Tim Watts (Gellibrand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Communications) Share this | Hansard source

We debate these budget measures here today, in perhaps the most trying times that have faced our nation since the Second World War. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a test of who we are as a nation. I've been really proud of the way that my community has pulled together to confront these challenges. From the community Facebook groups to the neighbourhood WhatsApp groups, people have been looking out for each other and doing the little things for each other that we need to get by. We've done our best to support local small businesses that have been forced to pivot their business model to adapt to COVID-19 health restrictions. Most importantly, we've been following the health recommendations from the experts—social distancing, hand-washing and mask wearing—in a way that has crushed the second wave. It's been tough going, but we know that the best way to get through this is to come together. That's always how Australians have gotten through crises. When natural disasters hit we're there for our neighbours. We're there to help a mate and we know they will be there for us too. It's the Australian way.

But, unfortunately, there have been those who've sought to use this pandemic as an opportunity to divide us—those people who have put their own interests before those of the community; those people who have sought to use this crisis to build their own profiles, spruiking conspiracy theories that offer anxious members of the community the false comfort that there is a grand plan to the calamities that beset us. There are those who have sought to use this crisis as a political tactic, undermining the advice of medical and public health experts in pursuit of short-term political point scoring.

Perhaps worse of all, there are those who have sought to use this crisis to set one Australian against another, laying the blame for this crisis on one ethnic group or another—playing the politics of race at our nation's most challenging moment. The first target for this were Asian Australians. Since the beginning of this pandemic, we have seen a small minority of people direct incredibly harmful language at Asian Australians, painting them as spreaders of COVID-19. They have imported the hateful and divisive language of US President Donald Trump in calling COVID-19 the 'Wuhan virus' or the 'Wuhan flu'.

I regret that a member of this place has been one such person using this tactic. The member for Hughes, who we heard from earlier in this debate, has over the past month published numerous Facebook posts and opinion pieces where he refers to COVID-19 as the 'Wuhan flu', all while peddling dangerous conspiracy theories about medical treatment for COVID-19 not approved by the Therapeutic Goods Association and downplaying the threat of the pandemic—all of this without any rebuke from the Prime Minister or the Minister for Health. It's rhetoric like this that, at the height of the pandemic, led to social media posts laying blame for supermarket shortages at the feet of Asian Australians. In my own electorate, a fake social media post was created in March claiming that Asians were hoarding food, baby formula, toilet paper and medical supplies to be exported to China from a Footscray warehouse. This wasn't a Facebook post with a few hundred likes; it was shared almost 95,000 times. Victoria police were forced to investigated and debunk the post.

It's tempting to think that these attacks on multicultural communities are only being carried out on social media. But, sadly, this year we've increasingly seen COVID-19 related racism incidents on the streets of Australia, and they are getting physical. Research from the Asian Australian Alliance and Per Capita found that 60 per cent of reported COVID-19 related racism incidents involved physical or verbal harassment; 40 per cent of incidents happened on a public street or a sidewalk; and 22 per cent of incidents happened in a supermarket. Only 9.4 per cent of them happened online. The research quotes participants detailing the abuse directly, and it makes for disturbing reading.

The increasing strategic tensions between China and the United States during COVID-19 have further exacerbated the prejudices being experienced by Chinese Australians. One of the authors of this research from Per Capita, Mr Osmond Chiu, appeared before a Senate committee last week to give evidence on the issues facing diaspora communities in Australia. Unfortunately, the behaviour of government senators at this hearing towards Mr Chiu could have been tabled as direct evidence on the very topic he was there to give evidence on. Senator Abetz had the gall to begin his questions to Mr Chiu and his fellow attendees at this hearing, Yun Jiang and Wesa Chau, by demanding that they 'unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party', as if by virtue of their mere ethnicity their loyalties to Australia were somehow in question.

I am proud to say that I know Mr Chiu and Ms Chau personally and regard them as friends, and I know that they have lived lives of public service and the best kind of patriotism—a desire to make our country a better place. I was embarrassed and revolted by their treatment by Senator Abetz, and all members should be clear that an Australian's ethnicity should never bring their loyalty to our country into doubt. Disappointingly, in spite of Senator Abetz's behaviour being not just morally repugnant but patently absurd, neither the Prime Minister nor the acting minister for immigration and citizenship have been able to see their way to condemning this ethnic McCarthyism.

We've also saw a series of articles from a columnist at the Herald Sun Andrew Bolt laying blame for the COVID-19 outbreak in Victoria at the feet of multiculturalism more broadly. In an article on 14 October, titled 'Toxic multiculturalism has weakened Victoria leaving it vulnerable to coronavirus', Bolt stated:

Multiculturalism has weakened Victoria, leaving it more likely to be smashed by a pandemic … This virus hit hardest in suburbs with big foreign-born communities, and in schools, housing commission towers or businesses with many immigrants. The Victorian catastrophe is not just a failure of government. It is also a failure of an immigration intake, plus multicultural policies, that produced a fractured people that cannot be trusted to voluntarily do their basic civil duty in a pandemic—keep a social distance, wash hands and don't work and socialise when sick. How stupid we are. So pure in our multiculturalism. And, in Victoria, so sick from it, too.

That's just one of a series of articles Mr Bolt has published through the pandemic blaming the Victorian second wave on multiculturalism. On 12 July Mr Bolt wrote an article titled, 'Multiculturalism made Victoria vulnerable to coronavirus'. It reads:

The second wave of this coronavirus outbreak has hammered home the dangerous pitfalls of diversity, with immigrants a common denominator in the worst virus hot spots.

He goes on to say:

multiculturalism has made Victoria more vulnerable not just because we're increasingly a nation of tribes, less likely to make sacrifices for people outside of our 'own'.

Again, on 25 June, in an article called 'Victoria's coronavirus crisis made by multiculturalism', he writes:

Victoria's coronavirus outbreak exposes the stupidity of that multicultural slogan 'diversity makes us stronger'.

These articles are wrong and out of touch with modern Australia, particularly modern Melbourne. We don't have the data, but perhaps COVID-19 infections have been higher in industries with higher numbers of migrants because often these are the essential services that have continued to operate while non-essential workers have remained at home. They're the supermarket staff, the warehouse workers, the truck drivers, the aged-care workers, the doctors and nurses who have kept the state running during COVID-19 restrictions. I've spoken to many of these staff, and they and their unions understand well the dangers of COVID-19 and have sought to protect themselves and their community as much as humanly possible while continuing to do these essential jobs. They deserve our thanks, not our blame.

As for migrants only caring about their tribe and not the broader Australian community, Mr Bolt could not be more out of touch. Walk into any charitable or community endeavour in 21st century Australia, particularly in Melbourne, and you'll see a room full of migrants, people who love our nation and feel a sense of public service to Australia. Just this year, I was proud to speak in this place about the incredible contributions made by inner city multicultural groups in my electorate to the bushfire relief effort for Victorians in rural and regional areas. The Australian Islamic Centre volunteers from Newport Mosque collected five truckloads full of donations and drove to Bairnsdale at 3 in the morning, with the assistance of the MFB and the CFA, to put on a breakfast sausage sizzle for exhausted firefighters. Buddhist Vietnamese volunteers from the Quang Minh temple delivered $33,000 in donations to the CFA in Bairnsdale and the CFA District 11 Headquarters Brigade. Sikh Volunteers Australia organised their volunteers to stay for 15 days in East Gippsland and help serve a thousand meals a day. They were helping out their fellow Australians, not their own tribe.

It's been the same in the current COVID crisis. Sikh Volunteers Australia have organised the delivery of well over 100,000 meals to the needy. And, when Richmond premiership champion Bachar Houli's mum was infected with COVID-19 and put into intensive care, he put the community first at this incredibly difficult personal time and spoke out at a public awareness campaign about the real risks of this virus. Again, they deserve our thanks, not our blame.

Public rhetoric blaming multiculturalism for COVID-19 is dangerous. Unfortunately the stresses of COVID-19 provide fertile soil for those who are willing to exploit Australians' anxiety for their own ends. Indeed, just this week, ASIO DG Mike Burgess acknowledged in evidence at Senate estimates:

Many of these groups and individuals have seized upon COVID-19, believing it reinforces the narrative and conspiracies at the core of their ideologies.

They see the pandemic as proof of the failure of globalisation, multiculturalism and democracy and confirmation societal collapse and a race war are inevitable.

The AFP deputy commissioner Ian McCartney said before estimates effectively the same thing, that young people are particularly at risk of being radicalised because:

We're finding now … that the concern for us is young people being radicalised online—very aggressively in relation to right-wing extremism.

Our security agencies have been warning about the threat of right-wing extremism for some time. ASIO's Mr Burgess repeated his evidence yesterday that 30 to 40 per cent of their priority counterterrorism caseload is now dedicated to extreme right-wing individuals.

It's not only the stresses of COVID-19 that have caused this up-tick in right-wing extremist activity. The actions of the Christchurch terrorist, an Australian who murdered 51 of our brethren in New Zealand in the name of this ideology, has poured accelerant on the trends before COVID-19. Despite warnings from our intelligence services, the threat of violent right-wing extremism remains almost unaddressed in the budget. There's nothing for new initiatives countering violent extremism and nothing for early intervention and nothing for deradicalisation. Indeed, the only direct response to the rising threat of right-wing extremism from those opposite is to ask for it to be called something else. It makes them uncomfortable. They don't want to think that people on the political Right could be extremists.

Well, it should make them uncomfortable, because those on the far Right of our politics are complicit in the rhetoric that radicalises right-wing extremist violence. It's a straight line from the title of the Christchurch terrorist's manifesto to the Great Replacement to the 2017 YouTube video of the same name, published by Lauren Southern, who is now a regular guest on Sky News, to the 2011 book on the same title by Frenchman Renaud Camus, and to the inspiration of it all—one of the most revolting books ever published, the 1973 book by Frenchman Jean Raspail, The Camp of the Saints. The Camp of the Saints enjoys general obscurity amongst decent people in our society, but on white supremacist forums it's regarded as a foundational book. It's been described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as one of the top 2 books in white supremacist circles. It tells the story of an invasion of France by a flotilla of 800,000 migrants from India, led by a man who eats only human excrement. It depicts Indians in the most dehumanising manner imaginable to promote the idea that Indians are morally deviant. The book exploits the most egregious racial traits imaginable—migrants as vectors for filth and disease, while white women are forced into sexual servitude in the face of the invasion. As one representative example, the death of one character is described thus:

Lydie ... She died in Nice, in a whorehouse for Hindus ... each refugee quarter had its stock of white women, all free for the taking. And perfectly legal. (One of the new regime's first laws, in fact. In order to 'demythify' the white women, as they put it.)' ... The enterprise was even given a name: the 'White Female Practice and Experimentation Centre' ... white women soon lost all pride in their colour, and with it, all resistance.

At one point, the hero of the story, a violent vigilante resisting the arrival of the Indians, murders a young Frenchman sympathetic to the migrants, while lamenting:

That scorn of a people for other races, the knowledge that one's own is best, the triumphant joy at feeling oneself to be part of humanity's finest—none of that had ever filled these youngsters' brains ...

It's disturbing stuff. Even worse, the author argued in an interview in 2016 in favour of violent resistance to immigration saying:

We're fed up ... There is going to be a resistance movement, and it has begun ... If the situation comes the one I predict—catastrophic—there will be certainly resistance that is both tough and armed ... Without the use of force we will never stop the invasion'.

This book incites violent right-wing extremism, and yet Andrew Bolt has bragged in his Herald Sun column about owning an autographed copy inscribed to him by the author: 'For Andrew, hoping without believing that the book will remain fictional. End game in 2045 to '55. Good luck, and in friendship.' Mr Bolt described the revolting premise of this book as 'prophetic and brave' and 'prescient'.

Research from the Victoria University has shown that 'exclusionary narratives contribute to violent extremism. The mainstream discourse around Great Replacement theory—originated from The Camp of the Saintsradicalises violent right-wing extremists, and we need to fight it.' It's no coincidence that the first commitment of the Christchurch Call, the global initiative to fight violent extremism in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attack, led by the New Zealand government, was to:

Counter the drivers of terrorism and violent extremism by strengthening the resilience and inclusiveness of our societies to enable them to resist terrorist and violent extremist ideologies, including through education, building media literacy to help counter distorted terrorist and violent extremist narratives, and the fight against inequality.

Australia signed up to the Christchurch Call and we need to live up to it too. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that we're strongest when we're united in a common cause. We're most resilient when we come together to the aid of those in need in our community. When we live up to the ideals of mateship and egalitarianism in the face of a crisis, especially in these difficult times, we need to counter the inaccurate and exploitative narratives that seek to weaken us and divide us. Those of us in public life, particularly in this place, have an obligation to lead this effort. In particular, as the member for Scullin has so rightly pointed out, we are in desperate need in these times of a new anti-racism strategy. We need to invest in the things that bring us together as Australians, to tell the real story of modern Australia, the inclusive story best described by Noel Pearson in his Declaration of Australia and the Australian People—three stories make Australia: the ancient Indigenous heritage, which is its foundation; the British institutions built on it; and the adorning gift of multicultural migration. Three stories make us one as Australians. That is the national story we must honour in this place.

See this speech in context