Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the very important Criminal Code Amendment (Hate Crimes) Bill 2024. I'd like to talk a bit about how we got into this situation, what has happened in Australia, what the response has been, antisemitism in general—because as horrific, distasteful and as outrageous as it is, we need to talk about it—this bill and how the coalition think that it could be made stronger. How did we get here? Well, it's interesting. Antisemitism is one of the oldest hatreds in the world—something we thought probably wasn't under the surface in Australia but that, to our horror, we discovered was there after the horrific acts of October 7. Everyone was shocked that Israel was attacked by Hamas in the way it was. Everyone was shocked the day after that Sunday when we all awoke and saw the news that paragliders, four-wheel-drive utes and all sorts of vehicles with murderous terrorists had gone into these peaceful kibbutzes and communities in southern Israel and committed the most horrific crimes. And the more the week went on, and as footage was released—it was impossible to watch, but you had to watch it to understand exactly what had happened.

It affected many people in this place very personally for their own reasons. In my case, before coming to parliament I had worked as an agricultural scientist for an Israeli water technology company called Netafim. I was very proud to work for that company, because that company developed water-saving technology that brought agricultural prosperity to many parts of the world—yes, in Australia, where we use it to grow tomatoes and almonds, but also in Third World countries and developing countries. That is Israeli technology that they developed out of necessity. The people who set up the kibbutz that started Netafim in Hatzerim, down in the south of Israel, were working with the government to do what the inventor of drip irrigation, Simcha Blass, said: 'Make the desert bloom.' They could make the desert bloom as long as they could use the very small amount of water they had efficiently, so they developed this technology, which is now used around the world. It brings life to people. At the time, I spoke about my visits to those Israeli communities. Many of them are in the south and many of them are very close to that border. Netafim is the company that makes the drip irrigation equipment, but there are other companies that make the valves, the filters—everything that gets water to agricultural crops, as the member for Braddon and the member for Forrest as farmers well know. It's all technology that's created in these communities, so they're bringing life to the world by making agricultural produce easier to grow. I said at the time that they were obsessed with life. What they were met with was people who were obsessed with death, people who have impossible to understand hatreds—irrational, insane hatreds—to think that they could cross the border and do those things to people. It's one thing in a war zone to attack one another's soldiers, and often, in war, there are civilian casualties that happen because of the nature of conflict, but these were people deliberately going and murdering civilians.

That they'd suffered should've sparked a great deal of sympathy for the Israeli people, instead, in some quarters in Australia, it unleashed burgeoning antisemitism. We saw that with the way that people gathered at the opera house and with the chants they were making. We've seen it since. A lot of that happened before Israel's military response, and people said: 'This isn't antisemitism. We're just against what Israel is doing in their attempts to defend themselves.' A lot of these protests happened before those military operations started—let's not deny that. But, since then, Israel launched some military actions.

A debate about what Israel is doing is legitimate. Targeting Australian Jewish people because of it is not, and that's what's been happening. It's happened at the opera house, at MPs offices and at my office in a small way. I mention this because I've had experience of 'Free Palestine' stickers being put and texter drawn all over my office. But I was disgusted with what happened to my friend, a person on the other side of the chamber that I met since I came to this place, the member for Macnamara. I play sport with him of a morning up here, and it's been my great honour to get to know him. For him and his staff to go through what they did at his office is against the foundations of democracy, and it's against a member. The member for Macnamara and I disagree on policy, but we are friends, as I am with the member for Hunter, and I felt that personally.

Obviously there's been a great deal of debate about the response since. I thought that the Leader of the Opposition's response had a real moral clarity to it. He spoke in parliament about what was chanted at the opera house, and that was really uncomfortable for all of us. He didn't use the exact words, but he alluded to them. I saw a lot of people around the House being critical of the opposition leader bringing them up, but you have to say this stuff to face the evil of it. He did that and he's been steadfast since. I think that he's shown real leadership on this issue even when it's got pretty difficult, and I commend him for that. There are people in the Australian Labor Party who have shown some leadership, but, overall, I would say that the response has been too equivocal and the Jewish community has felt that the response hasn't been strong enough. It hasn't had that moral clarity that we need to face this evil.

I just want to talk a little bit about antisemitism as one of the world's oldest hatreds. In my experience, you go back in your own mind and try to think about what you know, what you understand and what forms your view. I've talked a bit about my experiences in Israel, but, even before that, I remember my experience in the late eighties when I would've been in my early- to mid-teens. As I've said in this place, in the country you only had two channels, but I was allowed to watch the late movies sometimes when my parents didn't know that I was up watching the late movie. There was a TV movie on called Escape from Sobibor, and it showed, in graphic terms, what the Nazis were doing to the Jewish population in Europe in the late 1930s and 1940s and why the West had the moral clarity to wage war against that evil regime and to stop antisemitism in its tracks. I mention that because what we saw in the 1940s is what this sort of thinking and this sort of evil, when it gets going, can lead to.

As I said, the response from the opposition leader has had a moral clarity, and his writing to the Prime Minister to convene the National Cabinet on this was the right move. To push for this sort of thing and to keep the pressure on—which is what oppositions do—was the right move. Government take credit for coming out and saying, 'We're going to do something,' but often they do something because of the pressure the opposition puts on them. This bill is an example of that. This bill has come about because of the pressure applied by the opposition. I want to give a shout out to the member for Berowra, who's also shown equal moral clarity based on his own experiences.

The bill itself—the changes are welcome. I think they're too late, but we have to do this. We should have done it a long time ago, but we are doing it now. That's a good thing. There are some simple straightforward steps that the government are proposing to take. Those steps lower the threshold for criminality, particularly for those who urge violence against individuals or groups. Instead of proving that the person intended that the violence occur, the police now only need to prove that the person was reckless as to whether the violence would occur, and that is a welcome change. These laws remove the good faith defence for those urging violence. As the previous speaker, the member for Lynes, said, you can't urge violence in good faith, not in this situation. It's a welcome change. There's also some expansion of the offences that relate to the urging of violence in relation to a range of personal characteristics on the basis of which a person or a group is targeted.

I talked about what's happened to MPs' offices, what happened at the Opera House, the spray painting of cars and the targeting of people because of what they were wearing. All of this is anathema to what modern Australian values should be. But the worst thing happened late last year. Ironically for me, I was at the Israeli Embassy. I was there that day with the Israeli and German ambassadors. They're neighbours in Canberra; the German and Israeli embassies are next door to each other. The two ambassadors came together to commemorate a person from my electorate—an Indigenous Yorta Yorta man called William Cooper—who, in the 1930s, took a petition to the German consulate in Melbourne on behalf of the Jewish people and was turned away. There was a plaque to commemorate him. We celebrated that plaque the very day that there was a synagogue firebombing in Melbourne. If you didn't understand the necessity for these laws and the fact that they need to go further to protect places of worship, then that was your answer of what there needed to be.

That synagogue bombing was an outrage, and it's really rocked—everyone is experiencing that. But there are those of us who are from Victoria and understand those parts of Melbourne, like Caulfield and Brighton, where Jewish people, who make such a contribution to our region, have congregated and live in Melbourne. What a contribution they've made, through business and arts, to our community. For one of their places of worship to be firebombed by some coward or cowards is an outrage. It goes against everything we believe and everything all of us want Australia to be.

What we do in this place and the messages we send matter. I hope people get prosecuted. I hope people get caught. I hope they get prosecuted by these laws. I hope that this makes the prosecution of them easier. I hope that this makes the capture of them easier. I hope that this means the punishment can be harsher, but, even if it doesn't, the fact that we're passing this legislation is a message from this place to say that antisemitism will not be tolerated in Australia. Antisemitism is an outrage. It's a hatred that should have died in ashes of 1945 in World War II, when many of our brave Australian servicepeople and, indeed, many from the United States and the United Kingdom fought against that evil regime to put a stop to antisemitism once and for all.

We're seeing it rear its head again here. This parliament needs to send a very strong message that this is not tolerated. This bill's a start, but it needs to go further. We've got some amendments that take this further that I hope the government will consider. We should not only be passing legislation; we've all got to be really strong in our statements about this scourge. I urge the Prime Minister and anyone in a position of leadership to look at the way that the opposition leader acted in the days when this was getting a foothold, and to use that moral clarity to guide them in their attack on antisemitism.

See this speech in context