Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, opposition leader Dutton, in a media interview, made a comment we expected he would clarify but he hasn't. In the interview, the interviewer said:

We saw the terror threat raised to Probable yesterday. But there are multiple fronts now.

One of those fronts that I found most interesting has come out of Covid. There's the conspiracy theorists, the anti-vaxxers … what does it say to you about government overreach, and government, essentially, controlling people's lives and the effects that that can have?

Peter Dutton's answer:

None of that, though, should give rise to the sort of conduct that you're referring to. I would say to anybody in our community, whether it's within your friendship group, your family group, the work group, whatever it might be, where you see somebody's behaviour changing, regardless of their motivation, or if they've changed radically their thoughts about society and government … you need to report that information to ASIO, or to the Australian Federal Police as a matter of urgency.

In 1997, in the legal case Lange v the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the High Court found:

Under a legal system based on the common law, everybody is free to do anything, subject only to the provisions of the law, so that one proceeds upon an assumption of freedom of speech and turns to the law to discover the established exceptions to it.

To protect human life, free speech stops at incitement to violence against others and at incitement to break the law.

Free speech does not stop, as Peter Dutton suggests, merely at criticisms of others. Advocating that Australians be dobbed into ASIO for venting about government COVID measures, destroying their lives, health and families is a tone-deaf disgrace. In Canada and the UK right now, police response to criticism of the government is underway. Mere attendance at a protest rally without any violent words or actions is now enough to be arrested and imprisoned. Is this a glimpse of the future everyday Australians will endure under the supposedly honourable men and women of the Liberal Party, under an opposition leader who has come to bury Menzies, not to praise Menzies. I call on the opposition leader to clarify his remarks immediately.