Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I did not know Jo Cox—she was from a different political tradition to my own, she served in a parliament on the other side of the world and she worked for an organisation, Oxfam, with which I deeply disagree on many issues, and yet she touched the lives of so many people. She touched the lives of some members opposite who knew her; she touched the lives of members of my own side who had encountered her on international delegations. And in many respects we all know Jo Cox, even if we do not know Jo Cox the person. She was someone's daughter, someone's sister, someone's aunt, someone's wife, someone's mother, someone's friend and someone's member of parliament. She was a public servant who was motivated by the same great traditions that motivate all of us to come into this place—to do something for our community, for our country and for the world, and to make it a little bit better.

She was brutally murdered at a time when she was holding a constituency surgery, very much like many of us do in our own electorates here in Australia—putting ourselves out into our communities, holding listening posts, holding street stalls and making ourselves available as we go about functions and businesses. I think one of the great strengths of being a parliamentarian in a democracy like ours and like Britain's is that constituents can come up to you, they can approach you, they can ask you things, they can present you with things and they can give you a piece of their mind—and, frankly, they so often do. That is part of us staying in touch, and that is something we never want to lose.

I remember in the early 2000s when I worked in the court system—I had the privilege of being an associate to one of the justices of the High Court. At that time you could walk into practically any of our courts without going through a security scan, and I thought that was a fantastic thing. It actually said how secure our democracy was that, with the exception of the Family Court, you were pretty safe to walk into a courtroom. Now there are security scanners everywhere. Now this parliament, in and of itself, is in lockdown, in a security sense, and that is just a sign of the times. We have to take greater precautions for our own security when meeting in this place, we have to take greater precautions for the security of judicial officers meeting in courts and, sadly, sometimes we have to take greater precautions when we are out in the streets. That is something, sadly, that Jo Cox found. We never want to be in a situation where we cannot be accessible as parliamentarians to our constituents or we cannot be accessible to the community. That would be a very sad thing if it happened.

Jo Cox was killed, as other members have said, in a hate crime by a white supremacist. I think political murder is not something that is new in Western society—there were political murders in the Roman senate—but there is a climate in our political debate, a climate in our political discussion, that is motivated in part by the communications technology by which we operate and the social media environment in which we live.

I remember when I was growing up my mother used to say to me that fire and water were good servants but bad masters, and I think the same sort of thing can be said of social media. It provides us with a wonderful sense of opportunity and possibility to communicate with people, but it also narrows the sources from which we get information. It is possible to live in a world that is entirely an echo chamber: where people only ever agree with your opinion, where you are not exposed to difference and where you are not exposed to a friendly debate or a polite exchange of ideas. And I think it does something even worse than that: it is taking us to a pre-enlightenment age where reason is replaced by emotion. This is the age of the emoticon. This is the age of the Facebook meme. It is constantly trying to stir our emotions to get reactions rather than to stir our minds to reason. An appeal to emotion has always been part of the political armoury, but I think we are seeing that more and more now. As I said, I worry that we are hurtling towards a pre-enlightenment age where reason will be completely overtaken by emotions. And when emotion rules reason it can often lead to violence, and that is what we saw here in this instance.

Violence is never, ever the solution for political problems or political challenges. Members who may have read the excellent magisterial biography of Sir John Monash by Geoffrey Serle would have seen that Monash was a great soldier—everyone knows that—but he was also a great citizen. One of the things that Serle had access to were the prodigious diaries that Monash kept from the time he was a 16-year-old boy. In the early thirties, when it seemed as though democracy was failing, Monash was repeatedly approached by ex-servicemen who were saying to him, effectively, 'All you need to do is say the word and we will be prepared to follow you in a coup d'etat'. Monash wrote back to these ex-servicemen and said, 'To achieve constitutional change, you must use constitutional means.' That is a very important message. However much people are upset with the decisions that are made in a political system, there is never an excuse to resort to violence.

I get worried every year when I read the results of the Lowy Institute polls that show a decline in support for democracy. This year's Lowy Institute poll showed just 61 per cent of the population and 54 per cent of 18-to-29-year-olds believe that democracy is preferable to any other kind of government. We must work harder to demonstrate to people that what we do in this place serves them.

The previous speaker, the member for Perth, made some comments about the Brexit campaign and its connection to this particular instance. While I acknowledge that the murder of Jo Cox was a white supremacist and while I acknowledge that he supported the Brexit campaign, there were arguments advanced for Brexit that had nothing to do with white supremacy. It is very important to note that. The British people felt—and that is why they voted in the way they did—that, having had a democratic tradition that stretched back hundreds of years, they had lost control of their ability to control courts and make final decisions about the things that occurred in their own country, and there are reasonable arguments about that that can be made. I just wanted to make that point.

I said earlier that what happened to Jo Cox occurred on the other side of the world, but it occurred in the British parliament and, as the British parliament is the mother of our parliament and is the mother of so many parliaments around the world, it has an extra effect in this country. What happens in Britain has particular cultural effect here, although we are quite proudly a multicultural nation that has been infused with and has the benefit of the many people who have come here from different backgrounds. Our law, our language, our traditions and our parliamentary democracy stem from Britain, and it is very much British institutions and British traditions which have formed the way we see ourselves.

A generation ago, students learnt British history and that British history has helped cement our traditions. They learnt things like the Magna Carta, John Hampden, Ship Money, Star Chamber, Charles I losing his head, Judge Jeffreys, the Glorious Revolution, the first reform bill and, to quote the late John Hirst who wrote an article called From British rights to human rights:

... those who didn't know these particularities knew at least the slogans of British constitutional liberty: Britons never will be slaves; the Englishman's home is his castle; it's a free country; fair play; I'll have the law on you—which were heard as often in Australia as in Britain ...

The murder of Jo Cox was fundamentally an attack on British democracy. It was fundamentally an attack on British institutions and the British tradition, which is as much their tradition as it is our tradition. We must always condemn political murder in whatever form it occurs, because it is fundamentally an attack on our democratic system.

I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate those members opposite who moved this motion originally and to acknowledge the work of the Leader of the House in showing that this is a motion which should be adopted and sent to the House of Commons. I send greetings to members of the House of Commons and say that we in Australia feel solidarity with them at this time. I particularly want to send my condolences to the family and friends of Jo Cox, her constituents in Batley and Spen, the British parliament and the wider community. May her memory be a blessing.

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