Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the suspension of standing orders on the consideration of the Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill 2017. I say, very clearly, to all senators and anyone who is listening or watching: what you are seeing here is a government making an absolute mockery of the processes of this Senate and, by extension, making an absolute mockery of Australia's democracy. Even worse, they are doing so to try and make it easier to be a racist in this country, because—make no mistake—that is the core content of this legislation. The government wants to make it easier for Australians to engage in racist hate speech. They want to send a message out there into the community that it will be okay to say things that previously you could not say without offending section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

I sat as a member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, and it is very true to say that it was a significant inquiry. It took us a fair length of time, and it visited right around the country, as it should have. But what the Attorney did not tell the Senate was that the committee recommended precisely nothing in regard to 18C. It did not make a recommendation to engage in specific changes to 18C. What the committee did was float a range of options and leave it at that. As I said at the time, it was a blancmange of a report from the human rights committee.

The government has moved of its own volition to make changes to 18C that will make it easier to be a racist in this country. Then we had to put up with a quick and dirty inquiry that took precisely one morning, in terms of hearings, from the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee, which I also sit on. What a disgrace it was that representatives from the Aboriginal Legal Service were prevented from giving evidence to that committee by the government members, against the wishes of the Australian Greens and the Australian Labor Party members of that committee. So, we had the quick and dirty inquiry, the report of which was tabled only just over half an hour ago in this place, and then the government attempted to bring this legislation on for debate.

I have news for the government: Barnaby Joyce is right. This is not an issue that is dominating the barbeque conversation in this country. What it is an issue that has dominated the pages of TheAustralian, that has dominated the agenda of the IPA and its agents in this place, and that has dominated the agenda of the culture warriors who make up, exclusively, the far right of the Liberal Party in this place. It is those culture warriors doing the job of the culture warriors in TheAustralian, the culture warriors on Sky and the culture warriors in the IPA who have driven this debate so far that it has bullied a craven Prime Minister into acquiescing to their demands in moving to make it easier to be a racist in Australia. How far he has come—Mr Turnbull—from his glory days.

Make no mistake, the reason we are doing this in such a hurry today is that the Prime Minister is like a little boy who has to swallow a spoonful of cough medicine. He just wants to get it all down in one go. That is a really important point. This rush is about nothing more than politics. It is not about making good policy. It is about the Prime Minister getting a difficult issue, or an issue he sees as difficult, off his plate as quickly as he can.

The Greens are going to stand shoulder to shoulder with multicultural Australia here, because we have listened to what they have told us. There is never a good time to make it easier to be a racist in Australia, but now is the worst of all times, because multicultural Australians are telling us that racism is on the rise. They have told us about the toll it takes to be a victim of racism—the mental health toll and the physical health toll that are taken on people against whom racist acts are perpetrated. These are people who will face more racism if this legislation passes unamended through this place.

Senator Fifield has just described the amendments as technical. If they are just technical, give us a look at the things. We have not seen the amendments, and I do not accept that they are technical, because my understanding, from the evidence Senator Brandis gave to a committee, is that they will go to the heart of how the Human Rights Commission operates, and there is every chance that they will be detrimental to the work of that commission.