Scott Buchholz (Wright, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

BUCHHOLZ () (): It's a sad day when we have a bill such as the Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2024 being debated in the parliament. I will start off with a comment that speaks to this bill. It's about the hate crimes and antisemitic behaviour we're seeing in Australia at the moment, and, predominantly, our lack of leadership in addressing these hate crimes. This has been going on for years, as Martin Niemoller first penned when he said:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Those were controversial comments at the time. That quotation expresses Niemoller's belief that Germans had been complicit, through their silence, in the Nazi imprisonment, prosecution and murder of millions of people, including Jews. We need to change the behaviour which is sneaking into the Australian psyche and landscape.

I have been the beneficiary of a bipartisan visit to Israel and Palestine to see things firsthand, and what I witnessed was quite extraordinary—the vehement hatred that exists from one culture to the next, the generational bile that exists. It's indoctrinated into children. When in Palestine, I saw memorials similar to our Anzac memorials, where we honour and remember those fallen servicemen and women, in pretty much every regional town in Australia. They have similar memorials, but the names that are remembered are of children or people who have strapped on a suicide vest with the sole intent of killing as many Jews as possible. It's called 'pay for slay'—the more people you kill, the greater the stipend your family is given. Those funds are generated through the United Nations. The storybooks in the schools in some of the Palestinian communities depict Walt Disney characters like Mickey Mouse with suicide vests on, as though this is the pathway for these children.

The majority of the places we visited in Palestine seemed to be more welfare reliant—more reliant on handouts. The best-paying jobs were those in the construction sector beyond the wall, in Israel in the building sector. Those who did work were paid well; it was unskilled labour but they were paid well, I'm led to believe, and the jobs were well sought after.

I had the opportunity to catch up with the Palestinian Prime Minister. I said, 'I don't know why, and I don't pretend to know why, the hate exists and the many years that it's existed for, and I don't pretend to have an answer for you. We're only a small country in Australia, and it'd just be really handy for us if you guys stopped bombing each other for about six months because we're trying to help another country who's in a spot of bother'—and that was Ukraine. He put his hand on my hand and said, 'You speak the truth.'

It was a confronting visit and it was one that allows me to make a contribution today because, once you see the impacts and once you live for a number of weeks with the Israeli community who go to sleep every night under a dome to counter the regular bomb attacks—when they go to sleep each night knowing that 32 per cent of Israel's GDP is going to that offence budget—you see that it's another world that we take for granted.

When you see the antisemitic attacks that we're seeing now across the country that came with the October 7 terrorist attacks on Israel by Hamas, I think there can be no equivocation or denial that the October 7 attacks were the single greatest loss of Jewish lives on any day since the Holocaust. October 7 was a day of brutal murder, torture, kidnapping and sexual violence perpetrated by Hamas against Jews in Israel. The attacks were deliberate, cruel and barbaric. We don't need to repeat the heinous acts in this chamber, but there's no doubt that they were designed with the purpose of maximising pain and sorrow amongst the Jewish community.

I would've thought that the Jewish community had probably suffered enough. Last year, I was in France when the Rugby World Cup was on and I took the opportunity with my wife to swing past Germany. We went to Dachau, one of the detention camps, and it gets real as soon as you walk into those buildings and you see the furnaces, the conditions and the museum. You see the way that humans treated other humans and you feel physically ill. As legislators, we should be doing everything in our power to make sure those same mistakes are never repeated and that we stop them when we see them in our universities and in our streets. Hopefully, this bill goes some way to stopping them.

Our speaking points talk about the role of our prime minister, and Australians looked to the Prime Minister to set the tone for the national response to that crisis. He could've made it clear through his actions from the very beginning that those who sought to spread antisemitic attacks would feel the full force of the law, but it wasn't the case. He should've been clear from the very beginning about the scale of the horror inflicted by Hamas and that Australia stands with its long-term friend and ally Israel, a democratically elected government in the Middle East. He should've used our laws and the police forces to clamp down on those who sought to weaponise the Hamas attacks for their own hateful purposes here at home. The Prime Minister failed the test of leadership, and he has failed the Jewish community.

I don't know which emotion I felt when I saw the protests at the universities and on campuses around Australia. There was the presumption that these students, who had the right to protest, had some academic context or some knowledge and historical context because they were on university campuses. But the emotion that I was left with was that, when they were asked by journalists while they were chanting the Hamas-indoctrinated 'river to the sea' chant, the bulk of them could not tell the journalists which river or which sea and had no depth or sense of the cruelty and the absolute annihilation that that chant speaks to. Then they gave megaphones to Australian children with no concept or sense of the impact that it would have across the country. And then, as if that wasn't enough, these people who protested came after our veterans in the way that they vandalised war memorials across the country, particularly here. There was one in Canberra where they splashed paint all over it. That's an absolutely appalling, abhorrent reflection on the honourable servicemen and women who left their families, went overseas and put their lives on the line. Some never returned, and you've got a group of people here in Australia, that live under the freedom that those very men and women provided them, denigrating their contributions to this country by vandalising memorials.

I fear what this country's future is with a lack of leadership. There have been consequences for the inaction under the PM's watch. The consequences of this government's indifference to domestic antisemitism has been stark. There have been months of protests in our capital cities and the occupations of our universities. We've seen doxxing of Jewish businesses and the harassment of Jewish students and academics. Buildings have been vandalised, homes defaced and cars torched. We saw the attempted arsons of synagogues in Sydney and the burning of a daycare centre in Maroubra. We saw the terrorist firebombing of the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne. We have seen now, extraordinarily, a caravan packed with explosives apparently targeting Jewish addresses, and have a Prime Minister who, as a result of question time today, was in the dark that any of this was happening—completely oblivious. It was an extraordinary failure by a weak Prime Minister as he stood by and allowed the strain of antisemitism to spread. It's making our nation's character poorer. It's an indictment on the leadership. I'm sorry that this bill is before the House, and I'm sorry that we're not joined in condemning this behaviour by those who sit on the other side of the chamber.

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