Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I have always believed that this is racist legislation, and clearly it is, because the government is seeking to exempt itself from the provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act. You cannot have a situation where you say that certain standards will apply about the level of filter on publicly funded computers for one group of people in the population but that a different standard will apply when you are talking about the government’s own Commonwealth Public Service. Given that the State of the Public Service report published in 2004-05 said that 283 employees in 29 agencies were investigated for improper use of email or the internet—and that is not all pornography, I absolutely acknowledge that, but some of it is—we have a situation where the government is going tough on pornography in Indigenous communities but has a different standard for the Commonwealth Public Service. That is not a good look. That is very discriminatory. I would like to hear from the government an undertaking that the same standards will apply to all publicly funded computers. Otherwise, what is the justification for saying that Indigenous people have to have one level and other people have to have another?