Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to speak about a couple of matters this evening. The Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Mr Keelty, made a speech a week or so ago at the South Australian Press Club in Adelaide which I thought should be more widely acknowledged and noted. He expressed concern about the potential impact on the security of our entire country if there was excessive ramping up of hysteria, anxiety, fear and vilification towards Muslim Australians. I questioned Mr Keelty about his speech and about some of his concerns last week at Senate estimates, and I would recommend his responses to people who are interested in ensuring that our nation is mature enough to debate difficult, complex and emotional issues without resorting to hysteria, exaggeration and feeding frenzies.

Mr Keelty used an example in his speech and he referred to it in his answers at Senate estimates. We were talking about a report a month or two ago that got widespread coverage in Australia—indeed, front-page coverage—alleging that al-Qaeda or Muslim extremists in the UK had planned an attack on the last Ashes cricket series in England. It was alleged that there was a threat against the Australian cricket team and the English cricket team during the Ashes series. Mr Keelty said:

Certainly we—

that is, the Australian Federal Police—

have no evidence of a threat against the Australian cricket team during the last Ashes series, nor have our UK counterparts. When you go back to the origins of the story, if I recall correctly, it was reported in one of the British tabloids and then merely repeated by the Australian media outlets.

It was more than repeated; it was built upon. It was shifted onto the front pages of at least some of our newspapers. We had stories running for a day or so about ‘major threat to our Ashes heroes in the UK’, ‘terrorist threat to cricketers’ and ‘Muslim extremists targeting our Aussie cricketers’. I am sure we can all recall those stories. I remind the Senate that Mr Keelty said the AFP and their UK counterparts had no evidence at all that there was any threat against the Australian cricket team. So, basically, Mr Keelty was saying that story did not seem to have much substance. Making it into a huge front-page scandal is not only inaccurate; it is potentially quite destructive and dangerous when these sorts of fear campaigns are being built up.

I asked a bit of a flippant question regarding whether Mr Keelty was aware that that original story had been corrected in any way by the newspapers concerned. I did not expect that it had been or that Mr Keelty was aware that it had been, but I did at least think: major front-page story; not much substance; they all stopped talking about it; fair enough. Yet, there I was yesterday in Brisbane reading the Sunday Mail, and what do I see but a story stating that an unprecedented security cordon will be thrown around the Gabba and other venues for this summer’s Ashes cricket series. According to the article, that particular action was requested:

... after revelations al-Qaeda had planned a gas attack on the team during last year’s Ashes series in England.

Despite the fact that the head of Australia’s Federal Police said that there was no evidence of any such attack or plan, that his UK counterparts had no evidence of any such plan and that that was quite clearly known—there was no follow-up and no substance to the stories a month or so ago—what we saw just yesterday in the Sunday Mail and perhaps other papers from the same stable, I do not know, was repeated as though it was total fact: ‘revelations al-Qaeda had planned a gas attack on the team during last year’s Ashes series in England’. That will no doubt now go down as being accepted fact that no longer needs to be qualified in any way, shape or form, despite the fact that not only does it need to be qualified but also it should not be mentioned at all because there is no evidence that there is any substance to it.

In those sorts of circumstances, is it any wonder that Muslim Australians get alienated, get frustrated and some of them get very angry about these sorts of stories? The stories make great media—there is no doubt about it. Everybody reacts to scares like that. Everybody can feel some anxiety about the thought. They just want to go along to the cricket. Maybe there will be a terrorist attack. Of course it is great story. But we have to think through what the wider ramifications are. If we are going to have this sort of coverage, we have to be able to do it responsibly.

In that context I would like to also take the opportunity to comment on the media coverage regarding the disgraceful comments by Sheikh al-Hilali from the mosque in Sydney. I condemn those comments, as many people did. But condemning the comments of an individual, even a person with the title of mufti, should not be used as an excuse to have a week-long feeding frenzy vilifying and attacking the entire Australian Muslim community—and that is basically what happened. If we cannot get to a circumstance where we can express appropriate concerns about completely inappropriate statements, whether they are by a mufti, a priest, a politician, a judge or anybody else, without then using them as an excuse to throw blanket smears over an entire community, then frankly we are not only showing ourselves to be immature as a nation but also really setting ourselves up for a very divided community and potential risks for the future—and that is what Commissioner Keelty was warning about.

I very much agree with Commissioner Keelty’s concerns. I do not always agree with everything he says, but this is the person who is charged more than most with having to ensure that some of these potential threats of terrorism or violence of all sorts from all sections of the community do not blossom and do not have fertile soil in which to grow. There is no better prospect for providing fertile soil for these things to grow than to have completely unfair and unreasonable commentary day after day. I criticised the comments as well—and I am certainly not saying that people should not have criticised those comments—but I am concerned that people took the opportunity to then go the extra step and say, ‘Here’s an opportunity for us under the cover of these inappropriate comments, these disgraceful comments, to have a free kick at all the Muslims—a free kick and a feeding frenzy day after day.’

It is simply not appropriate for the Prime Minister or, for that matter, people like Mr Rudd to be instructing Muslims in Australia and saying: ‘You must sack this person. You must do this. You should not do that.’ Imagine how it would go down if we had political leaders saying to the people of the Anglican synod, who recently balloted I think in Melbourne as to who would be their next head bishop, ‘You should not pick this person because he has unsound opinions about this; you should vote for this person,’ or they were lecturing the Catholics, saying, ‘You should get rid of George Pell.’ Some of us may think that is a good idea, but it is not a matter for us. If people within the Catholic Church want to make commentary about that, they can. It is certainly not a matter for us at the leadership level to be lecturing people of any religion about what they should be doing.

The other most frustrating aspect of this is that I know and I am fairly sure that the Prime Minister would know—if he does not, he should—that a lot of Muslims in the Australian community have not been happy for a long period of time about this person having the title of mufti. They are not happy about how it happened, they are not happy that he has it and they look for opportunities to address that. Maybe this situation has presented that. But one thing you can be sure of is that it will be a lot harder for them to do anything about it and to fix up some of those problems if they are perceived by their community and they perceive themselves as doing it because they were told to do it by politicians. Nobody likes doing stuff if they think they are doing it because they are being pressured by the media, politicians or anything else. If we genuinely want positive change, we should be voicing support for our Muslim community. We should be working with them outside of the glare of the feeding frenzies in the mainstream media. We should be working with them at the community level day after day, doing the sort of work, frankly, that Mr Keelty and plenty of other people in the police force do outside the glare of the media while working to create good relations. That is what politicians should start doing. (Time expired)