Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, where was the concern for minorities at the time of the Tampa? Where is the concern for David Hicks and his family? Where is the concern for the West Papuans? Where is the concern for oppression and illness in Indigenous communities? It is not borne out in budgets, it is not borne out in actions, but today we hear the coalition standing up and supposedly having this great concern for minorities in Australia. I would add to that: where is the concern for the gay, lesbian, transgender and intersex community in Australia? I do not hear anyone standing up for that minority, either. That is the heart of where we are in this debate.

I would hope that the Australian community would ask themselves: why is it that Senator Brown and the Australian Greens are asking for a Senate investigation into this sect when they have spent their entire political career defending minorities, defending religious rights and standing up for people? Could it just be that there is a case to answer? That is the point that I am coming to today. What we are asking for in this motion is an investigation and we have had, as Senator Brown pointed out and I am not going to reiterate, numerous letters and emails from people who have been excommunicated and divided from their families for the rest of their lives for the crime of leaving a religious organisation. But I am not going to go into that because we have endless evidence of that.

I want to tell you about a situation when I was teaching in north-west Tasmania at a time of very poor retention rates to years 11 and 12. I spent my teaching career encouraging young girls and boys to go on to higher education. There was a complaint made to the principal. I was called in and told that a complaint had been made because I had been encouraging one of the grade 10 girls to go on to a higher education—to years 11 and 12. I was told that her parents were offended, that her religion said that she would leave school at grade 10, work in a shop owned by the family or the community’s business, that the marriage would be arranged and that I should mind my own business and stop encouraging this young girl to go on to higher education. I have been really concerned about that going on around Australia and to this day women who marry in the Exclusive Brethren sect are not allowed to work. Girls—or boys either, for that matter—are not allowed to go on to higher education.

This is happening in a Western democracy like ours where the Convention on the Rights of the Child says very clearly that young people have a right to achieve their full potential and goes on to talk about equality in education and so on. That just is not happening. That is not what I am going to focus on mainly today either. That is my personal experience of this sect. I can tell you the children at that high school had a very difficult time because they were not allowed to eat with other students, with the ‘worldlies’. They were not allowed to be part of the school community.

Today I want to address the issue of political activity. You are quite wrong to misrepresent the Greens’ concern. We welcome everybody’s involvement in politics. Participatory democracy is one of the four fundamental platforms of the Greens. What we do not support is people entering into election campaigns and remaining anonymous and, as they describe it themselves, ‘flying beneath the radar and affecting the outcome of elections’. That is why we have electoral disclosure laws. They are based on the principle that people who fund political parties, political advertising and so on ought to be upfront about it so that people know where that perspective is coming from. That is the point I make. Throughout this entire debate, every single time an Exclusive Brethren advertisement appears in the paper, the excuse is constantly, ‘This is an individual act. It has nothing to do with the church. It is just that as an individual in Scottsdale I woke up one day and decided to put an ad in the paper. The fact that it is exactly the same in content as a whole lot of ads is just a spontaneous thing.’ That happened in the last election.

It goes further than that, to connections with the Liberal Party. I think the Australian people would appreciate a bit of honesty here. At the last election, we had ads authorised by people from the Exclusive Brethren community saying, ‘We are happy, John. John Howard provides.’ Then we had the anti-Green ads, ‘Why the grass won’t be greener.’ In my own case in Tasmania, a pamphlet was distributed everywhere and there was no upfront declaration to the electoral office, but now there will be a disclosure to the electoral office about the funding of that advertisement, entirely appropriately under the law. Now we have a situation where the government has changed the electoral disclosure laws so that it will be virtually impossible for people in the Australian community to find out who is writing the ads, placing the ads and paying for the ads.

As my colleague Damien Mantach admitted in the Tasmania election, the Liberal Party in New South Wales had met with the Exclusive Brethren and the advertisements in New South Wales were almost identical to the Liberal Party ads in South Australia—funny thing that. They had exactly the same wording and font as the Liberal Party ads, even though they were supposedly placed by individuals. What is the connection?