Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Obviously, the coalition won't be supporting this bill. However, I am a firm believer in the right to protest in a democracy. Throughout my life, I have participated in a lot of protests that I wish Senator Shoebridge had joined me in—Keep the Sheep protests where, outside this very parliament, farmers from Western Australia, sheep farmers from across the country, livestock transporters and those that support the agricultural industry sought to get Labor to overturn their ban on the live sheep export industry, which is cruelling the livelihoods of thousands of people, particularly in regional Western Australia.

The right to be heard, though, is not the right to hold everybody else hostage. And I really want to go to the view of the Greens in Victoria about the VicGrid project, which is rolling out across regional Victoria, where farmers are standing in solidarity against hundreds of 80-metre wind towers and transmission lines rolling out across their prime agricultural land—an authoritarian Labor government supported by the Greens in Victoria is taking away the right of these people to appeal decisions of government—to lock the gate against officials seeking to get these projects off the ground.

I'm also against protests which do hold other people hostage and impede their freedom of movement. I've spoken with Jewish communities in Australia, in particular in Melbourne after the Adass synagogue bombing, who told me that they were restricted—