Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I concur with the remarks of the member for Riverina, especially about other people who have been taken, like Catherine, into the realm of a political life when they never bought a ticket. That's an absolute disgrace. When I was at the University of New England, my old alma mater, there was a quote by Caius Cornelius Tacitus, 'Ex sapientia modus,' which is, 'From wisdom comes moderation.' Moderation, of course, is an incredibly important thing. Why would Tacitus be so enthralled by moderation? Because moderation is what keeps people in harmonious relationships with one another. People don't get hurt when we have tolerance and when we rely on differences, but we don't take it to a point where we are prepared to do harm to another person—tolerance from moderation.

I come from a family who all served in the Defence Forces—both of my grandfathers and my father. Tragically my grandmother was English. We're not quite sure—they came from the Midlands, so it was a depressing process—but I think seven brothers were killed. They were all killed—all the boys. All gone. So impressed upon me from a young age was moderation.

There are evils of those who live in the shadows of the extremes on either side of the political fence, the Left and the Right, and the absolute horrendous mechanism of hate that they enthral the masses with for the destruction of people. We saw it in its most profound and evil form in the events that followed 1938 and probably started with the 1933 social service act of Germany, where they decided the path and that they were going to start with the exclusion of a certain race of people—Jewish people. What they worked on the back of was the political, social, economic and ethical malaise that was so evident in the Great Depression. With the promulgation of an ethos that worked on the back of that, they had the capacity to therefore target a certain group of people and place on their heads the profound problems that were there in Europe, especially the hyperinflation and economic destruction in Germany that followed the First World War.

Of course it was the art of evil. It wasn't a group of people that brought that about. You could probably go back to the economic circumstances of the armistice that brought that about. What was the purpose of this evil that came forward? How did it get to the point where we could believe that people stood by and watched people—and they knew about it—be put into the wholesale-factory-like incineration, destruction, starvation, belittlement and everything that went through the Holocaust?

I'm not Jewish, but I certainly did take—from stories that were conveyed to me by my father about my grandfather and the way they held the people who did that in absolute and utter contempt—that there was just this absolute, unbelievable disdain. Why would you do this?

The thing about Australia and, might I say, New Zealand is that we have an incredible egalitarian ethos that you don't understand until you go somewhere else. All the time in Australia, if you're too much on the edge, people tell you to tone it down. 'Take it down a cog. Take a pill.' We don't like extremism. Inherently in us, we see the evil that perpetrates that—the evil seed that grows in that garden that lives on the extreme of the Left and the Right. It's not just that we see it in antisemitism; that is the most profound thing, and I'll go to that, because that's what we're seeing now. But you saw it in Pol Pot and in the extreme of the Left. You could see it in Mao's China. It was wholesale destruction of people through the Cultural Revolution—just starving them to death. I did have family members on a side of the family who were Chinese that certainly did live that. Why? It was because they'd been to university. Apparently that was evil, so they were sent out to the countryside to die. The trees died because they ate the bark off them. That's what happens when you let this evil animal—this evil snake—have its head.

Our philosophical premise in being Australian and our duty is that, when we see this start to rise up, we don't wait until it comes to its horrific time on the throne. You deal with it immediately. That's what has gone wrong here. This thing has started. It's like a fire. When a fire gets out the tip of the filth and into the grass, you don't wait until it's halfway up the hill before you try to put it out. You put it out immediately. We haven't put this out. It has grown and followed exactly the same malaise as the absolute evil of Germany in the period of 1933 through to 1945. It starts innocuously. 'Oh, they're just a bunch of radicals. Don't worry about them. They're just in the corner. They'll never go anywhere.' No-one takes them seriously. Well, they didn't take them seriously in Germany, either, until they started mustering up people from the whole of Europe and murdering them. Even then, once they got to that point, let's be honest—most people just stood by and watched.

The premise of this is that we have a duty to jump on this, not just from the conservative side or the Labor side but from both sides. People of moderation are duty bound to deal with this and deal with it immediately. If we have respect for those who have fought for our nations, we will remember that tens of thousands of Australians died against the extreme regimes of the filth of fascism—that's what I call it—and its like-minded person in imperial Japan. It's the same thing. They were just wholesale murdering people. They didn't care. What happens if you let this get away is that a certain group of people determine that another group of people are merely animals, and they act like animals in how they deal with people. This is why it is not incumbent just on this parliament to deal with this issue but on all Australians. That ethos of egalitarianism and moderation says that, when you hear someone like the member for Riverina was talking about, you're actually duty bound to go up to them and say: 'Mate, tone it down. I don't find what you've said acceptable. You are not respecting the egalitarian nature of Australia. We know what you're doing; you're inciting hate. You're inciting a movement. You're basically working on the back of that.' I would say that they work on the back of issues pertinent to the Middle East, which we're seeing in Israel and Gaza. It's not for the betterment of the people of Gaza. They're not turning up there to say, 'We're going to build hospitals,' or to try to deal with the issues there. 'We're going to join a United Nations peacekeeping force!' They're using it in Australia for the incitement of a movement of the extreme. In the incitement of the movement of the extreme, once more in our nation—and I've never seen it, but for the first time, out of the tip of filth, the fire is in the grass. Now we've all got a job to put this fire out, and this bill is a part of that. It's a part of what we've done here.

I don't know how much is gained or added to by going through the history of the process, but it is a fact that on 7 October Israel was invaded. It's as simple as that. If Australia were invaded in the same way that Israel was invaded, you would expect a response from this parliament and our defence force that was absolutely profound and that dealt with it in such a form as to remove the threat. That would be the expectation if, let's pretend, some island we've never heard of manifested itself overnight and decided to attack Australia and do what happened on October 7 in Israel. The response of the Australian Army—led by Labor, Liberal, National, whatever you like—would be that they must deal with that immediately and in the most profound way.

But we all want peace there. There is no solace or solution in the loss of life for innocent people. Actually, that's the problem; some people do believe that's okay. In fascism, they did believe it was a-okay to murder innocent people. Under Pol Pot, they did believe it. In Stalinist Russia, they did believe it. In Mao's China they did believe it. The Hutus in Rwanda believed it. They did believe it was right to murder innocent people, throw them down toilets, or fill up football stadiums with them and just murder them outright. They did believe that—no doubt, it's happening right now.

But, when it comes to Australia, and when we see people pop up and start espousing their views on racial grounds, on religious grounds or on ethical grounds, it's always the same. They believe they are 100 per cent right and everybody else is 100 per cent wrong. On that premise, they believe they have the right to create harm, and it doesn't stop there; they ultimately believe they have the right to kill other humans because they believe the other humans are not human. They are less than human; they are subhuman.

Going back, in my family, we were not allowed to even draw a swastika, a symbol of hate. It was not allowed. If you draw a war plane, do not put a swastika on it. My father was from the right, he was a conservative, but he had a pathological dislike of fascism. It was a subject, an issue, that would be held in absolute disdain. There was nothing to be mentioned but that it was evil. There was nothing to be mentioned but any semblance of it, any sense of it, any sight of it was to be crushed. When my father's friends came round—ex-serviceman who served in New Guinea, in the Middle East, all round—they were from every side. They joked about my dad because he actually started in the left—he was a boilermaker, fitter and turner, and he actually met Chifley—but he was on the right when he finished. One of his mates who fought in Papua New Guinea, Jim Flower, was a pacifist. He demanded never to wear a firearm, but he was one of the bravest people there. He would go out in the scrub, find people screaming and get them back to the hospital. He did that, and when he was around his unit he was seen as one of the bravest men who had ever lived. He was from the left. He was definitely on the left. He drove my mother crazy, because she was on the right. But all these people had one thing in common: moderation. You have a beer together, you don't get too worked up about politics, you don't bang on too much about your religion—that's your business. Keep your business to yourself because this is how we get along in this nation.

These symbols of hate say that that ethos of Australia, that egalitarian ethos, is to be put aside for an alternative view. Now, it shouldn't be part of any part of the world, but most definitely it should never be part of Australia. It is just not who we are. With the filth that comes out of the tip and the fire that comes out of the tip and lands on the grass, what we immediately have to do on the Labor side, the Liberal side, the Nationals side and the crossbench side is find that fire, seek out and close in on that fire and put it out. Don't let them divide us up. Say, 'You've got no friends on the Labor side, you've got no friends on the crossbench side, you've got no friends anywhere.' This filth is going out. This filth is going back into the tip. We're going to find a backhoe and cover you up, and you can basically just lay dormant like a dinosaur.

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