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

Senator Boswell said that 'the Greens do not want to do the right thing'; 'the Greens want to intimidate Jewish business'; 'this is 1939 revisited'. Senator Milne took a point of order, which was not acted upon by the chair. I ask you, Mr Deputy President, to seek the judgement of the President on those three sentences and whether they ought to be allowed in this place. What we are seeing here is a totally disgraceful debasement of the way in which this house works—by innuendo, hatred, use of the word 'vile', inference across the chamber against honourable senators—and the diversion of a debate that is about the healing of wounds in the Middle East and about what we can do in this chamber to help see the Palestinians have statehood in their own right and the Israelis, with their statehood, being able to live together with the Palestinians, instead of seeing, in Senator Abetz's own words, the vilest effort to introduce into this chamber a denigration of honourable members of the Senate.

The Greens take second place to none in moving in this chamber to have the issue of Palestine and Israel maturely debated. Time and time again these attempts are voted down by both the major parties. It is our job as senators to debate the issue of the Middle East, because it concerns the peace of the world. What we are getting in the motion that has just gone through the Senate and this motion from Senator Abetz is a tawdry descent into disgraceful calumny—unwarranted, unjustified and totally undignified—against fellow senators. They will not debate the substantive issue but they want to come in here with this sort of reprehensible bombast.

That is up to senators, but I want to ask, in the time available: what about Senator Boswell's reference to the ACCC yesterday, which answered a request from this chamber? Senator Boswell says that the ACCC should have taken action because the majority of this chamber put a reference to it. What Senator Boswell is saying is that politics should rule the outcome of the ACCC, not the ACCC's ability to divine what it should do itself. Then Senator Boswell went on to refer to the Chairman of the ACCC, Mr Sims, as wanting to act like Pontius Pilate. That is disgraceful and reprehensible calumny of somebody who is not even in the chamber, in the pursuit of a political point of view. It was reprehensible, disgusting and untoward behaviour in this chamber. (Time expired)