Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the Minister for Multicultural Affairs for that address. She may be often quietly spoken, but this parliament has been a better place from the moment she stepped into it. I know from our many personal conversations—she is also a friend—just how much racial abuse she has put up with every day, be it in direct messages, on social media, threats to her office or even to her face. I thank you for your service and I thank you for being an inspiration for so many people in my community. Thank you.

The 50th anniversary of the Whitlam Labor government's Racial Discrimination Act was a moment worth reflecting on for our entire nation. One of the Whitlam Labor government's last major acts was the Racial Discrimination Act, having earlier in its term abolished the last vestiges of the old racist white Australia policy. The Racial Discrimination Act stood the test of time for 50 years. It sets the legal foundation for modern Australia as the proud multicultural nation that we know and love today. It was an attempt to legislate for human dignity and equality of all people regardless of race, ethnicity or origin.

I listened carefully this morning in the chamber to the speech of the shadow Attorney-General earlier. There were nice words and noble phrases but it was also a whitewashing of the history of this law. The truth is in 1975 numerous conservative politicians rallied against the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act. Contrary to this blurred historical vision and pretence that everyone embraced it in some kumbaya fest, the bill was hard-fought in the parliament then. The then backbencher John Howard stated, 'One does nothing towards reducing the incidence of racial tension by legislative coercion.' As we know from the 1980s, he has a lot of form on issues of race and migration. Some conservative MPs even tried to debate the third reading of the bill in April 1975 to protest its passage. But when the bill passed both houses of the parliament in June 1975, Australia was made a better nation. At the proclamation of the bill on 31 October 1975, 11 days before the dismissal of the Whitlam government, then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam described the aims of the act as to entrench new attitudes of tolerance and understanding in the hearts and minds of the people, saying the new act 'wrote it firmly into the legislation that Australia is in reality a multicultural nation, in which the linguistic and cultural heritage of the Aboriginal people and of peoples from all parts of the world can find an honoured place'.

The significance of the Racial Discrimination Act for modern Australia, or I could say multicultural Australia because modern Australia and multicultural Australia are the same thing, cannot be overstated. We are a better nation for the vision and courage of the Whitlam government. As has been said, of course the act has not cured all racial ills, no law can. A law cannot and does not seek to stop racist beliefs or determine what people think. This law focuses on behaviours and seeks to establish the legal and societal norms for how Australians relate to each other regardless of ethnicity, fostering mutual respect and social cohesion.

Now, an Australian, to me, is anyone committed to our country and our democratic institutions and to the principle of mutual respect for their fellow Australians, who are likely to be, or most certainly are, very, very different—be it their ethnicity, their identity or their beliefs. Overwhelmingly, I believe, Australians love and cherish our multicultural character. I love our multicultural nation. We see this in the research, in the Scanlon Foundation's work. We see it in the daily lives and the decency of the Australian people in schools, workplaces, sporting clubs and the community.

As I said, I love our country; I cherish our diversity. But still today the sad reality is there's a very small, loud—increasingly loud at the moment—minority who deny the basic reality of Australia as a multicultural nation or those who choose to play footsy with issues of race and migration. Some of them have long been here in this parliament—One Nation, of course, but not just in One Nation. Sadly, some are also amongst the opposition—not all of them, but too many.

We saw at the federal election, when Australians overwhelmingly rejected the politics of fear, division, discrimination and toxic negativity, that those leaders who operate in the echo chamber, pandering to their most extreme supporters, will fail. They failed nationally and they will always fail in our vibrant, diverse democracy. Real leaders cannot talk out both sides of their mouth. It's clear that the Liberals have still not yet learned the lesson of the last election. Some of them are trying; some very decent people are trying. But we saw it with Senator Price's comments relating to Indian Australians, for which she still refuses to apologise. We have, for decades, had a proudly non-discriminatory migration policy, and long may that continue.

The former opposition leader was never above a crack at groups of Australians if he saw a political advantage to try and divide Australia on issues of race—the Africans had a turn, Lebanese migrants 'shouldn't have come', Muslim Australians. There was the shameful failure to stand up for Australians of Chinese heritage experiencing shocking racism during COVID, including in my community. It's ultimately a matter for the Liberal Party of today—I don't say the 'modern Liberals'—to explain why they continue to get embroiled in a race to the bottom on issues of race and migration. Increasingly, it seems that some of them just don't love our country; they don't love the reality of modern, multicultural Australia.

As I said, this is not a new thing. In my first 12 months in parliament, back in 2016, I was bright eyed and bushy tailed, with ideas and things I wanted to do. I was stunned to discover, on arrival in Canberra, that the then government's main legislative priority—poor old Malcolm Turnbull had been dragged to the right by the IPA brigade, who'd come in; here he is, the member for Goldstein!—was to weaken the Racial Discrimination Act, to water down the protections of section 18C. That might have been a great, fun debate to have in Canberra, but the lesson I learned then was that leadership matters. The tone, the words and the propositions that political leaders put forward into the country impact daily life in the suburbs and communities. I saw it in my community, because, while that debate was raging, we saw a spike in public racism. We saw people abused on the bus, we saw hijabs ripped off, and we saw turbans ripped off, because of the debate on—as they said—the 'right to be a bigot'. I was incredibly proud of the thousands of people that we stood in front of when Labor stood with modern Australia, multicultural Australia in the Springvale town hall and right across the nation—including the Jewish community, most loudly and proudly—to stop the Liberals' attempts to weaken this law that today they say they love. I'm glad we did.

It's strange how the shadow Attorney-General this morning forgot to mention, amongst his fine prose, his steadfast advocacy to weaken the Racial Discrimination Act—the very law he claimed to support and embrace today. He gave multiple speeches in 2017 arguing to repeal section 18C and the protections against racist hate speech. I wonder if that remains his view. I wonder how many other Liberals will have the courage to come in here today to speak on the debate and state what they really think. I haven't seen anyone on the speaking list—maybe the member for Goldstein is here to speak. The question, though, in all of this debate and all of this footsy with weakening the law that they pretend to support today is that they've never actually said what racist things they think people should be able to say to each other that they can't say today—literally what? Be precise; be specific. They've never been clear on that. It might be an intellectual debate in the IPA. Maybe they could've drafted the law differently, but the fact is that it's stood the test of time.

When you unleash these debates, they have real world consequences in electorates like mine. That's just the truth of it. I ask the shadow Attorney-General if he still wants to water down section 18C of the act. Is that still the Liberals' policy? I also observe the sad irony that if the Liberals had their way in 2017 then the protections of section 18C would not have been available to the Jewish community, who brought a complaint with the AHRC in 2024 rightly calling out racist, antisemitic hate-preaching. The Federal Court upheld that case and said that the lectures were fundamentally racist and antisemitic, and offensive and insulting statements. This law would also not have been there to call out Senator Hanson's disgusting, racist remarks against a fellow senator, telling her 'to piss off back to Pakistan'—clearly a racist attack, as the Federal Court found. This 50th anniversary would be a great time for the Liberal Party of today to apologise for their carry-on and sustained attempts to weaken Australia's Racial Discrimination Act, and to promise never to try this again.

I will close on this: being diverse is not the same thing as being a successful multicultural country. We can all think of countries that are diverse but are not successful and not cohesive. Success requires legal foundations and norms which this act provides, amongst others. It requires investment, particularly to help people new to Australia to settle in and build their lives and build the nation, but it also requires leadership. It requires political leadership, it requires faith leadership, and it requires leaders from business communities and sporting clubs, but, perhaps most importantly, day in, day out, it requires the contributions of thousands of community leaders and multicultural communities who stand up for their communities and who speak up for these norms, and the overwhelming number of decent Australians who support our multicultural character.

See this speech in context