Peter Dutton (Dickson, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move the following motion:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the following from occurring immediately:

(1) the Member for Berowra presenting a Bill for an Act to amend the Criminal Code Act 1995, and for related purposes;

(2) debate on the second reading of the bill proceeding immediately for a period of no longer than one hour; and

(3) any questions required to complete the passage of the bill then being put without delay.

Leave not granted.

I move:

That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the following from occurring immediately:

(1) the Member for Berowra presenting a Bill for an Act to amend the Criminal Code Act 1995, and for related purposes;

(2) debate on the second reading of the bill proceeding immediately for a period of no longer than one hour; and

(3) any questions required to complete the passage of the bill then being put without delay.

I rise today to support the suspension motion that will allow the member for Berowra to introduce a bill to amend the Criminal Code Act of 1995. The coalition is seeking to have the Criminal Code amended to prohibit the display of Nazi symbols. Nazi symbols are, of course, associated with one of the most heinous regimes in history. Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany carried out the deliberate, calculated and organised mass murder of six million European Jews as well as five million prisoners of war and other victims. The Nazis' systemic and state sponsored campaign of persecution dehumanised an entire people and its industrialised extermination resulted in the Holocaust, one of the worst crimes committed in history. In all, the Nazis murdered 11 million human beings they considered to be life unworthy of life.

The Nazi regime is one of the greatest evils ever visited on humanity. Nazism is an ideology of unparalleled hate. It's an ideology which, through its contempt for the rights of man, can lead only to darkness and to the destruction of humanity. Thus, in what they represent, Nazi symbols are no ordinary symbols. They must be condemned wherever and whenever they are found and displayed. Today, we must stand united as a parliament. Those who display Nazi symbols are either ignorant of history or they are knowingly lionising an evil, which must never be revisited upon humanity. Sadly, and repugnantly, there is growing incidence of the glorification of Nazism in Australia. A Nazi symbol is a symbol of action commonly associated with the Nazi party. It would include the Nazi swastika, the Nazi salute, Nazi uniforms and other types of symbols identified in the Executive Council of Australian Jewry's anti-Semitism reports.

In seeking to amend the Criminal Code, we seek to make it an offence to display such symbols without a reasonable excuse. A person would have committed an offence if the person displays a Nazi symbol or the person knows that the symbol is a Nazi symbol. The penalty would be 100 units or 12 months imprisonment. In these amendments there would be exceptions, and to avoid doubt the display of swastika in connection with Buddhism, Hinduism or Jainism does not constitute the display of a Nazi symbol. Moreover, to ensure the prohibition does not interfere with the vital work of teaching young people about the evils of the past, there are limitations and carve-outs in terms of genuine educational, scientific and artistic purposes such as films and documentaries. Furthermore, the prohibition does not apply to journalism or where symbols are displayed for another purpose in the public interest.

There will be those who complain about these amendments to the Criminal Code being an infringement of civil liberties. To those people, I can say that the historical context here is everything. We owe it to all of those who were victims of one of the greatest crimes ever committed that such crimes are never repeated. As a parliament and as a people, ours is a duty to the present and the future, informed by one of the greatest sins of the past.

We seek support from the government today to suspend standing orders to bring on an important bill. It goes to the points that I raised earlier in this contribution. It allows us as a parliament to deal with this issue as a matter of urgency. It's clear to this parliament that there is no matter on the agenda today which has precedence over this matter, which we seek to bring in a bipartisan way into this chamber. It's obvious, through the drafting by the shadow Attorney-General, that we have been able in a concise way to provide words to the parliament that will enhance the Criminal Code and give the ability to authorities to stamp out a repugnant practice, a practice which is on the rise and which we must condemn.

As the Minister for Home Affairs in 2020, I wrote to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and asked the committee to examine this very issue—the issue of symbols—particularly in the context of coming from a period where we had been worried about ISIL attacks, including attacks that had taken place in our own country, and a rise in the incidence of right-wing extremism, which is not to be tolerated by anybody but to be discouraged by all. The committee, to their credit, said that they had a heavy agenda and that they would consider it in due course. The now Attorney-General was a member of the PJCIS at that time. The government says that it will examine this through the PJCIS process. That's a commitment that I understand the government had given. We're 10 months into the period of government, since May of last year. The government still hasn't dealt with this matter, even though I had written to the committee in 2020.

We seek to work with the government, through this suspension, on a particularly important issue. The Leader of the House has the opportunity now to read through the proposal that we put, and we would ask for his respect in allowing the chamber to deal with this important matter.

I want to join with everybody, not just on this side of the House but on both sides of the House, in working as one to do what we can to make sure that the Criminal Code reflects the reality of having to deal with this scourge. That is why it is important for us as a parliament to suspend standing orders to deal with this in a balanced way. We call on the support of the Independents, who have come into this place saying that they have an open mind, and many of them have made a commitment to considering each bill that comes before them. There is no more compelling bill before the House than that which we present this morning.

We ask for the support of the Leader of the House, who's good enough to be here in the chamber, and the Attorney-General as well, and we respect that. We don't seek to divide; we seek to unify through this action in the parliament today. We don't seek to vilify people for spurious reasons. We don't seek to cast completely baseless aspersions on their character. We don't seek to occupy that ground. In fact, it's completely the opposite. We seek to work together to send a very clear message, particularly to young Australians, predominantly young males, who may be influenced and indoctrinated quickly online. As the Director-General of Security in our country has pointed out, it can happen very quickly. A period of history may be glorified, and denialism may somehow appeal to them as it did in a previous generation.

We come together to send a very clear message that it is not Australian to adopt these symbols, to publicly display them and glorify that period of history. It is Australian to condemn that period of history. It is Australian to stand with people of Jewish faith. It is Australian to stand against those anti-Semitic incidents that we see globally and in our country as well. It's on the rise. Today it is an opportunity for our parliament to show our country and, frankly, to show the world that we will take action which is significant and will send a clear message to those that might otherwise be influenced by people of bad faith.

There are Australians who live to this very day with the horrors of knowing that their loved ones were tortured, gassed, murdered and abused in so many violent ways. They deserve the support of this parliament. They deserve to know that we stand with them in the condemnation of the rise of Nazism and the display of these symbols, which are meant to deliver hate on those people that seek love. We will work with the government. We've allowed them as much time as possible to contemplate, to deal with this matter as a matter of urgency in the parliament. I want to thank the member for Berowra for a lifetime of work in this area. I want to thank him for the drafting. He is a renowned legal expert, as we know, and he's been at work on drafting this. It's not in a complicated form. It reflects some of the legislation in New South Wales as well. There should not be any difficulty for the government to support what we're reasonably proposing today.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Leader of the Opposition. Is the motion seconded?

Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I second the motion. The events on the streets of Melbourne at the weekend were offensive to all Australians. They are offensive to the memory of the one million Australians who served and the 39,600 Australians who made the supreme sacrifice in the Second World War. They are offensive to me as a Liberal, as a Jew and most importantly as an Australian.

This offence, this dishonouring of earlier generations of Australians and this abuse of our political discourse, deserves a comprehensive response today. What we witnessed in Melbourne on the weekend was the glorification and mimicking of an ideology whose fundamental tenet is the racial superiority of one group of people over another. We know the idea of racial superiority is a myth, but it's not a myth without consequences. Its consequences are real. Six million Jews were murdered, a figure that represents two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, and millions of innocents, people of faith, homosexuals, political prisoners and people with disabilities. It was industrial-scale murder the likes of which the world has never seen.

Last Saturday we saw little men in Melbourne with steroided arms and stunted minds seeking to mimic and impersonate the evil that the greatest generation fought. These cowards, many of them with their faces covered by the cloths of shame, celebrated Nazism. Their actions sicken me to the core. To them I say, we say, 'Not in our country.' Not in the country that took in more Holocaust survivors per capita than anywhere else on earth.

The worst part of what we saw in Melbourne on Saturday is that it is part of a trend across our country. The Director-General of Security has spoken about the growth of grievance motivated violent extremism. He said, 'As a nation we need to reflect on why some teenagers are hanging Nazi flags and portraits of the Christchurch killer on their bedroom walls and others are sharing beheading videos. Just as importantly, we must reflect on what we can do about it.'

The Director-General of Security is right. There must be no place in Australia for Nazi-style flags, uniforms, salutes and boycotts, because they are the means by which this sickness seeks to perpetuate and promote itself. Such actions should be and must be a crime. I invite the government to put aside any partisan hesitation and support this motion initiated by the Leader of the Opposition. Yesterday he said in this place that we would support legislation that makes illegal the display of any aspect of Nazi glorification. The bill that we seek to have debated shows that we are true to our word.

Unfortunately yesterday the Attorney-General did something abominable. He attributed anti-Semitism to someone who is not anti-Semitic, to a whole party that is not anti-Semitic. That action was a mockery of the seriousness of anti-Semitism. The Attorney-General is the first law officer of the Crown and a lawyer of considerable distinction in his own right. He should be an example to so many in this country. The tragedy is that the Attorney-General all too often cannot rise above these appalling political misjudgements.

By contrast, today we approached Labor and the crossbench in a spirit of goodwill and good faith. I recognise the good work of people in this place such as the member for Wentworth and the member for Macnamara, who I work with so closely as co-chairs of the Parliamentary Friends of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

I want to say something of a personal nature. In seconding the motion today I am thinking of a person who demonstrated to me the courage we need during times such as this. Her name was Katie Popp. She was German, had olive skin and wore her grey hair in a bun. She lived in the Dorian Towers apartment building in Double Bay. When I knew her, she was an old lady. When I visited Katie, she would make my brother and I tasty German cakes. She was such a part of our family that she sewed our names on our school uniforms. She was so much from another time and place that she made her home here, like so many Europeans from that time.

I didn't know it as a boy, but I know now that Katie helped get my family out of Germany in 1936. Katie was Catholic. If you want to know why I have such a deep passion to protect the religious freedoms of other Australians such as my Catholic friends, it's because a Catholic woman saved a Jewish family—my family. Katie had been the family housekeeper, and as Germany went from bad to worse she took risks to help get my grandmother and her brother to Switzerland, then to England and finally to Australia in 1936. I come from a tradition which says 'whoever saves one life, it is as if they had saved the world'. Katie Popp was what we call Righteous Among the Nations. Her decision not to turn a blind eye and not to be a bystander because of the risk to herself, but the risk for all which is right, is an example that lives through time.

Katie is part of the moral barometer of my life, to know we must confront evil and oppose racial prejudice and do everything we can to keep it at bay. This is what the bill we seek to present is about, and this is why we seek support for the suspension of standing orders.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

First of all, I acknowledge the tone from those in the opposition as to how this has been presented. There is a set of speaking notes that I've sighted that I won't use. The tone from both the Leader of the Opposition, in particular, and the shadow minister is one that has kept completely to the issue that is contained in this bill that we've just seen, so I intend to confine my remarks in a similar way.

Can I say, first of all: no government ever, whether it was us or the opposition, has had a private member's bill brought forward in a suspension of standing orders and immediately said 'yep', without going through cabinet, without going through any processes or without going through its party room, and said, 'We're going to vote on it and deal with it all in the next hour.' I respect that there'll be objections to that, but no government anywhere in the history of Federation would have taken the suspension of standing orders that's in front of us and voted for it. That doesn't go against the principles that are contained within the private member's bill in any way. I'm advised by the Attorney-General—we had a conversation before I knew this was coming on, given issues that were raised by the Leader of the Opposition in an indulgence he took yesterday, where he raised this principle—and I have clarified with the Attorney-General that there is work being done within his department that has been going on for some time that goes to these exact issues. What the government won't do is take a bill that has been handed to us now, without us being able to go through any of our own procedures, and deal immediately with it for a period, as it says here, of no longer than one hour and then have any remaining questions put without delay.

Just to confine it to the issue the way those opposite have, I put it in these terms: every time we introduce legislation, I have kept to a very strict rule of there being delays and allowing those opposite to go through their party room procedures. It wasn't always done for us.

Opposition Member:

An opposition member interjecting

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, no, hear me out. On those rare occasions, as the former speaker has just interjected, where something is more urgent—and we had some of that, for example, that happened at the start of this year, with respect to some regulations as well—we have always made sure that there are briefings that happen beforehand, and we do everything we can—because occasionally something is genuinely that urgent—to make sure party procedures are able to be followed.

Any legislation that we deal with on this issue would be government legislation. For example, questions as to whether the number of penalty units that is proposed here is the right number of penalty units in the context of the rest of the act—should it be higher or lower?—is something that you'd get formal departmental advice on. Whether the exemptions here are right, whether there is anything that has been missed, whether it should be tighter or narrower, is something that you would formally work through. But, as I say, I've been advised that work on this exact area is being done and has been underway for some time in the office of the Attorney-General.

Because of the tone of the debate, I am not criticising the opposition in any way, shape or form for raising it in this way. Nobody should take the government's decision to not immediately, without any process, go ahead with the private member's bill as being some sort of lack of commitment to this cause. On issues relating to this, we have had previous debates, over about a decade, with respect to 18C and other areas where people have toyed with various pathways. But ultimately the previous government never went ahead with those changes, and I respect that they ended up not going ahead with them.

An honourable member interjecting—

I hear you. They didn't go ahead with them. We've had previous debates. We are in a situation where there are objections to Nazi symbols being used. They are symbols that are horrific. People go to a freedom-of-speech argument, but, when it comes to just straight hatred, symbols can be bullets, words can be bullets, and the horror of that salute is, in real terms, an act of violence in itself. Those are views that are shared around this room.

There are particular reasons why no government has ever agreed to a private member's bill in the form that is put here, but, as I said, every state parliament now, pretty much, has been working through these issues. There has often been a debate before they've got there, and often some people have tested the water with freedom-of-speech arguments before things have landed. I say this as someone who will go through their entire life without being a victim of racial bigotry, but I am surrounded by neighbours whose experience can be utterly different. Of all the symbols of bigotry, this is one we have a particular need to unanimously oppose. The fact that we will end up dividing on a procedural motion, as we're about to, should not be seen to change the unanimity on the need to oppose those symbols.

The shadow minister quite rightly—the Leader of the Opposition may have as well, but for part of his speech I was walking to the chamber, so I can't pretend to have heard the whole of the speech—referred very specifically to the horror of the Holocaust. We have members within this chamber for whom the Holocaust is not simply something they learnt about; it's something that has touched their families very personally. It was a level of hatred that has been crystallised in particular symbols. Some Australians—for reasons that I will never be able to fathom, and I suspect no-one in this room will be able to fathom—somehow see a level of security or something in reverting back to those symbols. Well, the parliament won't have it. This private member's bill potentially goes some way to being able to deal with it, but, as I say, there are processes that are already underway in the Attorney-General's Department, and there are further processes that we have to go to. But I would not want anyone—anyone at all—to see the parliament dividing on a vote in a few moments time and see that as evidence of division on the need to oppose the use of these symbols. These symbols have become the symbols of the worst of humanity, and I was stunned and horrified to see them appearing in Melbourne.

Dan Tehan (Wannon, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Immigration and Citizenship) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We all were.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, we all were, and I think I've been including everybody in the way that I've dealt with this in this speech. I think I've been dealing with everybody in the way that I've turned this speech, and I've done it very deliberately.

So I make no criticism of the Leader of the Opposition for bringing this resolution forward—no criticism whatsoever. But I do want to make the point very clearly—I guess two points. One is that no government ever, in a circumstance where something like this is moved, would be in a position to vote for it. That's never happened. It won't happen. Secondly, while we'll vote in different ways on the voices, I don't know whether a division will be called, but, if a division is called, no-one who uses these symbols should see a division about procedure on the floor of this parliament as giving them the solace of thinking that they have supporters. Nobody should think, because we divide on the procedure, that somehow that creates a divide on the repugnancy of Nazism and the symbols that go with it. So for those reasons the government will not be supporting the suspension motion that's before the House.

Mike Freelander (Macarthur, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate that the member for Wentworth is seeking the call, but the time allotted for this debate has expired.

Milton Dick (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is the motion moved by the Leader of the Opposition be disagreed to.