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

While I am in the chamber I will give a shout out to the delegation of New Zealand parliamentarians that is in my office right now.

Yesterday, I was reminding people about what ANTaR had written in their submission to the inquiry by the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights. They said:

Far from being a theoretical discussion, racial discrimination has a very real impact on mental health and wellbeing for First Peoples.

They said in their necessarily quick submission to the inquiry held last 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 earlier this year, which they do every two years—so this is using 2016 data—ANTaR said that the government needs to start looking at first people's lived experience of racism and leave the RDA protections untouched.

The national reconciliation barometer showed an increase of racism experienced by our first peoples. They found that racism towards first peoples has increased from 39 per cent to 46 per cent since the last barometer, in 2014. I remind people that the latest data was collected in 2016. That is a significant increase in racism towards our first peoples. They found that one in three Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had experienced verbal racial abuse in the six months before the survey. The anecdotal feedback from a number of Aboriginal people I have spoken to is that it certainly has not gotten any better since then. In fact, it may have gotten even worse. Given the negative impact on health and wellbeing of racism, if we are going to close the gap it is absolutely vital that we maintain protections against racial discrimination. In other words, racial discrimination has a direct impact on people's wellbeing, and we need to address that if we are ever going to close the gap by our agreed target dates.

To say the community's support for retaining the current wording of section 18C is overwhelming is an understatement. We know that racial discrimination and vilification remains a major challenge in Australia, and the barometer pointed that out. If anything, that challenge is growing. The Scanlon Foundation's most recent report found that the proportion of Australians who have experienced racism in the past 12 months has grown to 20 per cent. That is one in five Australians.

We only have to observe the general tenor of comments online, under news reports, on social media and in forums, to see that a significant number of people in this country currently feel very free to unleash racist, bigoted, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic diatribes in public. We only need to read one of the countless experiences recounted in submissions to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry into section 18C to know that racism remains an ever-present problem. We must be especially vigilant now that a significant proportion of our community has been energised by the election of Donald Trump. People have responded by feeling much freer to be racist in that environment.

If you have never experienced racial discrimination or abuse, you only need to listen to those Australians who have. They know how utterly destructive to a person's sense of self it is. If you listen to people, listen to their experiences, you know it is having a significant impact on that person's sense of self. To be so often attacked about something as arbitrary as the colour of your skin or the clothes that you wear or the country of one's birth is just utter nonsense. So it is in this environment of rampant xenophobia, of racist trolls, of growing experiences of racial abuse and discrimination—you only had to listen to Senator McKim reading out those tweets under #freedomofspeech last week to know of the dozens and dozens and dozens of experiences that people were reporting of abuse. We only have to look at those experiences to ask the question: what does the government seek to achieve by these changes? Why are they trying to make it easier for people to be racist? Why are they sending this signal to the community that it is okay to launch racist diatribes at people?

These zombie measures should not succeed. We should finally put them to bed—in fact kill them off. Why does the other side of this chamber, the government, continue to pretend this is about freedom of speech? I really do not understand just how it is that people like the Attorney-General, like Senator Abetz, like Senator Paterson want to be able to say what they already say. Let us take their argument at face value and assume that they are all currently being muzzled by swathes of politically correct red tape that prevents them from truly expressing themselves. I am not aware of any principle of libertarianism that seriously proposes that freedom of speech is or should be an absolute or unfettered freedom. We have always accepted legitimate restrictions on our freedom to say exactly what we would like to say. We all seem to accept laws that protect us against reputational damage—libel or slander—or that protect us from violent threats. The basic principle of libertarianism is that we should all be free to do or say whatever we want to the point that our expression of freedoms cause genuine and unjustified harm to others, such as, for example, what I described about the impact on our First People's mental health and wellbeing.

I do not think anybody seriously accepts that racism does not cause genuine harm. As I have outlined, it clearly does. That is the whole basis of the Racial Discrimination Act itself, which is our acquittal of our international legal duty under the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. It is genuinely difficult to decipher the argument of the small number of right-wingers in their own little echo chamber that want these changes. We hear them froth and rant about the words 'insult' and 'offend' and declare that there is no right to not be offended, that causing offence is central to the principle of freedom of speech. But they ignore the fact that the words 'insult' and 'offend' have been applied very strictly in the courts. It seems to me they just want to be able to make unfettered racial comments and to abuse people.

Australia is the most successful multicultural nation on the planet. Multiculturalism is what we do better than anywhere else in the world. It is our great advantage; it underpins so much of our ongoing peace and prosperity. It is a large part of why so many people want to visit here and why so many people in fact want to come here to live, to migrate here. We have just started a Senate committee inquiry into how we can strengthen Australia's multiculturalism even further. We know, even before it starts, that multiculturalism is an asset for all of us.

In technical terms, sections 18C and 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act established the legal case to be applied by the Australian Human Rights Commission and the courts when assessing complaints about racial hate speech. But section 18C is also highly symbolic. It represents our continued commitment to multicultural harmony. It sets the absolute minimum conditions for public engagement in our overwhelmingly successful multicultural society. I just do not see why this small group of hard Right, Dad's Army opponents of 18C want so badly to attack it. Hundreds of people have spoken to us in the last few weeks and months about racial hate speech, and about the continued need to protect Australians against it. I am sure every senator in this place has in fact had many phone calls and emails about that, and other personal communications and meetings.

There are some people in our country who are genuinely afraid of the tenor of some of our public debate and where it might lead in the future—and, again, I have had multiple conversations exactly along those lines. There are many, many Australians who have experienced just what can happen when racial hate speech gets out of control. Rightly, Australia is seen as an oasis of peace away from the hatreds that have been allowed by the political leaders to bubble up in other places. Our Racial Discrimination Act underpins that peace. For very good reason it had bipartisan and then tripartisan support until very recently, when this small group of people who do not represent broader Australia and their opinion, as has been evidenced by many, sprung up, with the support of some media outlets, to run their campaign to undermine our Racial Discrimination Act.

But we Greens will not support it. We will stand in opposition to their moves to undermine the act and undermine section 18C. We will stand firm with millions of Australians who live and work and breathe our wonderful, multicultural reality every day. We will continue to work with them to strengthen our community, not divide our community. We say no to racism, and we say no to the changes that in fact will undermine our multicultural society.