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

Democracy runs on persuasion, not on threats and coercion.

I take the minister's objection to me calling the Jacinta Allan Labor government in Victoria authoritarian. I would like the minister to come with me to regional Victoria, where they want to lock the gate against her officials who seek to take away their private property rights so that she, along with the Greens, can roll out their 100 per cent renewable dreams, trash the property values, destroy environmental ecosystems along the 240-kilometre transmission line corridor and destroy community cohesion as they pit family against family in the rollout of this project. The minister thinks he knows what authoritarianism looks like. Well, he doesn't. It looks like Jacinta Allan in Victoria—the same government that locked Victorians up during COVID, that arrested pregnant women for going for walks and that actually sought to destroy the social cohesion of our community in Victoria.

But then we go to protests against the Gillard government's carbon tax—an incredibly successful protest—or against the Labor Party's Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal, when truckies descended en masse from across the country to say this was a bad Labor government doing bad things to small businesses and the employment options across the country. And we sought to overturn that. And there were the 'never again' protests against antisemitism, which I would love to see Senator Shoebridge and the Greens senators join me in to march against antisemitism and actually put their feet to not just the pro-Palestinian movement, which does intimidate Jewish Australians from attending capital cities. The minister interrupted my comments about a Jewish man from Melbourne who, after the Adass synagogue bombing, spoke to me personally about being warned against taking his young family into the Melbourne CBD on the weekends because of Senator Shoebridge and his colleagues in the Greens taking to the streets to support Palestine and chanting antisemitic—