Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I'm delighted to speak on the Right to Protest Bill 2025 put forward by the Australian Greens. I'm delighted that we're on broadcast while I do it, because the Australian people need to understand that (a) they already have the right to protest in Australia, and (b) let's call this bill what it really is. It's been put forward by the Australian Greens for this reason—to give legal cover to the Greens activist base.

For every small business listening in to this broadcast, these are the same groups who block highways, chain themselves to machinery, disrupt small businesses and—listen to this, mums and dads of Australia—even prevent emergency vehicles from getting through when they need to.

This bill has got nothing to do with the right to protest. Let me tell you what this bill does. We're going to go through a few of the clauses. When you go through the clauses you actually understand what this bill does. It is basically seeking to legislate the right to cause chaos. Senator Shoebridge says that this is an essential reset of the right-to-protest laws in Australia. It depends on what you mean by reset, doesn't it? I would have thought that the right to cause chaos and basically have a society based on anarchy is possibly not something that the Australian people will accept.

Let's have a look at the bill. To say that it's an absurd bill is an understatement. It is designed to take away safety and civility from our streets, in favour of the Greens' activist support base. Let's have a look at what the bill actually does. When you look at the bill, as opposed to listening to the comments of Senator Shoebridge, it is a one-clause bill of rights. Let's be very clear about what that does. The right is one that enshrines protest rights in a completely unfettered and unprecedented manner. It's never been done before in any international human rights instrument or in any legislative charter of rights. I want to read the definition in the bill. Once you read the definition in the bill, you basically know that you can only go downhill from there. This is what section 5 says:

In this Act:

protest includes the following:

(a) actions that are political in nature;

(b) actions that are disruptive, or that seek to be disruptive.

Again, for those listening in to the broadcast, this is what the Greens want to do. They basically want to give, by this bill, legal cover to their activist base—those same groups, as I said, who block highways and cause you inconvenience, chain themselves to machinery and disrupt small businesses. God help any small business—they don't need any more disruption; it's bad enough under the Albanese government.