Kimberley Kitching (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Abetz. He was, of course, when he said those words, referring to the Soviet Union, and look at it today—plus ca change. I'm not saying that democracies are always right. After all, it was from his jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama, that Martin Luther King Jr wrote these words, which should still ring in our ears—and they certainly ring in mine very often. He wrote:

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

But it is democracies where there is sunlight and transparency, that have a rule of law, that respect the rights of minorities, that believe in free and fair elections, that believe in the freedom of the press and that believe in human rights. It is they that are the promised land for those who suffer at the mean and ugly hands of authoritarian regimes. Democracies need to grow, not to contract.

For those of us in this parliament and around the world who do not hold out an appeasing hand to those who commit human rights abuses, who do not hold out a slippery hand to those who engage in large-scale corruption; for those of us who tell these evil people, 'No, we will not look away while you do wrong,' but rather look them straight in the eye and say, 'We shall make pariahs of you all'; for those of us who choose to fight for the best world we can have; for those of us who will fight for justice and righteousness, we have made the only choice there is to make.

I was recently in one of the oldest centres of democracy on this earth, Westminster, for an awards ceremony. I am honoured and humbled that I received an award for outstanding contribution to Magnitsky legislation.

An honourable senator: Congratulations.

Thank you. I will never forget some of the people I met there and had an opportunity to become better acquainted with in meetings concerning Magnitsky legislation. They included people whose hands have been permanently affected by the poison that agents of the Russian state had administered. Their hands are red and disfigured, the veins distorted. They have had to learn to walk again because they were so badly affected by the poison.

They included people who were not able to come at all, because they are imprisoned with no due process or no process at all. They included journalists who have been threatened because they have written about despots and the money trails of their corruption and who are still being threatened years after their books and columns were published. Their publishers have been threatened, through both legal and extrajudicial means, and their families have been threatened. Maybe today is the day that they, or one of their children, put their hand on a doorknob at their home and that doorknob has been coated in poison. That's happened to people.

Whether it be the Republic of Conscience, as imagined by Seamus Heaney, which makes clear that we are self-aware beings capable of self-examination, or whether we are guided by the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or the Vedas in the Bhagavad Gita, or whether it is what we see in our daily dealings with other human beings, we learn to distinguish what is right and what is wrong, what is moral and what is immoral and, indeed, what is good and what is evil.

If we don't call out evil where it lurks, and if we don't fight back when given the opportunity to diminish and defeat evil, then who are we? What are we doing in this place? It is for that reason—the lack of respect for the rights of their fellow human beings—that we observe the phenomenon of those who have gamed the authoritarian system by stealing or by engaging in the most heinous human rights abuses and corruption and then seeking the safety of the free world's jurisdictions. They seek to protect themselves and their ill-gotten gains with the very protections they deny to the victims of their regimes. Our system of land title gives you as close to absolute certainty that no-one can steal your property from you. In the authoritarian world, there is no such safety. If someone with power wants to take, he or she can do just that. There might be the occasional fig leaf of pretend process, but the outcome is the same.

That brings us to this bill. This bill is inspired by Sergei Magnitsky, an employee of hedge fund manager Bill Browder. Sergei Magnitsky was murdered by Russian crooks connected to the highest levels of the current Russian regime. He died in a Russian prison after being tortured. He was murdered because he had uncovered what were successful attempts to steal hundreds of millions of dollars from the Russian state. Mr Browder, the employer of Sergei Magnitsky, is a prosperous man, and I spent a quite a lot of time with him in London recently. He could have continued with a quiet and comfortable life, but he was so outraged and saddened that he has dedicated his life to what are now called Magnitsky laws.

Prior to the introduction of the bill we are speaking on today, local proposals to do the same have been driven by many in this place. I want to talk about Michael Danby, who was the first person I talked to about Magnitsky legislation, having seen Bill Browder interviewed on 7.30. But I also want to acknowledge Senator Payne and her office, as Senator Rice has said. I want to acknowledge Senator Rice, and I want to acknowledge Senator James Paterson—another Victorian, so maybe Victoria really is where the good people are. I want to acknowledge Mr Hastie, in the other place, the Hon. Kevin Andrews and Mr Chris Hayes. And I want to acknowledge Senator Abetz and Senator Fierravanti-Wells. Although this was done in the Joint Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade, the Senate standing committee was equally committed to this legislation, so I appreciate the work of my fellow committee members.

On 3 December 2019, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Minister for Women, Senator the Hon. Marise Payne, asked the Human Rights Subcommittee of the joint standing committee to inquire into the use of targeted sanctions. In that committee, we heard from a number of expert witnesses, both local and international. These included Bill Browder and prominent international lawyers Geoffrey Robertson QC and Amal Clooney, as well as former Canadian Attorney-General Professor Irwin Cotler. I met all of these people in London, and they have been, and remain, very generous with their time. I want to say thank you to them—they were amazing sounding-boards. I'd also like to also acknowledge again the members of the joint standing committee, particularly those on the Human Rights Subcommittee.

I think it's also important—and this will be the last point I make—to synchronise our local response, through the passing of this bill, with the responses of like-minded democracies, which is why I'm so pleased Labor will be moving an amendment to put 'Magnitsky' into the title of this bill. In a world of growing authoritarianism, the harmonisation of this type of legislation becomes a weapon for democratic pushback. I'm in regular contact with New Zealand and Japanese legislators, and they hope to enact their own Magnitsky legislation. I think this will be very important for our region.

A strong and clear message will be sent to lower-ranking officials and criminal thugs that their crimes, whether on behalf of or protected by their superiors, will not be immune from international consequences. This legislation says to them: 'Your stolen money is no good here. No matter how you steal from your people, there will be no shopping trips to Paris, no harbourfront mansions in Sydney, no skiing in Aspen and no nest egg in a Western bank.' Like King Midas, they will have lots of gold but no way to enjoy it. It will also say: 'You are beneath contempt. You are so loathsome that we have judged you and we will say so in public—we will name you. Australia will not be a fence for stolen goods nor a hollow log for stolen money.'

This legislation is important. We are a democracy and as a democracy we should stand with other democracies and other like-minded people around the world and say no to the evil that we also see in our world.