Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to questions without notice asked by Senators Singh and Peris today relating to proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

It has been made clear today that the Attorney-General is more interested in defending the rights of those he refers to as 'bigots' than in defending the rights of minorities. In order to protect what Senator Brandis described in this place as the fundamental right to be a bigot he has released plans to narrow protections under the Racial Discrimination Act and then exempt almost everyone from this law. What is the point of having a law if you are then going to have umpteen exemptions from it? That just outlines the dishonesty that is being put forward in this draft exposure that Senator Brandis provided to the public yesterday.

By the Attorney-General's own admission vilification and hate speech should never be a feature of intellectual debate. So, if that is the case, why does the Abbott government want to introduce such broad exemptions to the law? Under these exemptions even people vilifying ethnic and racial groups in bad faith are protected as long as they can claim it was related to any political, social, cultural, religious, artistic, academic or scientific matter. It is difficult, within that huge list, to think of any public statement that would not be covered by those exemptions, which shows the dishonesty in the proposed changes that Senator Brandis has put forward.

Let us think about what the changes might actually mean. They will mean comments on an online blog or article. They would include a sign threatening a Jewish group at a neo-Nazi rally against immigration. It is hard to imagine any conduct that falls outside these exemptions, which is an observation that was made by Chris Berg from the Institute of Public Affairs who clearly said:

The new exemption makes clear the fundamental importance of free discussion on any matter of public interest, no matter how extreme that discussion is.

Is that really the kind of Australian society we want to live in? What is the point of having Senator Brandis bringing forward these changes of freedom of speech at any cost, bringing forward changes that he claims put forward laws for racial vilification and hate speech, but then exempts just about every kind of activity from them?

Let us take the case of Fredrick Toben—which is a case very familiar, I am sure, to Senator Brandis—who has been found time and time again to have unlawfully produced and published material that denies the Holocaust. He has accused Jews of exaggerating the scale of the murder of Jewish people during World War II and he has dismissed people, who were offended by or disagreed with such outrageous claims, as being of limited intelligence. Is this the kind of display of racial vilification that we want to allow in our community without any recourse? Because, under that huge list that Senator Brandis outlined in section 4, it would be allowed. This is absolutely absurd and is not supported by some 150 community and ethnic groups across the country—some of which Senator Brandis claims he has met but which, clearly, he has also chosen to ignore.

We have been enlightened today by the way Senator Brandis has appeased the IPA. Through his cups of tea and through the IPA's briefing to the coalition it has been made very clear that the IPA are very happy with these proposed changes, as will be Andrew Bolt, because they go very much to the heart of doing exactly what the IPA, I am sure, briefed the coalition on. People in positions of privilege—people in positions of power—like Andrew Bolt have a platform to be racist. They are public commentators. They are journalists. It is not a level playing field. The victims, though, of racial abuses do not have that position of privilege or power— (Time expired)