Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

No, it is not so. Minister, you know—and I would ask you to tell me if I am wrong about this—that these coercive powers of the Australian Crime Commission apply to Indigenous people anywhere in this country, whether they are in Launceston, Palm Island, Brisbane, Perth, Echuca, Woomera or wherever. If people are black, the coercive Crime Commission powers, which usurp the rule of law in this country, can be applied. But if they are white—and, notwithstanding what you have had to say, the majority of children in this country who need protection are white—those same coercive, intrusive, Star Chamber powers, which are outside the ordinary rule of law in this country, cannot be used. That is the case.

This is not confined to the Northern Territory. This report may have been, but these powers in this legislation—and this minister knows it—apply to black people in this country, wherever they might be. If they are in Redfern, they have no escape from those powers, unless they are white. That is the racist nature of this legislation. And it is not any accident; it is laid out in the explanatory memorandum that these coercive Star Chamber powers can be used against black perpetrators involved in child sex offences anywhere in the country. I ask this: if you are going to justify intervening to protect children—and we all want to protect children—using these Star Chamber powers, why not children in the white community? What is it in the white community that makes a crime against a child matter less than a crime against a child in a black community?

This is racist legislation, more appropriate in an apartheid South Africa than in this wonderful country of ours. I am not inventing this; this is the government’s own explanation in its own memorandum of explanation. No, it is not confined to the Northern Territory; it applies to black people across this country—Indigenous people. It does not apply to any other community. I ask why that is the case. What is it about crime perpetrated on Indigenous children that should invoke these laws when they are not invoked in the white community? Is it that the government thinks that sexual offences against children in the white community are of a lesser nature or do not matter as much as sexual offences against children in the black community? Frankly, Mr Temporary Chairman, you and I and the minister know that that is not the case.

What we have before us is pure, unmitigated, inexcusable racist legislation. If this coercive law is required for the Indigenous community and not for the more than 80 per cent of the rest of the community where this crime occurs, it is outrageous racism against Indigenous Australia—or, if you use another argument, it is a failure to use the law to protect non-Indigenous Australian children, and it would apparently follow that the government does not care about non-Indigenous Australian children as much. I do not believe that. This is racist legislation. It has no place in this Senate. It should not be supported by the opposition, the Democrats or anybody else. The government should be ashamed of it.

We will talk about the things that we will agree with. Senator Siewert will be talking about that later. We are concerned about children, communities, drug abuse, alcohol abuse, the breakdown of communities and the failure to act on this for so long. We want action, but we do not want racist legislation like this. It is beyond the pale. This is not the Botha government; this is the Howard government, and we should not have this legislation before this Senate. It should never have been conceived this way. That is why we say that we should take time over this and let the community look at it. It is a downright shameful piece of legislation, in just the dimension I have put—but there will be more.