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

That's exactly right. You've got to be kidding me. I have to say that it's pretty offensive when their activist base stops emergency vehicles from getting through.

Let's be clear. That is what the Greens want to entrench as a fundamental right for all Australians—the right to take actions that are disruptive or seek to be disruptive. Let's have a look at the practical effect of that on the ground. For all of those in their workplace today, I can come to your workplace and disrupt you because I don't like your race or religion or because you're an ex-partner and I don't like the way you're raising my kids. That is actually a right that I would have under this bill. In the Greens' weird political-fantasy world, if this bill were to pass, this is what would happen: Australians would no longer have the right to be safe from crime and wouldn't have the right to live in accordance with their religious beliefs or to be educated in a faith based school. Guess what you would have? You would have the right to disrupt whoever you like. The fact that the Greens can even put forward a bill of this nature in the Australian Senate shows that, as a political party, they are not serious and they are certainly not credible.

That was only the definition. As I said, if you actually read through the bill, it only goes downhill from there. The bill pretends to have a couple of guardrails in section 9. This is how they define those guardrails: 'restrictions on right'. 'Guardrail', though, I have to say, is probably too strong a term to use. This is perhaps a better way to say it: a wobbly fence made of sticks. You and I might say, 'Well, okay, clearly a right to protest can't be at large.' Such a right could be abused.

Let's face it. The current right is abused by almost anyone with ill intent and puts at risk our public safety and national security or even, given this has occurred before, our public health.

But then, as we do in the Senate, we actually look to the detail of the bill. Looking at clause 9(1), guess what that actually does? It is a limitation on the ability to actually restrict the right. This is what the clause says: you can only have restrictions 'as are necessary in a democratic society in the interests of' those sorts of things. Then you go down to clause 9(2), and, again, the devil is always in the detail when the Australian Greens put forward a bill. It's a great title—a bit like Labor—but guess what? If you read the clauses, Australians will start to get very, very scared. This is what clause 9(2) says:

(a) a restriction is only necessary if it is intended to, and appropriately adapted to the goal of, addressing an unacceptable risk of harm related to a matter in paragraphs (1)(a) to (e); and

(b) an excessive penalty—

Get this, everybody. Let me go back to what the Greens are good at—the activist space and blocking highways, chaining themselves to machinery, disrupting small business and even preventing emergency vehicles from getting through. This is what the bill says:

(b) an excessive penalty is an unnecessary restriction regardless of whether the penalty is imposed for contravening a necessary restriction.

Quite frankly, I'm not even sure the grammar is actually correct in that clause.

But this is what it actually says: exposing someone to a penalty for going to a public place or a workplace or a hospital with the deliberate intent of disrupting that place, under this bill, is now a right you would have. We would be legislating, if this were to go through, the right to chaos and, as I said quite frankly, the right for society to dissolve into anarchy, which is probably a long-held wish of the Australian Greens. So you would now have that right, but the bill also says that you could never be exposed to an excessive penalty. You have to be kidding me!

It's not enough to take a completely reasonable position and say, 'I want this hospital or this school or this business or this street to function as intended for the benefit of society at large,' because in the Greens's weird, fantasy world this would actually be a restriction on a right to protest. There is no two ways about it. This bill has been brought forward because the Greens do not want—and this is where it's so dangerous—law-abiding citizens to go about their day. They do not want that. We have an arbitrary rule that something called an 'excessive penalty', whatever that means, is an unnecessary restriction. Under this bill, go ahead and cause as much chaos as you like, because guess what? If the bill were legislated, you could, and what's worse is that the court can't then impose upon you an unnecessary restriction of an excessive penalty. Honestly, you could not script this unless you actually lived in the Greens's weird, fantasy world.

But it actually gets worse, and I know that was already pretty bad. The real kicker is in clause 10. This is what clause 10 does, for everybody listening in, to a state or territory: clause 10 is an override of every state, territory or Commonwealth law that might seek to protect the community or provide essential services or guarantee the ordinary and rational functioning of civil society. Let me just read that out again, because most people would say, 'You're making things up.' No, it is actually there in writing in the bill that we currently have before the Senate. This is what clause 10 does: it is an override of every state, territory or Commonwealth law that might seek to protect the community or provide essential services or guarantee the ordinary and rational functioning of civil society. Clause 10 says that every such law, regardless of who passes it, has no effect if—you're going to love this—it contravenes the Greens's right to protest.

Let's look at the practical implication of that.