Amanda Stoker (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

What a great opportunity this is to deal with some of the rubbish we have had served up in the last two question times. I'm going to start by taking some of the points that have been served up in the warm slop that has just been provided by Senator Watt. Not once but twice he has taken the statement I made yesterday, quoted it out of context, twisted it, and cut and pasted it somewhere else, so I'm going to help him out. I'm going to provide the words I supplied in context, because in context they make a whole lot more sense than the nonsense that's been spurted by those people on the other side.

Let's get in there. It goes a bit like this. If we're doing our job properly as politicians, we will talk to people from all walks of life every day and we won't agree with them all. Trying to shame into silence anyone who would speak to a person who is wrong on an issue damages our capacity to have a constructive democracy. When we're confronted with people with whom we disagree, the answer isn't to pretend that you're too good to walk into a room with them. The answer isn't to carry on, virtue-signal and make out you are as nice as pie—so good that you wouldn't even walk near these people. Instead, the answer is to engage with people who have wrong-headed ideas. The answer is to talk to them about why their view is wrong and why it should shift. To do anything less than this means inhabiting an echo chamber of people who all think exactly the same way. You know what? That explains a lot about the Labor Party: they only talk to themselves. That's why they think that you can't even walk into a room unless you have checked out the backgrounds of every single person who's in the room to see whether they have the same preconceived ideas that you do.

You know what, let's get to the direct quote that they have taken out of context. I said, 'Their ideas, their deplatforming nonsense means that you couldn't walk into a room without doing background checks on everyone in it. That's stupid, impractical and harmful for a civil society.' That's what I said. I didn't say it was stupid and impractical to condemn bad beliefs. I think the views of Mr Kassam are stupid, childish and wrong. But there's a very, very big difference between a person, who is an ex-Muslim man who is now an atheist—part of the same ethnic minority—who has now made a decision that he opposes radical Islam and when he talks about it he's talking about his own experiences. He is a man from the very same ethnic minority criticising the group with which he was raised.

The views of Labor here are, in fact, actually rather bigoted. Why should some faiths, some ideas, be immune from the ordinary battle of ideas? The ability to take each other on, think about what they've got to say and let the good ideas rise to the top. This should not be a strange thing. You know what, they're going to make out they're perfect and pure, that they never hang out with people who do anything wrong. We all know the people that Senator Keneally hangs out with have a fabulous record on corruption. We know that Senator Wong likes to hang out with a bloke by the name of Benjamin Law, who quite happily talks about how he would like to hate F U C K my parliamentary colleague Mr Hastie—