Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

So let's try to get these things into perspective—and the silliness of the interjection about Nauru, which I will take. The people have freedom of movement. They are given, should they wish it, 30 years permanent residency in Nauru should they wish to take it. Indeed, they can even go to the United States, but do you know why some of these people don't want to go to the United States? It is because the welfare system in Australia is deemed to be better than that of the United States. Is that a real human rights issue? If the United States is good enough for, what, about 250 million people in the world, people that are genuinely concerned about body, life and limb might find it an appropriate place to live as well—not the forum shopping which is dressed up so often and, might I add, so cruelly in the terms of human rights.

When we talk human rights, we shouldn't be seeking to advocate the cause of those that seek to put the better welfare system between the United States and Australia as somehow the determinant of human rights. I would prefer to have a discussion about the death penalty, about the rule of law, about democracy, about religious freedom. They are the issues on which we should be concentrating, and I congratulate Senator Bernardi for bringing such an issue to us to debate and discuss.

I say to my friends in the Greens that, when you talk about increased civil disobedience and hoping there will be increased civil disobedience, you are, in fact, undermining the very fabric of civil society and a democracy, because civil disobedience in the case to which Senator McKim has been referring—namely, Extinction Rebellion, which some of us call 'extreme rabble'—is doing just that. By supergluing themselves to roads and by interrupting people, what they are saying is that their point of view is so important, so right, that they have a supervening right to disrupt people from picking up their children from school or dropping them off at child care and making them late for work—that somehow, they have the right to inconvenience everybody else within the community.

In a civil society, you can demonstrate and put your point of view. The great thing about Australia is that every three years our fellow Australians can pass judgement on the government of the day on whether or not they want them to be re-elected or they want a change of personnel and policy. Indeed, before 18 May the Australian Greens, along with Labor, were trumpeting that this would be the climate change election. They put it front and centre to the Australian people, saying that is what the election was going to be about. What did the Australian people decide? That a more moderate, considered approach was the appropriate one. Indeed, the Australian people made a choice between pain and gain. They asked: 'If we were to follow the Labor-Green approach to climate change, what would the economic pain be?' Of course, that was the question that Mr Shorten and the Greens could never answer and in fact refused to answer. You then move on to: 'Even if we were to implement those policies, what would be the actual gain for the environment?' We know what our Chief Scientist said. He said that, even if Australia were to close down all its CO2 emissions, the impact on the world environment would be 'virtually nil'.

Let's remember this about these people of civil disobedience that Senator McKim seeks to champion. Back in the early eighties there was civil disobedience in the streets of my home state of Tasmania against the construction of a renewable energy plant. When the people asked the question, 'Where are we going to get our energy and electricity from?' the great doyen of the Green movement, on the front page of his local paper, said, 'Easy: a coal-fired power station.' Can you believe that? Dr Bob Brown, head of the Wilderness Society, in opposing a hydroelectricity scheme, said the better alternative would be a coal-fired power station. Fast forward 30 years and where is Bob Brown? Campaigning against coalmining in Queensland. These people are not so committed to the environment as they are to disruption of our community and good commonsense policy.

I say, with the greatest of respect, that in this debate I am more than willing to discuss the issue of environmental policy and the way we should go. But, when people are being imprisoned in China by the hundreds of thousands—the estimate is a million—when Falun Gong followers are being killed and their organs are sold and when Christian churches are being pulled down and pastors are imprisoned, the Greens say the big ticket item for discussion is the civil disobedience on Australia's streets. Talk about privilege; talk about First World problems; talk about a disconnect with genuine reality! In Australia, these people have the genuine opportunity to advocate, to talk, to discuss and to put their point of view. All we ask is: be civil to your fellow Australians, be civil to society at large and allow them to go about their business. What right do you have to deliberately delay a mum from picking up her child from a childcare centre or a dad from taking his kids to school on his way to work?

There is, I suggest, a complete disconnect with the fundamentals here, and I would simply encourage those that seek to take part in this debate to consider the real, fundamental issues that we are discussing. When we are asked by the honourable senator opposite about the need to tell the truth, I would encourage him to consider some of the facts, some of the assertions, some of the hyperbole that is used in the climate change debate and not encourage people to disrupt their fellow citizens. I would encourage him and his fellow Greens senators to consider their position in this regard. With that said, I also remind him, when he seeks to cast aspersions on donations to political parties, which party was the beneficiary of the biggest corporate donation in Australian history. It was the Australian Greens—funny that! It was $1.6 million, if I recall, from one Graeme Wood, and that donation was personally negotiated by the leader of the Greens and Mr Wood, not through an intermediary, and then the leader of the Australian Greens at the time had the audacity to say to the Australian people that he would be forever indebted for that donation. Mr Wood, who made the donation, thought it was a good investment. Just imagine if the leader of the Labor Party or the Liberal Party were to have negotiated personally such a donation and then said, 'I am forever indebted,' and the donor saying, 'It was a great investment.' Can you imagine the outrage? That is where we get the hypocrisy, the duplicity and the double standards, day after day, from the Australian Greens. I think the Australian people are starting to wake up to it, and that is why, when the convoy led by Bob Brown went to Queensland, this convoy of southern superiority was so rightly rejected by the Queensland people, because they saw through the duplicity and they saw through the hypocrisy.

Returning to the Human Rights (Parliamentary Scrutiny) Amendment (Australian Freedoms) Bill 2019, the sentiment is great, the sentiment is good, the sentiment is important. Human rights and those freedoms which we enjoy today are not as a result of parliamentarians sitting around in places like this; these freedoms were bought for us by the sacrifice of those that we commemorate across the avenue from this place, in the Australian War Memorial and its cenotaphs in nearly every single town and city around our nation. It was bought with blood, and we have a duty and an obligation to defend those freedoms, advocate for those freedoms and remember that those men and women who have sacrificed did so to give us the fundamental freedoms that I was able to read out, and I read them out again because they are so worth repeating. As Robert Menzies said in 'We believe':

The real freedoms are to worship, to think, to speak, to choose, to be ambitious, to be independent, to be industrious, to acquire skill, to seek reward.

With great respect I don't think the right to superglue yourself to a street in Brisbane, inconveniencing your fellow Australians, falls into any of those categories. It is a matter of regret that this debate has been subverted in this way and that our concentration has been taken away from the fundamentals. As a Liberal I stand very firmly behind paragraph 13 of 'We believe', which supports those fundamental human freedoms, the great human freedoms that we have enshrined in this country now for many years, and long may they continue.