Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I want to start by thanking the crossbench, the member for Goldstein and a number of members who will speak. The conversation about how we lower the temperature in what is happening in the community is not something that simply happened by reference to this MPI. I have taken personal phone calls from many members of the crossbench, knowing the nature of my community, and we've been trying to work out what we can do at different points to help lower the temperature and to acknowledge the very real grief—I don't think it's an exaggeration to use the word 'trauma'—that the people we each represent are experiencing. I want to advise the House but in particular to publicly acknowledge when those crossbench members have raised this with me it has helped member of my community when I have told them that they did. It has mattered, and I am deeply grateful for it.

I hope as part of where Australia is now at we can once and for all do away with the argument that somehow hate speech is part of freedom of speech. I have heard those debates in this chamber on and off for the best part of a decade. I remember when it was seriously argued that the right wasn't the right to protection from hate speech; the right was the right to be a bigot. It was put in a serious form by someone who, I might say, on many aspects of these sorts of issues actually had a really good reputation. This concept of freedom of speech as an article of faith is something that I do appreciate. If you live the life that I have lived and you only see it from your personal perspective, maybe you could get there. I have never been subject to hate speech. I will cop—as we all do—hatred, anger and bile for what we have done or for what someone thinks we might have done or might have said, but we never cop it for who we are. For so many Australians, that is their daily experience.

I also want to make sure—and this resolution and this opportunity for the parliament, I think, does it brilliantly—that we don't get into some world where somehow it is a competition about who is being the more picked on. If anyone is subject to any level of bigotry, that is not acceptable. We need to call it all out. I had one person ask me just the other day, very genuinely: 'When there is something that causes so much concern, such as, for example, Caulfield, why is it that the response is to refer to both antisemitism and Islamophobia given the concern there was publicly viewed very much as being about antisemitism? Does that mean you are somehow excusing the other?' No, it doesn't.

While we might live much of our lives observing what's happening in the community by what breaks in the media, the people we represent don't have to wait for a media story to be experiencing this. The big moments that make the papers that are horrific are a tiny subset of the constant drain of being harassed because you are in the school uniform of a Jewish school or having all the confidence in the world prior to 7 October and now saying, as one woman said to me not long ago, 'Right now, I won't go out without my husband.' That's because she wears a hijab. She knows that, the moment she gets outside of the immediate suburb she lives in, she will have people calling her a terrorist. Someone else wearing the keffiyeh, the Palestinian scarf, a schoolteacher I know very well, let me know three days ago that just walking through the streets she had food thrown at her along with abuse. None of this makes the papers. It's not necessarily because the papers are holding it back; most people don't report it. Most people just want it to go away. Most people just want to be able to live their lives. This is where our leadership roles in our communities can allow us to call it out, both when it's against the people we represent and when it's not. That consistency I hope provides a pathway, some level of solace and, in the tiniest way, some level of example.

I've addressed most of this in terms of members of parliament. I do want to say something to the media. I'm always wary because when you say something to the media it can blow things up in a worse way, but I do think something needs to be said. Please, just be wary of magnifying an offensive voice that is already a complete fringe marginal voice and pretending it is somehow representative. I know that this is being done in an area close to me with some hate speech. It has been presented as though it's somehow representative of the Islamic community. If you go to the person's social media feed, you see that most of their posts are actually an attack on the leadership of the Islamic community. They're a complete fringe group that have never had anything like the publicity they've had in the last week. I worry what that impact will end up being. I know similarly that there are some groups that present as representing the Jewish community in Australia. In terms of membership, I am told they are nowhere near as representative as you would think. Understandably, journalists sometimes go to where it's quickest to get a quote when they're putting a story together.

In Australia the vast majority of people who are deeply affected by their personal relationships to the region have I think two things in common. The first thing they have in common is that they are experiencing not just grief but trauma right now. Think of the grief that any of us feel when we hear that a family member has passed away. Imagine that sort of grief and trauma being presented to you graphically multiple times a day on your phone. That's happening and that is putting people on edge. The second thing people have in common is that they deeply want Australia to work. They deeply want our relationships with each other to be good and positive. We have a real role in making sure that that happens.

The concept that abuse is just words is not true. And some of it is being done by members of parliament. The worst examples are by members of parliament in the other place, not in this one. These debates tend to bring out the best and the worst of what leaders are capable of. I met today with one of the rabbis who walked with me in Lakemba a few years ago in the Walk for Respect. It was a wonderful conversation of hope. It feels in so many ways like we have gone backwards. For people's ordinary experience of what it is to live in Australia we have gone backwards in the last month in a big way for a lot of people. I want those people in some small way to know by this debate that there is a core of people who in fact do represent the communities most directly affected, who hear you, who respect you, who call out the hate speech against you, no matter where it comes from, and who dearly want you to feel as safe in Australia as we do.

See this speech in context