Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

From the outset, I really want to pick up where the previous speech left off. I commend the Attorney-General for bringing this bill to the House. It hasn't been a quick thing. I know, from hearing the Attorney-General report to the government caucus room and to caucus committees and from talking with colleagues about the development of this bill, which was introduced last year and extensively considered through the proper parliamentary processes, that this is something that he is rightly personally proud of and has put a lot of careful intellectual thought into with extensive consultation.

These are complex areas of legislation, as we know, because they intersect with state and territory regimes and balance competing rights. These are always, rightly so, contested bills in a democracy because, when you're measuring one set of rights—and some would rightly say freedom of speech is of critical value in our society, but freedom of speech is not unlimited. It never has been. You can't incite people to violence. You can't defame people. You can't breach national security classifications. In any decent society, there have always been some limits to freedom of speech, and, in this case, there are a complex set of things that we balance. But it is a significant piece of legislation.

Let there be no doubt at the outset that the government is committed to protecting the community from those amongst us who would promote extremism, violence or hatred or seek to incite violence. That's a values based commitment. No Australian should be targeted because of who they are or what they believe, and the government has worked diligently to introduce this legislation to create new criminal offences and to also strengthen the protections against hate crimes within existing criminal offences. The bill will create new criminal offences for directly threatening the use of force or violence against a group or a member of a group. I've had a lot of emails from people who are a bit confused asking, 'Does it protect this characteristic or this group?' Importantly, these offences will protect groups or members of groups distinguished by race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, disability, nationality, national or ethnic origin, or political opinion. They will provide protection to Australians right across the community from hate speech and from those who would urge violence.

I'll make a couple of contextual remarks though. I believe we're the world's most successful multicultural society—one of the most diverse societies on the planet. We can run a bit of a book with Canada, but I'll claim we're the most successful! But just being a diverse society is not the same thing as being a successful multicultural society. We can all think of countries that are diverse that are not successful. Indeed, the member for Wentworth recommended a book when we caught up for a cup of tea last year, and, I will admit, I didn't finish it over the summer, as I promised—I'll give you this confession now!—but I did get through another couple of chapters. Part of the thesis of that book was observing that, if you look through history, most diverse societies—the Ottoman Empire and other places we could mention—were actually run by authoritarian rulers. The notion of a modern liberal democratic polity existing with the level of human diversity that we have—be it faith, linguistic, cultural or ethnic—is actually a very new notion; it is, some would say, only decades old in the whole of human history. So the jury's out. People in 200 years will look back and see how we did. Hopefully there'll still be a peaceful, democratic, diverse society that we've bequeathed to them, to those who come after us. But we can't take our success for granted.

Success, in my view, has three key attributes. First is legal foundations and political intent. This year we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Whitlam Labor government's introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act, having abolished the last vestiges of the old racist White Australia policy. That act has stood the test of time laying the legal foundations but it alone has not been enough; there are other things that we've had to layer on in that task of trying to maintain a cohesive society in the face of all this diversity and these conflicting views.

Second, as you would know, Deputy Speaker Payne, is investment. Often that's helping new people settle in. The member for Banks over there also represents a diverse electorate. You have to sometimes give some people a bit more help than others to get on their feet and set up life here and succeed. It is investing to allow people to celebrate and cherish their cultural traditions, to pass them on, and, importantly, to share them with the broader community. Again, that takes investment.

But in my view, the magic ingredient, the secret sauce, of success is leadership at all levels—political leadership, faith leadership, interfaith work and community leadership. Day in, day out, it's the community leaders, the volunteers and the people on committees and organisations who do that work of building our social cohesion and maintaining it. Social cohesion is not an end state; it's inherent in the word 'cohesion'. 'To cohere' means to come together. Social cohesion is a dynamic process. We can't take it for granted. When we face stresses and strains on our social cohesion, which I'll touch on in a moment, as we are at this time in our history, we've got to look at all aspects of that formula. Where do we need to strengthen our legal regimes and our protections? This is a good example, where the government is of the view that we need to strengthen the legal protections and the regimes which exist to protect people from hate speech and to allow people to be themselves, whatever that means, and to be safe in the community. It means investing, as the government is, but it also means thinking about leadership.

I learnt a really important lesson in my first six months here, in 2016. I arrived in Canberra bright-eyed, bushy-tailed and full of good ideas, and I was shocked to discover that the then government's main legislative priority—which consumed the then government party room, with Peter Dutton and Scott Morrison and the whole rotten cabal of the IPA—was to weaken the Racial Discrimination Act. That's what they came to Canberra to do. They don't like to talk about that now because the Labor Party worked with the Jewish community and the multicultural communities of this country to fight and stop the then Liberal government weakening the Racial Discrimination Act. It's a shameful moment in our history, and the leadership lesson I learnt then was that the words that are said in this parliament and the things that leaders do in this country have real-world impacts. What we saw with that rotten government—and the now opposition leader was right at the heart of this nasty little tawdry campaign—was a spike in racism. People with black skin got abused on public transport. In my community, Muslim women had headscarves ripped off. Sikh guys had their turbans ripped off. Jewish people were bagged in the street for showing the articles of their faith. The leadership lesson I took was: 'Don't be like the Liberal Party. Don't try to divide the community and chase votes based on dog whistling.' Sadly, that's what we're seeing. The Attorney-General rightly described the Leader of the Opposition's disgusting attempts to politicise antisemitism and chase votes as grotesque.

It's a serious issue, and I know the member for Wentworth and the member for Macnamara over there feel this as much as or more than anyone in this parliament, given what you two have experienced in your community. It's a serious issue, and it shouldn't be politicised. They call for laws on doxxing. They don't like to talk about the fact they voted against the laws on doxxing last year, despite calling for them. Despite the fact they're still trying to claim credit for them, they actually voted against them. So let's see where their vote lands this time. They weren't in favour of this legislation late last year. Let's see how they vote now. The strains on our social cohesion are real. The horrific series of antisemitic incidents in capital cities is probably the most visible sign of that. But there are other forms of discrimination.

There's racism. The Anti-Racism Framework released by the Human Rights Commission last year called that out. In my community, I don't have a large Jewish community, though I was mayor of a council, I think in the member for Macnamara's electorate, which has the largest Jewish community. We have old and close connections with the conservative and the progressive elements of the Jewish community, if you want to call it that, despite some of the rubbish that gets written in certain media outlets. But in my community, it's Islamophobia. We've seen, since the conflict in the Middle East, more public abuse and personal intimidation of mainly Muslim women going about their business. They'll be shopping with their kids and get abused in the street. There's homophobia. It's all the forms of discrimination that this bill seeks to address. The government is committed to protecting the entire community from those who want to promote extremism or hatred or incite violence. There's no place for that stuff in our diverse society—none whatsoever.

As I said, I decry the politicisation of this. I'll touch on some aspects of the bill. Actually, no, I just want to say a little more on that point on social cohesion. The Scanlon Foundation's work is actually the longest-running longitudinal study examining social cohesion that we've found anywhere in the world. It's not perfect—people can critique the methodology, and that's perfectly legitimate—but the fact that it's longitudinal, even if you want to argue about the questions, means it does give you a year-on-year comparison to see how things are going. To be glass-half-full, what it showed last year was actually no change in the headline measure of social cohesion. Pleasingly, despite all of the strains on society, the percentage of Australians who support our multicultural society, support its character and celebrate their identity as Australians didn't show a major change. I think it went from about 85 to 81. That's a canary in the coalmine. You don't want to see that stuff go down.

But what we did see was a significant rise in the number of Australians holding antisemitic views, and, actually, an even more significant rise in the number of Australians holding Islamophobic views. That's what the data said. They're two particular indices that, for obvious reasons, they've measured for some years. We saw a correlating rise in negative attitudes towards people of faith generally. We've unpicked that a bit. We did it informally. I've talked a bit about this in speeches. The reality of life in modern Australia is that global conflicts and global events do impact daily life here. We're a globally connected society. What happens in the world impacts our communities, be it through family, friends, loved ones, social media, care for homelands and so on. That said the vast majority of Australians don't want global conflicts to rip apart our society. I've called out repeatedly what the Greens political party have done, spreading lies and active disinformation. Again, at the other side of the political spectrum, they've trying to profit electorally, harvest a few votes—it has been a difficult time to govern. We're standing in the centre of that and trying to, I think, do what the vast majority of Australians want, which is not to divide our society and not to see our workplaces, schools, sporting clubs, public transport and public events divided by a global conflict because people in the Liberal Party on the one hand and the Greens political party on the other want to try and chase a few votes by weaponising this conflict here. The vast majority of Australians sit in the middle.

It's also true, I think, that most Australians think: 'Not my cup of tea, mate. You do your thing; I'll do mine.' But they don't like to see faith groups fighting. That's not part of our tradition. I think some of that rise in negative attitudes is actually explained by what is a pretty benign and decent response: 'Just don't bring that stuff here. We don't want to see the fight. You have your view; I'll have mine. We can talk about it.' We need to rediscover the art, in our diverse society, of disagreeing agreeably. I pay tribute to those interfaith leaders who are quietly looking at ways to start to bridge those gaps and restart some dialogue. It's been one of the saddest things to see—the breakdown of decades-old interfaith relationships over this conflict.

As Minister Burke has said, if ever there were a time for the Muslim incantation—inshallah or God willing—it would be in response to the ceasefire and the current cessation of overt hostilities in the Middle East. Let's hope, for the sake of people in Israel, the occupied Palestinian territories and Lebanon who are affected by this conflict, as well as Australians, that that holds. That's a bit of context.

I think this is a really important bill. I think it goes to that first part of the success ingredient for a multicultural society—that we need to constantly review and, where necessary, strengthen the legal foundations and the protections for Australians whatever their background. To me, the great promise of Australian multiculturalism is that great Australian promise of a fair go —that everyone gets a chance to fulfil their human potential and live their life in our country free from discrimination no matter their faith, their ethnicity, their circumstances, how long they've been here or their identity. That's what this bill is about—protecting Australians. I commend it to the House, and I hope, as the ASIO boss said, we can lower the temperature.

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