Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This is outrageous. Here is a piece of legislation, the Religious Discrimination (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2021, that has been in the making for years and that we know, from having just seen it in the last day, is actually going to increase discrimination, not reduce discrimination. Yet the government is trying to quickly get it out of the way, to try to pretend that that's not the case. It is so disrespectful to the whole Australian community, who have an interest in this legislation, because it is complex legislation. On one hand the Prime Minister is saying it's going to bring us all together and it's going to protect people of faith, and on the other hand, when you read this legislation, you see that it is actually going to increase discrimination, allowing people to make offensive statements and get away with it.

It is legislation that is a massive overreach—overriding all the state and territory antidiscrimination legislation. It's going to allow further discrimination in schools. Whereas the Prime Minister was promising that he was going to reduce discrimination in schools and not allow students to be expelled because of their sexuality or their gender identity, this legislation is actually going to consolidate that position. It is going to give schools more ability—it's going to encourage them—to use the provisions in this legislation to expel students and sack teachers on the basis of their gender identity or their sexuality.

This in itself is bad enough, but we know that's this government's agenda. Okay, so that's the government's agenda, and they're putting it on the table. They believe in it; we don't, but they believe in it. But let's have the committee inquiry, which is what we do in this Senate, to be able to thrash this out, to be able to get all the views of the community, of the many stakeholders. And that's not just LGBTIQ stakeholders. It's also people with disability. It's women. It's people of minority faiths. All these people want to have a say, because they are affected by this legislation.

This legislation allows people to make offensive statements against people with disabilities. It allows people in the street to come up to people and say, 'Your disability is a punishment from God.' This legislation will allow people to make offensive statements against women, to tell them they should be subject to the will of their husband. It allows people to make an offensive statement against single parents—to say that having children out of wedlock is simple. This legislation allows people to make offensive statements against same-sex couples—for a lesbian to have a colleague continually say to her, 'I'm going to pray to find you a husband.'

This is the sort of thing this legislation does. So, at the very least, we need to have a decent inquiry to make this clear, to thrash this out. Yet we have a government that, a minute before we are due to consider this issue, has the gall to table an amendment saying that we're going to have an inquiry that is going to be completed by the end of January. How disrespectful to all those members of the Australian community who want to have a say! If we're going to have an inquiry that reports by the end of January, any hearings for this inquiry would have to be at the beginning of January, when people are on their summer holidays. It is outrageous; it is absolutely outrageous and just so disrespectful. But it is typical of this government, who have got it into their heads that this is the direction they want to go—to ride roughshod over the interests of the vast majority of Australians, who actually want to see legislation that decreases discrimination.

People want to see a country where everybody is able to live their lives free of discrimination. They do not want to see legislation that is going to increase discrimination against women, against people with disabilities or against LGBTIQ Australians. So absolutely the Greens will be opposing this. We had hoped, through the selection of bills process last night, that we'd reached agreement to defer a decision on the committee and the reporting date until next week, to give us a bit more time to talk through these things sensibly. But, no, at the last minute, just before midnight, we had this disrespectful amendment from the government. I have moved an amendment to the selection of bills report to say that— (Time expired)