Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Hansard source

Just yesterday we saw that the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights inquiry into antisemitism at Australian universities heard evidence from the vice-chancellor of Macquarie University, who refused to unequivocally agree that a staff member's social media post saying, 'May 2025 be the end of Israel,' was antisemitic. They refused to convey a university position on this matter. If that doesn't prove that this committee is inadequate, I don't know what will.

It is absolutely obscene that we are once again having to have a look at academic grants and have a look at Dr Abdel-Fattah and her behaviour, which has included doxxing Jewish Australians. She has encouraged young children to chant hateful terrorist slogans. She has absolutely demonstrated antisemitism at an Australian university. She encouraged those children at an encampment on Sydney university campus and she has promoted Hamas on her social media accounts. They are a recognised terror group. If anyone, anywhere, any place, was inciting the support of a terror organisation, they would be called out but not at Australian universities and not when it's hatred of the Jews, it would seem. That is a different type of incitement according to many people who sit on the other side of this chamber and in the left-wing halls of academia. Australian universities should be moulding young minds. Instead, this same academic, Dr Abdel-Fattah was just invited to another university. She is up at the Queensland University of Technology for another antisemitism platform. She was there under the guise—and this is where we see the Greens and their rhetoric play out, they do these events under the guise—of fighting racism. They're antiracists, but they are antisemites.

It's about time, certainly, that the Labor government had the guts, the wherewithal—we know the intellectual fortitude is lacking in many of their offices, but perhaps someone with some needs to step up and point out that, when you are inciting hatred, when you are talking about the annihilation of a country, when you are talking about support for recognised terror organisations whose sole mission is the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people, that is antisemitic.

If you don't understand that that is antisemitism, just think about it in terms of the racism that you talk about. If anyone was calling for the destruction of any other race of people based on their religion—say the destruction of all Christianity: 'We want all Christians gone'—that would be seen as antireligious. Say we talked about the destruction of—I'll use my own race—all Caucasians. Sam Kerr may take a note out of this book. It is racist to attack white people. So if someone were to say, 'All white people need to be annihilated,' that would be seen as racist—God forbid I should use another example! Why is the destruction of Jews not antisemitic? Just understand it for what it is. It's what it is.

Universities should be places where young minds are taught to question and to debate. You don't send your kids to university to be indoctrinated. You send your kids to university—and quite often at great expense to families—not to learn basketweaving and gender studies; you hopefully send them to university to learn how to expand their mind, to question, to look at things objectively, to look at different arguments and to be able to present a view or a position on something with a well-put-together argument. Instead, what people are getting at universities now is nothing but an indoctrination. And we know it has always been left-leaning.

I enjoyed my days at university, where I very much never wavered, even after four years. My former university professor commented to me that I was still wearing the pearl earrings that I wore on day one of my university degree and that it showed some strength of character that, within five minutes of turning up to my university, I hadn't adopted the flowy skirts and become a left-wing Marxist but went into university voting Liberal and came out still doing the same.

Unfortunately, young minds can be susceptible. They're looking to fit in, to be part of the culture—the culture that has been allowed to fester at universities across Australia, and particularly at the universities that like to think they're better than all the other universities: the universities of the Group of Eight. They like to think they're a little bit more elite. Yet they have become absolute hotbeds of antisemitism, which is racism. And that has been allowed to continue to grow.

So I am incredibly pleased to be here to speak in support of Senator Henderson's bill, the Commission of Inquiry into Antisemitism at Australian Universities Bill 2024 (No. 2). I think it's the right thing to be done.

I hope that the Labor Party takes a good hard look at what's been happening in our great country, where a community now no longer feels safe, and changes their position and does support this bill. To the Labor Party: you can't move away—one in, all in. There are people in the Labor Party who do understand antisemitism, who do support Israel, and I am sorry that you are having to sit in a party room, in a caucus, that does not support you. I'm sorry that one member in particular, a Jewish member, Josh Burns, has been, quite clearly, hung out to dry by his own party in the way that he has been supported—or, more to the point, not.

So perhaps it's time for a bit of moral courage from those opposite to actually put a bit of pressure on the leadership. The boss is away; he's on a plane up to Townsville. He doesn't want to talk to the Australian people through the parliament today. He's up there. It's convenient timing, some may say, but he's gone up there. The boss is away. Come on! Let's get some of your other guys up there.

I'm sorry, Senator Watt? You? I've lived through floods, and I know how terrible they are. And the flood's still going to be there after today.

Senator Watt thinks he can start these sorts of smears. Just start me, because we're talking about antisemitism and the fact that you and your mob are continuing to play politics with antisemitism. See what the Jewish community says about you. Go and see what the Jewish community says about you and the weakness. I think we all know why the AFP didn't tell the Prime Minister about the caravan with the explosives. You, on that side, cannot be trusted with information to keep Australians safe, because your racist ideology that is antisemitic would bar you.