Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to a question without notice asked by Senator McCarthy today relating to the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

The answer was incredibly disappointing, in particular on this day, Harmony Day. As we reflect on Harmony Day, I want to go to some of the answers to me and my questions by Senator Brandis. I want to begin with Senator Brandis's response in terms of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull. I asked, first up, about the fact that Mr Turnbull has said on at least 16 occasions that he had ruled out his government amending section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Senator Brandis said that he had not said that—certainly not that many times. I just want to point out some very important media coverage of the moments when Mr Turnbull denied that it was a distraction for his government. In news.com, on 31 August 2016: 'The government has no plans to make changes to section 18C'. He said it again on 30 August in The Australian:

It’s filled the op-ed pages of newspapers for years and years but the government has no plans to make any changes to section 18C. We have other more pressing, much more pressing priorities to address.

Then again on 14 November 2016, on ABC 7.30, Mr Turnbull said:

18(C) is talked about constantly on the ABC. It's talked about constantly in what's often called the 'elite media'. I've focused overwhelmingly on the economy.

It appears that Prime Minister Turnbull has changed tack. Today is one of the most significant days in Australia and across the world. The purpose behind Harmony Day is to reflect on the diversity of culture across this country, something that unfortunately has been really stained by the Prime Minister's move to change the Racial Discrimination Act on this day in particular. It is incredibly sad. It really is a watering down of protections against racial vilifications. The irony of it being done on this day! The Attorney-General says he does not believe the Australian people are racist.

George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, I do not.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Coming from a white man.

Malarndirri McCarthy (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As a white man growing up in Petersham, attending private schools, I am sure you have never been denied access or service in a shop. You have never had taxis drive past, pretending not to see you. You have never received hateful letters and emails because of your race or the colour of your skin. I really wish I could believe there are not any racists in Australia. But certainly my personal experience, and my family's experience, informs me of the reality that I live in this country. It is deeply unfortunate.

I asked you in my question: what else do you need to say to me and to many other people of different races in this country that you cannot say now? What is it that you are so determined to say that you cannot say to people now?

My predecessor, Senator Nova Peris, had a disgraceful time in this Senate, standing here, being called all sorts of things—in fact, even on her Twitter account today—in terms of what racism she received from the general public. Just to clarify, in case you were thinking I meant it occurred in the Senate; I meant this is where she raised the issue about the racism that was displayed against her by the general public across Australia. It is really important to put this on the record. She stood courageously here to point out from her own personal experiences that racism is very much alive and strong in this country. We as parliamentarians in both the Senate and the House of Representatives must show leadership about the importance of harmony, diversity and cultural respect. That is something that is not happening now today in the Turnbull government.

Being the target of racist, hurtful comments is deeply distressing and causes deep harm. (Time expired)

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian people are rightly sick and tired of political correctness, which has been stifling our freedoms—including our freedom of speech. The destructive and divisive victimhood industry needs to be reined in, and that is what this legislation seeks to do. It seeks to get rid of the words 'offend, insult and humiliate' and to replace them with the word 'harass'.

As a former Australian Human Rights Commissioner, Sev Ozdowski, quite rightly said:

There should be no right to not be offended.

Part and parcel of the freedoms and the society we enjoy today is the underpinning of the virtue of freedom of speech. And, along with that, comes the opportunity for some people to behave in an untidy way from time to time. But that does not mean that the state should step in and stop it.

Similarly, one of the great underpinnings of our society in the criminal law is that you should be convicted on the basis of beyond reasonable doubt. Why do we have that? Because in our system of law we believe that it is better that nine guilty people walk free rather than convicting one innocent person. We do protect those freedoms in our society. Indeed, those opposite could say, 'Why do you support a system of law that allows nine guilty people to walk free?' It is because we believe in the right of the innocent to be absolutely protected.

Similarly, with the freedom of speech, we do say in this debate that people should be able to have a robust discussion—that people should not be able to claim a victimhood-type status. The Australian people are robust; we are not snowflakes. But what we as a government firmly believe in is that nobody should be harassed or intimidated, and that is what those on the other side will never tell you about—that there is that protection against genuine harassment and against intimidation. Of course, we all believe that that should be the case.

When we have a law that seeks to bring an absolute world-class cartoonist, in Bill Leak, before the Human Rights Commission because somebody thought they might be offended by him, we know that the law is reaching too far. It is not often that the Australian people will hear me quote a Greens senator in support of that which I am putting forward. But let's be reminded that when this legislation first came in the then Greens senator from Western Australia Christabel Chamarette made some very prophetic comments about 'creating a crime of words':

This will take the legislation across a certain threshold into the realm of thought police …

Even Greens senator Christabel Chamarette saw the consequences of the legislation which has now played out, unfortunately, against the now-deceased—and may his soul rest in peace—Bill Leak and the four QUT students who were harassed in a most inappropriate manner.

And so we on this side believe that the QUT students and Bill Leak were in fact offended, insulted and humiliated by the actions of the Australian Human Rights Commission in its very inappropriate methodologies in pursuing those four students. This is about balancing up our fundamental right to freedom of speech and ensuring that people within our community are not harassed or intimidated.

So I feel exceptionally comfortable with the landing that the government has come to on this. It is a sensible compromise. It is a system which will ensure freedom of speech and, what is more, protection from those who would seek to harass and intimidate. The Australian people will be well served by this legislation. The Australian people will see this as a sensible balance, where freedom of speech is absolutely protected—as it ought to be. (Time expired)

Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I do want to start by acknowledging the contribution of Senator Abetz on this matter. He is someone who I strongly disagree with, but at least, unlike others, he has been very consistent over a long period of time on his views about this issue.

Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Don't give him credit!

Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is credit for being consistent! I rise today on the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination—Harmony Day. The idea that today is the day that we are going to talk about watering down section 18C—watering down race hate laws in this country—is appalling. It is embarrassing. You could not script the joke that this place has become.

The irony is that the same people who keep going on about this matter of freedom of speech in this theoretical sense are the same people who argue against the right to freedom to marry the person that you love. The hypocrisy there is unbelievable! Where this debate is really headed to is this: as Senator McCarthy said, what is it that is so insulting, that is so humiliating or that is so offensive that people feel the current laws do not allow them to say those things, and feel like they are being held back by the laws as they are written currently?

When we have the challenges of youth unemployment and the challenges facing the economy, what do we have from the government? What we have from the government is this theoretical debate within their own wings which is more about protecting the Prime Minister's own job than it is about the jobs of tens of thousands of millions of Australians who are under threat in a changing economy.

Let's be honest: it is not going to impact the people in this chamber. We are all privileged to be here. But it is the message that you send to society; it is the message that gets sent from the top. It is when you have an Attorney-General who stands up in this chamber and talks about people having the right to be a bigot—the exact words of the Attorney-General, who is sitting here. It is the message that sends to our society.

It is about the 10-year-old school girl who might look a bit different or have a bit of a funny name getting picked on in the schoolyard, and it is about the parents who have to deal with the different children and their kids and what happens in the playground. At a practical level, they were never going to be able to take their cases to the Human Rights Commission—that is not what it is about. It is about the message that we send as a society and the message that we send as a community. Frankly, it is elitism for people who have never faced that type of discrimination and who have never faced that type of language to stand up and profess how difficult it must be for others. What is incredible is when you have groups like the Lebanese Muslim Association and the Executive Council of Australian Jewry—the leaders of the Jewish community—coming together, including many Asian community leaders right across the board and ethnic communities across this country, saying: 'Hang on. What has made our country so strong and so successful has been the tolerance and the openness of our society.' Part of that is the message that comes right from the top from the highest levels of government. When you have a government that has spent more time—more air time, more parliament time, more Senate time and more of the focus of the past nine months since the last election—trying to sort out the internal mess over this issue of 18C rather than the real issues that are affecting Australian households and Australian families, what message is that sending about values and priorities? I say to this government: 'You have responsibility for your actions. You have responsibility for your words.' The message that is consistently being sent by this government and this Attorney-General that it is okay to be a bigot is not the right message that we should be sending to future Australian leaders.— (Time expired)

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very, very proud to live in a country like Australia. We all recognise that we are living in the most successful multicultural society in the world, built on a foundation of mutual respect. We are not a racist country; neither I nor anyone on this side of the chamber believes that to be the truth for a moment. The Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Brandis, made that very clear in his answers earlier today.

It is sad to me that the official opposition, the Australian Labor Party and, perhaps more significantly, the Australian Greens, think that Australia is a racist country. The question by Senator Di Natale during question time was the low point in question time in this Senate. Senator Di Natale, you may think Australians are racist. I do not, and not many people would share your view.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Macdonald, please take your seat.

Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise on two points of order. I ask that Senator Macdonald not address his response directly to me but to address it through the chair, as is appropriate. Also, I would like to point out that Senator Macdonald is completely misrepresenting my position and I ask him to withdraw.

Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Di Natale, the second point is a debating point. But I do remind Senator Macdonald and all senators to address the chair in their remarks. Please continue.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You always know in this chamber when you are hitting the mark. You will have spurious points of order made as we just had by Senator Di Natale. Anyone who listened to question time today would have been disgusted at the tenor and nature of that question from Senator Di Natale earlier.

We, as Australians, value freedom of speech and we recognise the enormous benefits that multiculturalism has delivered to our country. We are a very proud multicultural society. I always say that all of us in Australia were at one stage immigrants to this land through our forebears—my forbears used to run around the highlands of Scotland wearing dresses and little skirts—but we have all integrated into Australia and we reflect our traditions once or twice a year at particular times. We have pipe bands, which are good. It is part of the multicultural nature of our society that has been so successful over so many years.

It is important that we understand how this whole debate started. The original section 18C was preceded by three significant independent inquiries: the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the then Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's National Inquiry into Racist Violence and the Australian Law Reform Commission's inquiry into Multiculturalism and the Law. None recommended that the current law should apply. Instead, they recommended that the law tackle racist harassment and incitement to hostility. So 'harass' in the proposal put forward by the government today reflects the recommendations of the National Inquiry into Racist Violence conducted in 1991 by the then Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

I will point out that it is not just coalition politicians talking about this and raising these issues. A distinguished law professor, Professor George Williams—a former ALP preselection candidate—who is currently the Dean of Law at the University of New South Wales, said:

Despite its limited operation, there is a good case for amending section 18C. … the law should proscribe extreme forms of speech such as racial vilification and incitement to violence. Section 18C—

as it currently stands—

goes too far in applying to more minor forms of speech, in particular words that offend or insult.

David Marr, a journalist from The Guardian newspaper, of all, says:

I want "offend" and "insult" taken out of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. I don't think the law should engage at that level. But I can't see that this country would be a better, freer place if "humiliate" and "intimidate" went too.

He is even suggesting a stronger response.

The proposal put forward by the government gets rid of the political correctness, it gets rid of the issues that Professor Williams and David Marr—to name just two—have raised in relation to this issue, and it does bring us to a very sensible amendment to a law that has caused so much controversy and has led to such injustice in the cases of the QUT issue and Mr Leak. (Time expired)

Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today, schoolchildren all across the country celebrate Harmony Day, a day I remember going to my own children's school and celebrating. It is a day when they recognise the different cultures in their school and their community, celebrated through picnics, food, dance and all the kinds of rich tapestry that living in a multicultural country gives us here in Australia.

Whilst those children, the next generation, are celebrating this day—Harmony Day, a day of belonging—little do they know that their government has chosen this day to put forward how it wants to weaken protections against race hate speech in our country. The very things they are celebrating—the right to live in harmony, the right to live peacefully amongst one another and the right to share and celebrate the differences amongst us—are being threatened by their government. Little do they know. Those children, if they had the right to vote at their age right now, I think that they would very clearly not vote for this government. They would not vote for a government that would take away the very essence of what it means to belong to a multicultural society and to recognise diversity as a strength and not as a weakness.

Senator Brandis said that the changes they are going to make to the protections we have against race hate speech are not a weakening or a watering down of them. He calls them a strengthening of them. Taking out three key verbs that are currently in our laws and replacing them with one—he says that is a strengthening. I do not know if that is straight out of the Trump fake news handbook or what, but that is clearly not true. It is not true. It is fake. It is a falsehood and it needs to be named as such. With the little time it appears that the Attorney-General has left in this place, with all the talk of him going to perhaps a posting or perhaps another position in his legal fraternity—I do not know—one would think that he would not want to be the Attorney-General that will go down in history as the Attorney-General who weakened our protections to race hate speech and who jeopardised that fantastic thing we have in Australian that we call multiculturalism.

It goes in the face of what the government announced yesterday with its multicultural statement. I acknowledge and give credit that it was a decent statement by this government, but it is a statement that was not worth the paper it was written on when the next day—Harmony Day—the government comes into the parliament to make clear its intentions to weaken protections against race hate in this country.

Who is happy about all of this? I do not know anyone that is happy about all of this. The only people I can see and understand to be happy about all of this are the very conservative members of the government: the Senator Abetzes of this world, the Senator Patersons of this world and the fringe dwellers like One Nation. They are the only people I can see who are happy out of this. Out of that, let's just have a look at them. They are conservatives who would not have a clue what it feels like to be in the position of Senator Malarndirri McCarthy and her family, or former Senator Nova Peris and her family. Why not actually represent those people? No, they do not care about those people.

They do not care about the people who actually needs these laws and the reason we had these laws put in place in the first place 20 years ago through, I would say, a decent amount of inquiry and reporting that took place in the parliament. No, they simply want to have the right—the right to what? I ask them: what is it that you want to say? What do you want to say to me? What do you want to say to former Senator Nova Peris? What do you want to say to Senator McCarthy? What do you want to say to Senator Dodson? What is it you want to say out there in the community to Aboriginal people, to people of Indian background, to people of Pakistani background, or to people of the many nations that make up this fantastic country of Australia? I ask them: what is it that you want to say? (Time expired)

Question agreed to.

Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to a question without notice asked by Senator Di Natale today relating to the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

Let me begin by saying at the start of this debate that it is about time we acknowledged that we are standing on stolen land, the land of the Ngunawal people. I want to pay my respects to their elders past and present. Let us remember that Australia was a multicultural and multilingual nation long before the first Europeans arrived.

We are standing here today on Harmony Day, a day where we come together to celebrate our enormous cultural diversity and the peace and prosperity that this nation is famous for. But it is today, on Harmony Day—this day of all days—that this government has decided it wants to pursue amendments to water down protections against racial discrimination and to make the expression of hate speech even easier. How is it that the Attorney-General and the Prime Minister would consider saying to people, on a day when we celebrate their contribution, 'We want to make it easier for you to be vilified in the Australian community.' This is a day chosen because it is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This is a day when the United Nations human rights chief says he wants governments to adopt legislation that expressly prohibits racial hate speech. We have the UN saying it wants countries around the world to strengthen protections against racist hate speech, and what is this government doing? It is weakening the protections we have, making it easier for racist hate speech.

This has nothing to do with freedom of speech, and it never has. Freedom of speech has never included the freedom to say racist and bigoted things that do harm to people. Watering down section 18C has nothing to do with freedom of speech. It has everything to do with freedom from consequence. It has everything to do with allowing a very small group of very privileged, largely older white folk in this place to be more racist than they might otherwise be.

If the freedom of speech warriors in this country were so concerned about freedom of speech, why wouldn't they be arguing against the erosion of freedom of speech in this country? Why wouldn't they be arguing against the Border Force Act or sections of the ASIO Act? What about the pieces of antiterror legislation that make it almost impossible for people to express themselves as we would expect in a liberal democracy? When the Attorney-General set up his parliamentary inquiry into freedom of speech all he was worried about was the rights of those so-called bigots, and giving them the right to say and do what they want to say and do.

Look at the section 18C parliamentary inquiry and even the Attorney-General's own inquiry into section 18C—and I know that Senator McKim was part of that. That was a committee dominated by a majority of coalition party room members and not even they, when looking at the evidence, could conclude that there was a case for section 18C to be watered down. We have to ask ourselves: what is it that the Attorney-General wants people to say? What is it that they currently cannot say that they will be able to say if we change the definition within section 18C? They cannot provide an answer to that question. They cannot provide it.

This is a debate manufactured within a narrow section of the media, within the Institute of Public Affairs and within the back rooms of the Liberal Party and the far Right of that party. But this is not a debate that many of the thousands of people around the country who have contacted my office or those of my colleagues in the Greens want to see us entertain. They want to see us protect our multicultural community. We have heard horrific stories of the effects of racism on many of those communities right across the country. What they are saying to us very loudly and clearly is, 'Please do not weaken 18C, particularly now that hate speech is taking a foothold right around the world, within some sections of the Australian community and indeed in this parliament.' The Australia I believe in is one that protects multicultural Australia, one that recognises the great contribution that migrants have made and one that recognises the protections we need when it comes to hate speech. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.