Jason Clare (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Communications) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister has just announced that he is going to make it legal to offend, insult or humiliate people based on the colour of their skin. This is not us. This is not the sort of country we ought to be. We are not a racist country but, from time to time, hurtful, racist things are said. They do not usually affect people who look like me, but they do affect my wife, my family and my community. I represent a community where more than 50 per cent of the people were born overseas, and this is going to hurt them because what the Prime Minister has just done is send a message to the whole country that it is okay to say hurtful, racist things.

I say to the Liberal Party: what do you want to say that you cannot say now? I say this more in sadness than in anger. I thought the Prime Minister was better than this. This is the sort of thing you would expect Pauline Hanson to do, not Malcolm Turnbull. It is not going to create one job across this country, but it will tear at our community. Why is he doing this? He is doing it to save his job, because he is weak and does not have the courage to stand up to the right-wing extremists in his own party. The tragedy is this: it is my community, the people I represent, who are going to pay the price for Malcolm Turnbull's weakness.