Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Amendment (Sunsetting of Special Powers Relating to Terrorism Offences) Bill 2019. Government has three key roles: protecting life, protecting property and protecting freedom. As servants to the people of Queensland and Australia, we will make sure that those roles are fulfilled. The government seeks to extend, in this bill, the provision for 12 months, already in place, to be able to detain and interview people. The underlying position is to keep our people safe. As servants to the people of Queensland and Australia, we need to keep people safe.

The people that we and the government want to protect us from are extremists, including Islamic extremists, who do not have respect for life; they are barbarians. The bill aims to protect the security of Australian citizens, because there is primacy in border security. Border security is one of the most fundamental responsibilities of a federal government. Australia had tight borders, thanks to Senator Hanson's strong position on border protection, back in the nineties. She forced the Howard government to listen to the will of the people, and the Howard Liberal government stood up. Then Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd weakened border security, and that led to the deaths of over a thousand illegal boat people, including innocent women and children.

In 2016 Senator Hanson and I were given a presentation by Mr Dutton's office on what had been accomplished under the Abbott government's border protection measures. It was truly amazing. We saw that the number of boats had plummeted to zero and, as importantly, the number of genuine refugees had increased. Instead of illegal immigrants taking the place of genuine humanitarian refugees, we had the opportunity to bring in genuine humanitarian refugees.

Here are some statistics that show that terrorism is a clear and real threat to Australians and their way of life. Since 2001 there have been 73 Australians convicted of terrorism related offences; 50 are currently in jail. About 100 Australian terrorists have died in the Middle East, fighting for ISIS. They're not our friends; they're our enemies. They're the enemies of freedom, the enemies of civilisation. We've had seven terrorist attacks in this country and at least 16 major counterterrorism disruption operations in response to the planning of potential attacks in our country—16 plus seven. The figures are terrifying in light of the thousands of deaths of Australians that could have occurred. One of the scariest statistics is that our national terrorism threat level is at 'probable'. Probable—a major terrorism attack in this country.

I want to honour, on behalf of One Nation and the people of Queensland, the fine, vigilant people in our border security and counterterrorism forces. But they need all the help they can get. They need that help to get access to some of the potential threats. Indeed, we in parliament, including Senator Keneally, are protected daily in this building and elsewhere by people such as our security forces in this country. Not just the people we see, not just the people carrying guns, not just the people who are willing to put their life on the line, but the people behind the scenes and in the back rooms, doing counter-terrorism operations.

I want to diverge slightly and come back to this point. In the days when it stood for Australia, the Labor Party was strong, very strong, on border protection. Ever since it started mimicking the leftovers known as the Greens, it has become a Clayton's Labor Party. As the UN's useful idiots, the leftovers known as the Greens want to end Australian sovereignty. That is a goal that involves ending border security, as is already seen in the European Union—which is not really a union—where sensible leaders of free nations are now standing up across the European continent and rejecting the European Union's commissars, or, indeed, leaving the European Union. So I now want to put some of Labor's actions in perspective. Labor's constitution has long stated:

The Australian Labor Party is a democratic socialist party and has the objective of the democratic socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange, to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation and other anti-social features in these fields.

It sounds admirable. But I detest socialism, because it has had a zero success rate for almost 150 years. Yet I still honour the legacy of the original Labor Party, members who were genuinely doing what they thought best in the interests of our country—deluded, maybe, but noble in intent. They had many achievements driven with that intent to look after our country and to maintain our sovereignty and to provide governance. I think of the Snowy Mountains scheme. I think of the fairness that the Labor Party—the old Labor Party—brought in. But today's Labor is a far cry from the noble Labor of old. Today's Labor is opportunistic, dishonest and deceitful. And, while there are honourable Labor senators in this place, the fact is that the party is under the rule of powerful backroom party powerbrokers whose goals are personal power and control.

Socialism extends to control. It always leads to control—always. And we can see it in the Labor Party, and we can see it in the Greens. Do I need to remind anyone of Hitler, Stalin and Mao? And now we see Senator Keneally emulating these control freaks, these mass murderers, and wanting to ban a Muslim who speaks against radical Islam. She wants to stop the CPAC conference about to be held in Sydney next week. It's a festival of freedom, but the Labor Party wants to ban it. I understand that, reportedly, the Labor Party 'has called on the Morrison government to deny Mr Kassam a visa after he called the Koran "fundamentally evil"'. Should we ban Labor conferences because their platform says they are still socialist? Should union meetings be banned because they're filled with old time communists? We say no. We say let the union meetings continue. We say let Labor Party conferences continue. Because One Nation, and most Australians, support and value freedom of expression. Yet under Labor's logic, socialist conferences and parties and unionists would be banned, because socialism leads to control and mass murder. This is not right—