Penny Wright (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Attorney-General, I will pick up on a couple of things you said. First of all, I think you are a lawyer; is that right? Is my memory serving me correctly that you are a lawyer too?

Senator Ian Macdonald interjecting—

I did not start this, Senator Macdonald—so, a bit of respect, Senator Brandis. I do not think you would want to mislead either this chamber or the public who might be listening to this debate. First of all, let me make it really clear: at no time has this amendment sought to remove that provision. We are working with the bill that the government has drafted, but we are reflecting genuine and widespread concerns about the broad and risky potential of this offence to have unintended consequences for freedom of expression in Australia.

At no point did I say in my comments earlier that we should remove the term 'advocates'. I specifically referred to the word 'promotes' and I asked you a specific question about how that would be defined—and I allow you as a lawyer to tell us what would in fact amount to 'promoting' under this bill so that people who are listening have some idea of the type of behaviour or speech they may not be able to be involved with if the bill is passed.

I will say a couple of other things. One of them is that you quibbled with me about using the words 'ramming through' about these laws. Certainly, last night there was debate about various amendments that were being put up by the Australian Greens, by Senator Leyonhjelm and by the government. But the sad reality is that the time allowed for this debate has been truncated; there is a guillotine hanging over us—at 12.30. So, much as I would have liked to ask further questions about the amendments that were being moved last night, I had to be very careful, knowing that I had other, substantive matters to deal with today. That has been hanging over my head and, no doubt, over the heads of other people who might want to engage in the debate today. So that is why the Australian Greens say that there was no justifiable reason to have an arbitrary guillotine that allowed less than eight hours of debate in the Senate.

I will go to the question that I put to you, and I do not think I received an answer, because you went off to suggest that the Australian Greens somehow do not care about the safety of Australians and that we perhaps are not concerned about people who might be in the community advocating some form of violence against others in the form of terrorism. So I will come back to my question: can you please as a lawyer explain in clear terms what the term 'promotes' means in the context of this offence, given that 'promotes' is one of the words used to define the term 'advocating' or 'advocacy'.