Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I take note of the government's response to order for the production of documents No. 592, which relates to visas issued to Palestinians. We know why the opposition is pursuing this, and that's because the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Dutton, and his colleagues in the Liberal and National parties intend to make race a central theme of their election campaign. Of course, that is going to be extremely harmful and hurtful to millions of Australians who identify as something other than Anglo, who have black or brown skin, who come from non-Anglo cultures. It's going to be a really difficult 12 months for those people, because, whether or not they're ready for it—and many of them aren't—this is going to be an election campaign where the opposition parties seek to place race and culture at the centre of their campaign.

What we are going to see is more of this manufactured outrage that we've seen from Mr Dutton. For example, he raised the issue of these so-called Sudanese gangs who were, apparently, according to him, prowling the streets of Melbourne, making it unsafe for people to go out for dinner. Even when Victoria Police came out and said, 'There are no Sudanese gangs in Melbourne,' that didn't dissuade Mr Dutton from his harmful and hurtful race based agenda. Of course, we know what Mr Dutton has built political career on. He has built his political career on demonising people from other cultures and people with non-white skin colours.

I made visits to Manus Island, and I acknowledge my friend and colleague Senator Hanson-Young here, who visited Nauru. Both of us went over there to have a look at the offshore prisons that Australia established in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. I know from my observations in the Lombrum detention centre on Manus Island how many white-skinned people there were incarcerated over there: absolutely none. That was, in effect, a racist detention system established by the opposition, contrary to our commitments to the refugee convention, which we were and are a signatory to, because of course that convention does not permit signatories to discriminate against people based on their mode of arrival in a country. Of course, what Australia's laws did and still do, shamefully, is discriminate against people based on the fact that they arrived here by boat, not my plane—a clear contravention of the refugee convention.

This order for the production of documents relates to advice provided by the Department of Home Affairs to the former Minister for Home Affairs, Ms O'Neil, and the former Minister for Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, Mr Giles, relating to the issuance of visas to Palestinians in response to the Israel-Hamas conflict. I just want to say a few words about what is actually going on in Gaza at the moment. The Gaza ministry of health has just released a 649-page report, and that report has the name, age, gender and ID number of every Palestinian killed in Gaza from 7 October to 31 August this year. Brace yourselves, colleagues, because I'm going to tell you something really tragic and so profoundly distressing. The first 14 pages of that report are people between the ages of zero and one who are dead. The first 14 pages are the babies who've been slaughtered by the government of the State of Israel. They are the innocents who are dead in a genocide. There are 14 pages of them—their names, their ages, their ID numbers—tiny children who never even made it to their first birthday because of a genocide that Australia is complicit in, that Labor is complicit in. That is because we are still exporting weapons components to the State of Israel, including a weapons component that actually opens the bomb doors on the F35 jets that are dropping the bombs that are killing these babies. How does it feel to be complicit in a genocide? That's a question that Labor needs to ask itself. It's also a question that the opposition needs to ask itself.

Remember that motion that came into this place shortly after October 7 last year that still remains—the motion that said, 'We stand with Israel,' the motion that the Australian Greens tried to amend to take out those words but were unsuccessful at doing so. 'We stand with Israel,' says that motion. We didn't support that motion because we didn't stand with Israel then, and we don't stand with Israel now. But the Labor and Liberal parties do. I say to them: How can you continue to be complicit in a genocide that has slaughtered tens of thousands of people? How can you be complicit in a genocide that has killed 14 pages worth of babies who never made it to their first birthday? How can you be complicit by providing weapons components and military components to the government that is carrying out a genocide like we're seeing in Gaza? It is profoundly distressing. It is utterly, utterly tragic. And here we are today. The Greens have fought for this parliament to take a more balanced position. We have fought for the government to end its complicity in this genocide. We have fought for Labor to cancel those export permits that relate to military hardware that's being used by the State of Israel in a genocide. And we'll keep fighting. Don't worry about that; we will keep fighting for those things. But the Australian people need to understand that, when the two establishment political groupings in this place get together and share complicity in a genocide, and when the two establishment political parties just become harder and harder to tell apart on this issue and a range of other issues, change is possible in a democracy, but you can't keep voting for the same old rubbish and expect to get something different.

If you want change, you have to vote for it. If you want to put people in this place who will fight against a genocide, as the Australian Greens have done and are doing and will continue to do, you've got to vote for us to get in here, because voting for the establishment parties is just going to deliver more of the same. It's going to deliver more motions through this place that say that, collectively, we stand with Israel, when in fact the Australian Greens did not at the time and have not done between then and us having this debate—and we're still not going to stand with Israel until they end the genocide and end the illegal occupation. Those are the things that the Australian Greens stand for. We stand for an end to the tragic, awful, profoundly distressing genocide in Gaza.