, I'd like to end by doing something that's often done at the beginning, which is to acknowledge the traditional owners of the land. To say that this galls me is an understatement: how can someone be so wilfully blind to this country's history as to talk about Australia being a white-only country when we have a black history? If the senator wants to talk about saying, 'Well, go back to where you came from,' he's probably included in that category as well, as is every one of us who's not an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Many of them must be looking at the things that he is saying with the same kind of revulsion. I know that there's a lot of work going on between the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community and members of the African communities in my electorate and in Melbourne more broadly at the moment. But I think it's appropriate to acknowledge the traditional owners of this country and pay respects to them.

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