Peter Khalil (Wills, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Colleagues, it's late—it's actually early. I'm going to implore you directly as parliamentary colleagues. We're debating the Religious Discrimination Bill—it's all in the name—and this amendment goes directly to protecting people of faith from discrimination. It's manifest in the name of this bill, and this amendment goes directly to it. There are a lot of good people on the other side here. We have different views, we might not agree on everything, but there are a lot of people of good conscience, and we've got an opportunity now to do the right thing by making this law better.

Most of us here probably already have our eyes closed, so keep them closed and imagine you're a member of a Jewish family, walking to a synagogue on the Sabbath, and a car full of yobbos drives past and starts spewing an anti-Semitic tirade against you and your children. Imagine you're a Sikh stacking shelves at a supermarket, and someone comes down the aisle and starts screaming at you that you're a terrorist. Imagine you're a young Muslim woman on a bus, wearing a hijab, and a group of people get on the bus and start shouting at you, in your face, and surrounding you. Imagine you're an Orthodox Christian priest, wearing a long black gown, at the shops, being screamed at by people and told to go back to where you came from. All of those examples are real experiences of ordinary Australians, and this amendment goes to the heart of protecting them from what they experience because of their faith. That's what we're debating here. It's not too hard for us to imagine their experiences, because some of us have experienced them as well. In voting for this amendment, we will give truth to the title of this bill, the Religious Discrimination Bill, and I implore you, colleagues, to vote for this amendment.

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