Cory Bernardi (SA, Australian Conservatives) Share this | Hansard source

When I was addressing my remarks, they were about freedom of speech and the cult of victimhood which is encroaching upon all our freedoms—something that Senator Steele-John doesn't want to acknowledge. In future, Senator Steele-John, just send me a Facebook message; it would be easier!

Honourable senators interjecting—

Now, ladies—Senators—there is something at work in this environment which is infringing upon the freedoms of all Australians. There are far too few people in this place who are prepared to stand up and defend the unalienable rights that we should have. One of those is the freedom of speech. Not all speech is acceptable; we understand that. But government needs to make the case about why some things are not there and why they are going to take these freedoms away from us.

We need to have the freedom of religion. That doesn't mean that all religious beliefs are equal. People are free to believe what they want to believe, as long as they comply with Australian law. And you should be free to be critical of it. But of course you're not, because some environments make that unpalatable. A Christian in this society is suddenly an aberration and someone who can be disregarded. Yet a Muslim is someone whose wise words are sage and are coming down from whatever God they believe in, and they are to be pursued and should be listened to and respected. Aboriginal spirituality can be respected as well. It doesn't mean you can be blind or uncritical. People are free to believe what they like—what they want to believe—and we should be defending that right at every single turn.

Similarly, we should be defending the other unalienable rights that we have, like the freedom of personhood. It was not that long ago, if you remember, Madam Acting Deputy President, that some people in this country weren't regarded as people. Aboriginal people weren't regarded as people not that long ago—back when Sir Robert Menzies was talking about the forgotten people. And we have to defend the rights of all Australians equally.

Every time we make legislation in this place, we talk about human rights, and it goes through the human rights committee, and there is a report on the human rights attached to it. Well, human rights are continually evolving and changing. They are handed down from on high, from the font of all wisdom—the United Nations! And the Hansard should pick up the sarcasm in that, because you get these groups of people who will register these new rights, and of course they compete with existing or traditional rights, the unalienable rights that I think are so important to preserve. So, if we want to adopt these things that infringe upon others, let the case be made for that.

Let us legislate for unalienable rights in this place, and then every piece of legislation, as it comes through this sausage factory, should have to undergo a scrutiny to examine what freedoms are being taken away from ordinary Australians, whether it be their right to privacy, or their freedom to conduct private affairs as they see fit, free of government interference, or freedom of speech, or the ability to pursue the ideas and thoughts that they think want to drive it. But we should not be silencing these things through victimhood, through shaming, however you want to call it—through this perpetual indulgence of identity politics. It is counterproductive, and it is doing us harm.

I know there are many on that side as well who believe in freedoms, and there are many in the Liberal Party who do, and there are others elsewhere who do. But the greatest threat to our freedoms is what we do here, and, when you get people who stand up and complain about an interjection, that is a denying of formality. It happened yesterday—denying of formality—and one of the Labor senators stood up and said, 'As a woman, that's a sexist thing.' Well, how is it sexist that formality is denied, just because someone happens to be female? We're told, on the one hand, that gender doesn't matter, and then gender is used all the time as a means of cowing others into silence and trying to stifle the freedoms that we're meant to have in this chamber. Freedom of speech and parliamentary privilege, which we should be respecting, are even being silenced through this.

We've got to make a determination about what sort of society we want. People will look at me and say,' Yes, he's an archconservative'—I've had all that levelled at me—but, if being a conservative means I want the maximum amount of freedom for all individuals in this country to choose the life that they want within the constraints of a civil society, I will make no apologies for that because I do believe that civil society is absolutely important, and yet we are slowly breaking that down, too. There are elements within this chamber and within the other place, and in politics around the country—extraneous groups—that are lobbying to diminish some of the institutions that protect us and give us this maximum freedom.

If you want to see how things have diminished in the public eye—much of it of their own making, might I add, in their failure to deal with some issues—look at the religious institutions, who make no apologies for that. Then look at the other great institution, the institution of parliament, and things have been diminished again and again and again, so much so—I said this to a friend of mine the other night—that we don't have the leadership that can take a country forward. We don't see it on that side of the chamber or on this side of the chamber. We don't see it; we just see politics being played out every single time for short-term opportunism, and the end result is that we've undermined one of the most important institutions that we have in this place. If we continue to do this, we will erode further the freedoms that Australians have long cherished and really won't notice until they've gone.

We've seen freedom of speech eroded in Australia. We know that there's a subjective clause. If you've got a hurt feeling, you can go to a tribunal and make the case that your feelings have been hurt and the tribunal will investigate it. They will make your life a misery if they want to, and it will cost you a load of money outside of the judicial system for a very long period of time. So, wouldn't it be better for us as legislators to say, 'These are the rights that all Australians have by virtue of their citizenship of this country,' and every single time we want to take away a bit of those rights, every time we want them to be addressed through a channel other than through the common law, if I can put it like that, we have to make the case? If someone wants to take you to a tribunal because of their subjective hurt feelings test, let the first rule be: 'Hang on, what are the unalienable rights of Australians?' Do you know what: one of them is to annoy the heck out of other people! We're all going to do that. If any of you are in a relationship or in a family or in a community group where people don't upset each other along the way, you're subject to groupthink—I can tell you that. Even in my own party, we manage to upset ourselves occasionally, and there's only one of me at the moment! It's a principle of the matter: if we're going to go down this path, we have to be prepared to defend freedom.

I'm happy to have this debate today. I want others to stand with it and rationalise why we can't have freedom and why we can't trust people to have the cut and thrust of positive and negative argument, to debate things and to get things resolved. And, if we want to remove a right for people in this place, then we need to justify why.