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

Last week, many members of parliament celebrated Harmony Day. But this week, this government has given a slap in the face to that day. It has given a slap in the face to multicultural Australia. Why is that? That is through the proposed changes that Senator Brandis has introduced into this place that give people in a position of privilege—people like Senator Brandis and people like Andrew Bolt—a platform to be racist.

Is that really the kind of society that we want to live in in Australia? After nearly six months, the first piece of legal reform that our Attorney-General in this country wants to bring into this parliament to become Australian law is the kind of law that will allow more racist activity and more bigotry in this nation, with little recourse for those who are being abused and vilified to have any resolve.

The victims of racial abuse do not have the same position of power or the same position of privilege that those like Senator Brandis and Mr Andrew Bolt have. They are not in that same position to defend themselves. This is not a level playing field. There is a clear power imbalance and that is why we have the Racial Discrimination Act providing some recourse for addressing that imbalance. The current laws in question, sections 18C and 18D, work perfectly fine. The majority of disputes brought before the Human Rights Commission are resolved through mediation. The law works. It is there working perfectly fine.

I understand that Senator Brandis knows the law all too well. I am sure that his understanding of the law is very fine. But while he may have an understanding of the law, I believe he would have little understanding of racism. If he did have an understanding of racism, he would know how these changes do not provide protection to people from racial abuse. He has narrowed these new racial discrimination amendment proposals so that they are so narrow that anyone being racially abused has little opportunity or recourse for what has occurred to them to be addressed. He has narrowed the laws so that the word 'vilify' only means to incite hatred against a person and that 'intimidate' is narrowed to causing fear or physical harm.

If that was not enough, he has then put a huge range of exceptions to all of that in section 4. Despite the outcry from various sections of the ethnic and broader community—some 150 organisations; some of which Senator Brandis has met himself—he has chosen to ignore them entirely and instead adopt what Andrew Bolt and the IPA have wanted all along.

I am all for freedom of speech but not at any cost, not at the cost of people being racially abused and not when it comes to issues of race. They are some of the views that have also been put forward by a number of those ethnic organisations. They are organisations including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, Chinese organisations, Korean organisations, Arab organisations and the National Congress of Australia's First Peoples.

These changes are before us. I encourage the community to put their views forward and their objections forward, because thus far I have seen no one standing up for any changes that Senator Brandis has put forward to our Racial Discrimination Act other than his mate Andrew Bolt.