Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill 2017. We have much more important business before the Senate. We have families being hit by cuts to penalty rates and there is the debacle of the social security system, yet we are spending all this time working out how we can allow people to make offensive, insulting and humiliating comments, without any comeback. I heard people here today say this debate is just about allowing them to have an opinion. Of course, everyone has a right to an opinion. This is not what we are debating here, and to pretend that we are is just disingenuous.

This debate is about being allowed to say hateful, hurtful comments based on another person's race. Is your opinion that I am somehow lesser than you because of my race, that I and my culture are not as deserving of respect as yours? This debate is about saying you have no right to take offence when people make these comments. But people have every right to take offence at this. You talk about freedoms and rights. Yes, people do have a right to take offence when hurtful, hateful comments are made to them because of their race. Australia is not colourblind, but in this bill we want to turn a blind eye to racism.

Racism is Australia's Achilles heel, our weak spot, our touchy national blister. I will not stand here and be lectured about racism and prejudice. I know what racism is and what impact it has and what personal damage it can cause. You only have to ask Adam Goodes or Nicky Winmar. Ask Michael Long or Senator Pat Dodson or former Senator Nova Peris or any of the multicultural leaders who were here in the parliament this week, consistently lobbying against this bill. They know what racism is. We live it every single day.

You cannot know what it is like to live with racism until it is a part of your everyday reality. Only then do you really know. I have heard so many members in this place express that it is something they do not experience. I certainly do not like standing here talking about racism, and I wish we were past that, but we are not. In my travels both as a member of parliament and as a journalist I have witnessed acts of racism against others. I have witnessed verbal assaults and seen a black woman refused a key to the toilets and told hurtful and hateful things about her because of the colour of her skin. I have seen a football team that wins a grand final for their south Arnhem Land team, only to be told they cannot celebrate in a local nearby pub because of the colour of their skin. I have received and continue to receive at various times racist comments and behaviour as a result of the colour of my skin.

From the get-go, white colonialists regarded first nations people as inferior beings and thought it was okay to denigrate us and take our lands and, in many cases, take our lives. This month, 112 years ago, Jack Patten was born, a man regarded as one of the founders of modern Aboriginal political action. He spent his life fighting for equal rights and opportunities for Aboriginal people. He spent his life believing in a better Australia, a more united Australia, a harmonious Australia and a just Australia. He fought against all the injustices, and this included the right not to be vilified and regarded as lesser because of race. In a speech delivered at the 1938 Day of Mourning and protest, Jack Patten said:

Our children on the Government stations are badly fed and poorly educated. The result is that when they go out into life, they feel inferior to white people.

This is not a matter of race, this is a matter of education and opportunity.

This is why we ask for a better education and better opportunity for our people.

We say that it is a disgrace to Australia's name that our people should be handicapped by undernourishment and poor education, and then blamed for being backward.

Jack saw clearly that Indigenous Australians were denied opportunities yet somehow that was their fault and that made it okay to denigrate people of a different colour.

We only need to read government sanctioned reports like the Bringing them home report, released 20 years ago this year, which tells story after story of the suffering of children removed from their families because of the colour of their skin and often that left behind an even deeper and tragic legacy of intergenerational trauma for them and their descendants. Sadly, this type of racist view still exists today. It festers on in social media and in institutionalised racism. We heard recent calls from congress for a broader look at such racism in our health and prison systems.

When I first stood in the Senate and addressed each of you in my maiden speech I touched on the real harm that racism and racist commentary can do. We need only be reminded of the hateful and hurtful commentary on race that ended the stellar career of AFL hero and Swans legend Adam Goodes. Then there is the work of Michael Long, who back in 1995 make a stand against racial abuse after an on-field incident. He is one of the pioneers behind the racial abuse code adopted by the AFL in the 1990s. Are we asking to weaken this? Is it infringing on the rights of footballers? Are they just expressing an opinion? Of course we are not.

I wish I could believe that there are no racists in Australia, but certainly my personal experience, my family's experience and that of those around me informs my reality. Being the target of racist, hateful comments and actions is deeply hurtful and deeply distressing and causes great harm. It causes insult, causes offence and causes humiliation. From a cultural perspective, to be incredibly humiliated can bring even more tragic circumstances. I know this as a fact. I know this because this is how I feel when I am subject to these comments. And it is not just personal; institutional racism, as I said earlier, is very much alive and well. It may not be as visible, but it is there and people feel it.

In my time as a journalist my work was never constrained or diminished by section 18C. I worked for 20 years as a journalist across Australia. As a former journalist and now senator, I am a firm supporter of free speech, but free speech is not hate speech. Former Prime Minister Paul Keating said in his Redfern speech:

I think what we need to do is open our hearts a bit. All of us. Perhaps when we recognise what we have in common we will see the things which must be done—the practical things.

As I said, I do not really want to be talking about the hateful reality of racism. We have spent so much unnecessary time on trying to remove a very important piece of legislation so unnecessarily. I want to be here talking about the many things that must be done—the work that needs to be done—to close the gap, to build a strong economy in north Australia, to ensure every Australian child has the opportunity to grow up safe, healthy and with access to quality education and to ensure that women have a right to safety across this beautiful country of ours. So let us open our hearts just a bit and think about what these changes to section 18C mean and the really deep potential impact on the lives of Australians.

In closing I would like to quote again Paul Keating's Redfern speech. He said:

We failed to ask—how would I feel if this were done to me? As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded all of us.

This is what racism and hate speech do. Weakening laws against it degrades us as a people and a country.