Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make a contribution to this debate tonight on the Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill 2017. Of all the pressing issues that the government has before it, they have chosen this issue rather than looking at the housing crisis, which is killing off Australian's dreams of home ownership; at the energy crisis, which has seen Australians pay higher energy costs without doing a thing about fossil fuels; and at climate change, and we have heard what their response to climate change is today. They seem to be in denial and making a joke of the fact that the Great Barrier Reef is currently having another serious episode of bleaching. What about the atrocious evidence we saw last night on Four Corners about abuse of people with a disability in residential and institutional settings? Instead of looking at these problems, the government has chosen this one, which even the member for McMillan has described as a '15th-order issue'.

You can bet that tomorrow they will be coming into this place at some stage saying, 'We need more hours, because there are all these other bills on the Notice Paper that we think are really important.' Instead of addressing those issues that they think are really important and that they themselves have admitted are priority issues, what they are doing is wasting time here on this particular issue—not that I am saying that protection from racial discrimination is not very important, because it is. But what those on the other side think is that it is okay to tear down those protections. They want to waste our time having this debate again, which most people thought had been put to bed after Mr Abbott's little blip in history. They are trying to drag that up again. Most people assumed that after his attack on the protections of racial discrimination it would have been consigned to the dustbin as yet another part of that blip in history where he was Prime Minister—along with things like the knighthood for Prince Philip and his very strange definition of 'no surprises and no excuses'. But, like some really bad zombie movie, this just refuses to stay buried. I am hoping that we will knock this off and then it will stay buried.

Here we are again talking about a change that nobody wants, that is good for nobody and that nobody thinks is needed except for a small group of people, most of whom have never experienced racial discrimination in their lives, and it is highly unlikely that they ever will. We have just had an extensive joint parliamentary inquiry by the human rights committee, which, despite being stacked by members of the Liberal Party, did not recommend that any changes be made to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. At the hearing I attended in Perth, overwhelmingly people wanted those measures to be retained.

In the last few days, we have had yet another Senate inquiry into this current bill—that is, if you can describe what happened on Friday as a Senate inquiry. It was an inquiry in which the chair banned the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service from appearing before it. Our first peoples, the people who have been subject to racial discrimination since colonisation, were excluded from giving evidence on Friday. Time after time the parliament hears about the continued need for protections against racial discrimination. For the joint parliamentary committee inquiry alone, we heard from hundreds of organisations, and thousands of individuals, about the need for racial discrimination protections. I want to specifically address the impacts of racism on our first peoples, on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the first peoples that the chair of the inquiry, Senator Macdonald, excluded from participation in the inquiry last week. ANTaR wrote a submission to the joint parliamentary inquiry saying that, far from being a theoretical discussion, racial discrimination has a very real impact on the health and wellbeing of our first peoples. They said, in their necessarily quick submission to the inquiry on Friday:

Racism and discrimination contribute to poor mental health, increased self-harm and suicide, decreased school attendance and lower workplace productivity, and participation in society more broadly.

When releasing their reconciliation barometer, which they do every two years—they released one towards the beginning of this year, which was actually—

Debate interrupted.