Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Acting Deputy President O'Neill. Who can forget the opposition leader, Mr Dutton, warning about these so-called Sudanese gangs that were allegedly roaming around Melbourne? Mr Dutton was saying, 'People are scared to go out and have dinner in Melbourne because of Sudanese gangs.' Then Victoria Police came out and said, 'Actually, there are no Sudanese gangs in Melbourne,' and what did Mr Dutton do? Did he do what any normal, decent person would do—retract and apologise? No. He doubled down.

What Mr Dutton and Senator Hanson need to understand is that their words give permission for people out in the Australian community to engage in racism. Whether that is in words or actions, up to and including violence motivated by racism, none of those things are acceptable. Enabling them or implicitly encouraging them is not acceptable either and must be called out every time that it happens.

The truth is that far too many Australians face this kind of racism. They face it far too often and they face it in far too many elements of their lives. It has to end, and a great place to begin ending that structural racism that exists in our society would be if people who get up in this place and either explicitly or implicitly encourage that racism were to stop—just stop.

This particular instrument that the Greens are seeking to disallow today increases visa application fees. International student visa application fees are going to increase by 125 per cent, as Senator Faruqi has already informed the chamber. In the context of an election campaign that I fear is going to be based in significant part on the demonising of migrants and multicultural communities in this country, this increase is a very unwise move by a Labor Party that is all about social cohesion when it suits it. They are all about social cohesion, yet they don't want to talk about the fact that they are complicit in a genocide in Gaza. It's all about social cohesion, but they don't seem to worry too much about social cohesion when they are talking about jacking up visa fees in the context of the upcoming election campaign.

Make no mistake, it is absolutely obvious to anyone who is paying attention that part of Mr Dutton's strategy in this campaign is going to be to blame migrants for as many of the challenges facing us here in Australia as he can. If you can't get in for a hip operation, blame migrants. If housing prices are too high and there are not enough homes available, blame migrants. If there is a pothole in the road outside your house, blame the migrants driving down the road. That's what we're going to get from Mr Dutton. It is blindingly obvious. He is going to weaponise Australia's multicultural communities. He is going to weaponise migration levels to this country, and he's going to do it because he thinks that's one of his pathways to power. Well, Mr Dutton and anyone else on that side of the chamber who's going to try that on needs to understand that they're going to be fought every step of the way by the Australian Greens because we are going to stand up for multicultural Australia. We are going to stand up for the amazing contribution that migrants have made, continue to make to this day and will continue to make into the future in this country. We are going to stand up, and we are going to fight against the kind of divisive, harmful rhetoric that has already started from the opposition and which no doubt will continue.

Of course, the Labor Party are not going to stand and fight proudly against that. In fact, they are going to start appeasing it, and they've done that already by cutting back on migration levels into Australia. That's because they don't want to fight Mr Dutton on that turf. They would prefer not to have a fight, and, in the time honoured way of the Labor Party, they're going to capitulate, roll over and let Mr Dutton tickle their collective bellies, as we've seen happen so many times on so many issues. The country therefore lurches further to the Right. The Greens are here to fight for people. We are here to fight for multiculturalism, and we are here to fight for a fair go for migrants.

When you place this in other contexts recently, it is yet another sad day in our country's national story. I went to Manus Island five times, and I know my friend and colleague Senator Hanson-Young visited Nauru. We saw firsthand the human cost of Australia's racist offshore detention system. I call it racist because—how many white people ended up on Manus Island? I didn't visit Nauru, because, on the instructions of the Australian government, the Nauru government refused me a visa. But I went to Manus Island five times, and I can tell you absolutely, without any doubt whatsoever, how many white people there were locked up in Manus Island: none. If a boatload of white South African farmers had happened to arrive in Australia during the time when that shameful policy was in place, I have no doubt the answer would have been the same: none. They would not have ended up on Manus Island, because they were white. It was okay to put the brown-skinned and the black-skinned people on Manus Island, but it would never have been okay to put a white-skinned person on Manus Island. That was a racist policy. We need to call that out.

This country has got a shameful history of being a racist country, back from the days when it was open and explicit, with the White Australia Policy, through to today—a shameful history of racism. And you can't do something like this, like what the government is trying to do, without understanding the historical context of this country and doing your best to understand what this does in that context. So we are going to stand up and fight. We are moving to disallow this, and I thank Senator Shoebridge for moving this disallowance. It is time for a reckoning in this country about our history, about the displacement of First Nations people from their country under the lie of terra nullius. It is time for a reckoning about the failure to get up a voice in this country and about Labor's current failure to proceed with Makarrata in the terms that it was conceived of in the Uluru statement. It is time for a reckoning about our racist history as a country. Until we have those reckonings—and that must include a treaty or treaties with First Nations people—we will still have massive unfinished business as a country; we will still have a hole in our collective hearts.