Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Abetz looks at the gallery, and I do too. And I ask: where is the Elect Vessel, Mr Bruce Hale? And I say this: let him come out and debate this with me. Let the Elect Vessel—this St Paul of 2006, this hugely rich man who pulls the strings and organises the political input, the deprivation of children of education and the deprivation of the right of people to marry this way or that—debate that with me in public. The majority in the Senate is going to fail them, but I will not. I put that challenge to the Elect Vessel: come out and debate it.

Democrat Senator Bartlett said that he has criticised Archbishop Pell. I will tell you the difference between Archbishop Pell and the Elect Vessel Bruce Hales: Archbishop Pell comes out in public and talks about his beliefs, defends them and stands up for them. When he goes to see the Prime Minister, everybody knows about it. It is not the same with Bruce Hales. Nobody can find him. The press cannot get to him. He is enormously protected, but it is fundamental to the health of our society that we have a person as powerful as this in our midst—this multimillionaire controlling massive amounts of money moving around the planet—held accountable in a democracy. To not foster that, to not insist upon it, to not look at it and to put the blinkers on and say, ‘Well, we won’t investigate that at all,’ is to fail our responsibility in this Senate to always uphold the tenets of democracy by understanding that in our community there are people who would abolish democracy as we have it. They would abolish the right to vote for everybody—not just for their own members but for every Australian.

They have already abolished the right for children to go to tertiary education, and if they could they would extend that to everybody. They have abolished the rights of women, who cannot speak up in their community and who cannot have any job which would have men in their service in that community—very much like the mullahs of Iran. Is that something that we should not debate? Is that something that is not open to the light of scrutiny? By not having this Senate inquiry, the darkness in which this sort of attack on our democracy and fundamentals grows, expands, gets greater.

The Exclusive Brethren decided to tackle the Greens. We decided to look back and see who they are. What you find are closed doors everywhere. You find a lot to worry about, but you find closed doors everywhere. We think those doors should be opened. That is what this motion is about. Senator Abetz, fulminating with his objectionable, distasteful and abominable references to Nazism, says: ‘I won’t open that door. I don’t believe people should know about it.’ We do not accept that. We believe that, for the health of democracy, we should be involved here in opening it up to the gaze of public scrutiny. (Time expired)

Question put:

That the motion (That the motion (Senator Bob Brown’s) be agreed to.) be agreed to.