Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Home Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

When we look at the Australian national flag and we see the Southern Cross, it's a reminder of how unique our geography is and the distance we have enjoyed over the years from many of the ancient hatreds in the Middle East and even Europe. But yesterday was a dark day in Australian history because we realised that those hatreds had come right to our front door.

Iran has sponsored terrorist acts on our soil against Jewish Australians. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps conducted operational activities to firebomb a place of worship in Melbourne and to firebomb a business in Sydney. To focus on that would be to miss the larger frame of the last two years which has occurred under this Labor government, and that is that we have seen a crisis of antisemitism erupt in this country. We've had a series of appalling incidents of vandalism and public displays of support for terrorists. It's left many Australians very shocked and troubled by this but particularly Australians of Jewish heritage and faith, who feel under siege, who feel like their country is disappearing before them and who have always considered themselves Australians but are now being targeted by the government of Iran.

But it's not just public displays of antisemitism. We have seen crime and hate spread across many parts of our community. Our universities have been transformed into nurseries of hatred, where students chant, 'From the river to the sea'. The phrase 'from the river to the sea' is, I'm guessing, not something they understand all too well. It's drawn directly from the Hamas charter documents as recently as 2017. It means that Hamas wants to see the Jewish people extinguished from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. It's effectively a call to violent action.

We've seen a shocking campaign of terror across our country as cars and homes have been vandalised. We've even seen a childcare centre set alight and graffitied with antisemitic messages. Just last week, we saw a Hamas flag flown at a protest in Brisbane. It is shameful. People are tired of it, and, under this government, we've seen inaction. We've seen a lack of political leadership. We've seen a lack of moral clarity. We've seen taxpayer funds go on to extremist community organisations that undermine social cohesion. Labor gave more than $1.5 million in funding to a group whose employee called October 7th 'a day of courage' and vowed that Islam would dominate. We've seen Labor funnel taxpayer funds to prop up its vote. Eighty per cent of organisations that shared in Labor's $30 million package to support Palestinian Muslim communities were groups in Labor held seats. This is not the sort of thing that this government should be doing. They should be fostering social cohesion.

On this question of listing the IRGC, for the last 2 ½ years the coalition has called on the Albanese government to list the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. My good friend the member for Berowra made these calls in the House of Representatives as early as February 2023, stating that the opposition was ready and willing to work with the government on any legislative changes to amend the Criminal Code to see the listing occur. We called on the government 10 times in the last two years to make the listing. Senator Claire Chandler's Senate inquiry gathered compelling evidence from the Jewish community and the Persian community that the IRGC was operating as a terrorist organisation. I want to emphasise to the House what a fine line there is between bombing a synagogue and actually murdering people. We could have had a foreign government, through its military arm, murdering Australian citizens, effectively conducting assassinations against the Australian people. That's how significant this was. It's taken ASIO 10 months of painstaking work to get the government to a point where they can finally see the necessity of listing the IRGC as a terrorist organisation, and we'll do that as fast as humanly possible because we think it needs to be done.

Today, we're calling on the Labor government to start showing moral clarity. It shouldn't take an envoy with a report and its neglected recommendations to bring them to action. Australians out in the streets can see very clearly that we have a serious problem with antisemitism and that Australians of Jewish faith and heritage feel under siege. Their places of worship are being bombed. Their businesses are being firebombed. There's vandalism. There are calls on the street for them to be extinguished as a people. This government needs to— (Time expired)

See this speech in context