Lisa Singh (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

Today, schoolchildren all across the country celebrate Harmony Day, a day I remember going to my own children's school and celebrating. It is a day when they recognise the different cultures in their school and their community, celebrated through picnics, food, dance and all the kinds of rich tapestry that living in a multicultural country gives us here in Australia.

Whilst those children, the next generation, are celebrating this day—Harmony Day, a day of belonging—little do they know that their government has chosen this day to put forward how it wants to weaken protections against race hate speech in our country. The very things they are celebrating—the right to live in harmony, the right to live peacefully amongst one another and the right to share and celebrate the differences amongst us—are being threatened by their government. Little do they know. Those children, if they had the right to vote at their age right now, I think that they would very clearly not vote for this government. They would not vote for a government that would take away the very essence of what it means to belong to a multicultural society and to recognise diversity as a strength and not as a weakness.

Senator Brandis said that the changes they are going to make to the protections we have against race hate speech are not a weakening or a watering down of them. He calls them a strengthening of them. Taking out three key verbs that are currently in our laws and replacing them with one—he says that is a strengthening. I do not know if that is straight out of the Trump fake news handbook or what, but that is clearly not true. It is not true. It is fake. It is a falsehood and it needs to be named as such. With the little time it appears that the Attorney-General has left in this place, with all the talk of him going to perhaps a posting or perhaps another position in his legal fraternity—I do not know—one would think that he would not want to be the Attorney-General that will go down in history as the Attorney-General who weakened our protections to race hate speech and who jeopardised that fantastic thing we have in Australian that we call multiculturalism.

It goes in the face of what the government announced yesterday with its multicultural statement. I acknowledge and give credit that it was a decent statement by this government, but it is a statement that was not worth the paper it was written on when the next day—Harmony Day—the government comes into the parliament to make clear its intentions to weaken protections against race hate in this country.

Who is happy about all of this? I do not know anyone that is happy about all of this. The only people I can see and understand to be happy about all of this are the very conservative members of the government: the Senator Abetzes of this world, the Senator Patersons of this world and the fringe dwellers like One Nation. They are the only people I can see who are happy out of this. Out of that, let's just have a look at them. They are conservatives who would not have a clue what it feels like to be in the position of Senator Malarndirri McCarthy and her family, or former Senator Nova Peris and her family. Why not actually represent those people? No, they do not care about those people.

They do not care about the people who actually needs these laws and the reason we had these laws put in place in the first place 20 years ago through, I would say, a decent amount of inquiry and reporting that took place in the parliament. No, they simply want to have the right—the right to what? I ask them: what is it that you want to say? What do you want to say to me? What do you want to say to former Senator Nova Peris? What do you want to say to Senator McCarthy? What do you want to say to Senator Dodson? What is it you want to say out there in the community to Aboriginal people, to people of Indian background, to people of Pakistani background, or to people of the many nations that make up this fantastic country of Australia? I ask them: what is it that you want to say? (Time expired)

Question agreed to.