Garth Hamilton (Groom, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to use this opportunity to address the comments Grace Tame made this week. In doing so, I want to acknowledge the Prime Minister's call for us not to politicise this, to have a very cold and calm conversation and, indeed, your direction, Mr Speaker, about how we talk on these things in this place. I think it's a really important conversation for us to have, and it's one that matters to me deeply. I spent the best part of 10 years of my life living in the Middle East, working in the Middle East. I have friends in Israel. I have friends right throughout Palestine and through Jordan. Mashal Ramadan I think of often in these situations. I think they'd be amazed at how much attention this conflict gets in Australia. I think they would be even more amazed to see how uneducated we are when we talk about it.

I arrived in Jeddah shortly after the end of the second intifada, and the scars of that conflict were felt right across the region. I remember having a young Syrian girl working for me who had scars on her shoulder. She wouldn't wear the full niqab because it was important for her to show her scars because that was part of her story of who she was. When she came into a Western office, she wasn't required to wear that and she was allowed to get away with that in that time. I remember just thinking, 'This is the bravest person I have ever met in my life,' because, as soon as she stepped outside of that office, Saudi religious police would force her to cover up. But it was important to her that people understood her story and understood what the intifada meant, what it did in her region and that this was not some happy Che-Guevara-wearing rebellion. This was a bloody, horrible, violent uprising where suicide bombers really came to the fore in Palestine—rocket attacks, gunfights in the streets. There were somewhere around 5,700 Palestinian victims. Over two-thirds of those were civilians. There are about a thousand Israeli victims; about 70 per cent of those were civilians. Many of these died in horrible circumstances.

I had one experience in my time in the Middle East of seeing the result of a suicide bombing. It was at the Al-Ahsa mosque on the eastern side of Saudi Arabia. I was driving to Bahrain to get my monthly stamp in and out, and, as I came back, I drove through the aftermath of a suicide bombing in this mosque. My memory is of black dust everywhere and intense sorrow and wailing as people were walking around, clearly trying to trying to get their bearings, having just walked out of a room that was blown up. There were blood, glass and bits of people across the road. No-one was celebrating. This wasn't something that you celebrate. These are horrible, horrible events.

That is what the intifada is. And I don't think Ms Tame understands that. I think this is a slogan. I wanted to raise this is because I had to raise this conversation with my own daughter, a 16-year-old girl, describing this, because it's not taught—the intifada is some cool word. It's the idea that there's some great struggle, and we're all going to be part of it, and it's great and it's happy. It's bloody horrible. These are real people, and they're butchered and murdered in horrible ways. For someone to call for that clearly rises to the level of incitement to violence under the New South Wales Crimes Act 1900. It clearly meets that threshold. This isn't just calling for someone to steal a loaf of bread because they're hungry. This isn't calling for someone to take out an act of white-collar justice. This is a call for the most gruesome butchery of people, exactly as we saw at Bondi, and it's about time we started to call this sort of stuff out.

It is right that the Prime Minister talked to us about depoliticising this, because this should not be a political issue. No-one should ever accept that that's a call to arms in Australia or that that's something that we should accept in our country. I think it is absolutely disgraceful. It should matter to us, and we should be informed on the issue.