Murray Watt (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Northern Australia) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I begin by endorsing the adjournment speech of Senator Dodson earlier where he paid tribute to the passing of one of Queensland's most significant Indigenous leaders of recent years, Mr Sam Watson. Mr Watson made an incredible contribution to Queensland society in recent decades, and our state is very much the poorer for his passing. Unfortunately, today not every political party in this country is standing in solidarity with Aboriginal people in the way that we saw Senator Dodson do in his own adjournment speech.

What we've seen emerge today in Queensland is some extremely concerning video footage involving active and senior members of the Young LNP organisation insulting a range of different racial groups within our community. These videos, which I certainly had not seen before and I think have only come to public attention for the first time today, are extremely concerning and, as I will detail, are part of a very worrying pattern of events that we are seeing over and over within the Young LNP and the senior LNP in my home state of Queensland. The video, which first emerged today and has now been widely publicised in the media, involves senior members of the Gold Coast Young LNP organisation posting videos where they pretend to interview schoolies at the recent schoolies week, including one young man who says the following on screen:

I mean, we've got to stop celebrating a culture that couldn't even invent the bloody wheel, for God's sake.

He is talking there about our First Australians, people who we should all have respect for and not denigrate in this way. This is a video that was posted on the Gold Coast Young LNP Facebook page today and involved the president of the Gold Coast Young LNP interviewing other Young LNP members.

Tonight, another video has emerged involving the same senior members of the Young LNP in Queensland, where they again use racial slurs, this time against Chinese people during a visit undertaken to China. I won't repeat the slurs that are used about Chinese people but it is all widely available in the media. Over the course of today, some have tried to dismiss this as just a bit of mucking around from schoolies or kids doing some silly business. In fact, every participant in these videos is an active participant and active member in the LNP in Queensland and has campaigned alongside numerous state and federal members of the LNP, including people who sit in this chamber and in the House of Representatives. There are numerous photos posted on social media involving the participants in these racist videos campaigning alongside the Prime Minister, Mr Morrison, Minister Dutton, Senator McGrath and the member for Petrie, Luke Howarth.

Some have also tried to dismiss these events today as a one-off incident and the kind of thing that happens, and that we shouldn't get too worried about that. But what is of most concern about this is that it is not an isolated incident. These are not the first videos that have surfaced involving highly racist and extremist thoughts being perpetuated by members of the Young LNP who are connected to senior federal LNP members in this chamber and in the House of Representatives. This goes to the fact that there is clearly something deeply wrong with the culture of the LNP organisation in Queensland that it fosters these kinds of attitudes and encourages this kind of behaviour.

As I said, this is not the first time we have seen this kind of behaviour from both Young LNP members and the broader LNP in Queensland. Only a couple of years ago newspaper reports surfaced of comments from the University of Queensland LNP President, saying that he would have been a Nazi if he had been around in the 1930s—a Nazi in the Young LNP organisation! Only a year ago we saw media reports of Young LNP members posing in photographs with Senator McGrath during election campaigning, where those Young LNP members are displaying, quite prominently, the white power symbol. We have also seen the notorious right-wing extremist Neil Erikson caught out attending a Gold Coast recruitment event for the Liberal National Party. It is no real surprise, because even a senator in this chamber, Senator Stoker from the Queensland LNP, has been prepared to share a stage at CPAC with other extremists. There is a deep cultural problem in the LNP in Queensland and the Prime Minister needs to tackle it today.