Josh Burns (Macnamara, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If you want a reflection of the standard of politics being practised by the LNP right now, we just had one. Those were really grubby, nasty, unfounded accusations that were trying to dredge up really personal matters in order to make some sort of headline political issue out of them. The member should reflect on that contribution. Using this place as a forum to dredge up really unnecessary and awful political questions about someone's life and the private matters that have happened in this building is, frankly, a poor reflection on those who are seeking to politicise this.

But let's talk about more important matters. In my home city of Melbourne, over the last few months, we saw some of the most confronting scenes of bigotry and of the glorification of an old ideology that saw one of the worst chapters of human history, a chapter that Australia stood with our allies and other countries to fight against. What happened in Germany prior to and throughout the Second World War was one of the darkest chapters of humankind. My grandmother fled Germany in 1938 to come to Australia, and she did so as a stateless refugee, someone who, at four years of age, was deemed not to be an equal member of the society that she was born into. Yet Australia provided a safe place for her. It meant that she was able to create a life for herself outside of the country she was fleeing. Australia provided a safe haven of multicultural acceptance, a home and an opportunity. She was a teacher. She had multiple degrees. She was by far the smartest person in our family. She was a proud Australian and, dare I say it, was also proud of her German heritage, and felt very sad about it. I say that because the scene that we saw in Melbourne of people marching and flippantly signalling the Sieg Heil, the Nazi salute, and parading around like foolish, young, lost souls in a city that celebrates multiculturalism was as jarring and uncomfortable a scene as I can remember in all my life living in our beautiful city.

After that moment, we saw governments come together across the country to work together and to look at what legislative loopholes needed to be tightened to ensure against those sorts of ugly scenes, which stand against every fibre of the multicultural heart of our city. I want to thank the Attorney-General for his leadership and his careful consideration of these matters. I think that the legislation that the federal government has introduced this week will complement that of the state governments. As we saw on the streets of Melbourne, where people were marching up and down doing neo-Nazi glorification, those policing those matters were Victoria Police. It is appropriate for the state police to be upholding the state legislation. It is also appropriate that the federal government complements that legislation in order to ensure that there is no glorification of or profiteering from the bigoted and ugly neo-Nazi ideology that those characters were seeking to publicise in Melbourne.

Obviously, as with every piece of legislation, we need to review it and ensure that it is being implemented in practice, but I want to take this opportunity to talk about this issue and say that this is a deeply personal issue. As someone who obviously is the beneficiary of Australia's welcoming approach to my grandmother but also as someone who cares deeply about this country, as someone who wants us to remain a proudly multicultural society, as someone who wants us to uphold the law equally and proudly for all its citizens I ask the Attorney-General: why is it so important that we maintain our multicultural heart, and why is it so important to have these laws implemented for our society to benefit?

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