Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Hansard source

I just indicate that the government does not support this motion. In fact, much of what sits behind this motion is an assertion that there is data that is unavailable to the public—that there is data that, for all sorts of motivations that are impugned by the characters who share this sort of stuff on social media, has not been made available, for all sorts of nefarious purposes.

For the people who spend a lot of time in this place late in the evening on the socials posting thing that are true and things that are untrue, often with a disregard for evidence, science and the institutions that are there to analyse and disseminate the data—of course, I'm sure that there are some people who do that who honestly believe what it is that they say. There are probably a few of those. There are some who know it not to be true but say it anyway because it's a well-worn tactic of people who seek to propagate radical right-wing extremism.

There are some who've gone through a bit of a journey themselves who started doing it for those reasons—that is, they latched onto these things as a way of organising the maximum possible position for their political position even if they were things they knew to be untrue, and they have subsequently, in a process of self-radicalisation, begun to believe that they are true. I've seen some evidence of that in this place. It's the kind of process that we've seen in many parts of the world with this kind of conspiracy-theory thinking, bereft of the benefits of the last few centuries of scientific discovery since the Enlightenment and using those for a very narrow, very nasty set of organising propositions.

Where there is an event like a global pandemic, it is of course a frightening event. The Spanish flu caused untold misery, untold deaths around the world. There were 19 million deaths in Europe—more than the Great War. In the history of my family in this country, in the space of one week in the town of Uralla, a relative of mine, his daughter and his granddaughter all died of the Spanish flu in their home. It's not imaginable for us here in Australia, where we have the benefits of a health system and we have the state and Commonwealth governments working—not perfectly, but working—to deal with the challenge. People are able to attend hospitals. But remember the beginning of the COVID pandemic. There was no certainty that a vaccine would be developed in time, and people were frightened.

Some people in the political system, of course, where they see fear see opportunity. Where they see a capacity to divide people, to isolate them and to frighten them, that is an opportunity. We've seen that in other phases of our history. It will happen again. It certainly happened around the COVID-19 crisis. Some of the things that were being shared on social media in particular were the preserve of the funny characters you would find, when I was growing up in country New South Wales, in the League of Rights. They were the far-right organisation. They made efforts at organising. They made efforts at incursions into political parties. They did their best. They were the jackboot crowd in regional New South Wales and regional Queensland in particular. They'd be handing out the little leaflets outside the show or outside the markets.

Where there were bookshops, occasionally they would be found, Senator Smith; that's right. It would be all of the conspiracy theory stuff of the age—much of it with an antisemitic overtone, I have to say. Very regrettably, they were Australians who did not understand the moral weight of what it is they were doing. We laughed at those characters because they were isolated and all they could do was hand out something that they had run off on the Gestetner in some lonely garage somewhere and post it around through Australia Post. They would be there at those events.

I have to tell you as an aside, colleagues, that the Glen Innes Show is on this weekend. It's where I grew up. It's a fantastic agricultural show. I urge Senator Scarr and Senator Rennick and others making their way back to Queensland to do it by road, go through Glen Innes and see the Glen Innes Show and Mayor Banham.