David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This motion is condemning the racist, white supremacist and anti-immigrant rallies held over the weekend and condemns the support of, and attendance at, the rallies by MPs. Do you know what those in the coalition are going to do? They are going to vote against it because they want to be in a position to platform Neo-Nazis as part of their general attack against multiculturalism. To watch them come in here and run cover for Neo-Nazis is a new low. To run cover for those MPs and senators who went to attend and spread hateful politics attacking multiculturalism and attacking migrants is equally low. But they'll do it, because that's their politics—that's where they come from. It's a shameful, shameful low that the coalition has fallen to in 2025.

But I think we should take a step back and work out who also has been giving cover for anti-immigrant, anti-asylum seeker and anti-refugee politics. It's the club—it's Labor and the coalition. The coalition has the bigger dog whistle, but who has actually been passing the nastier laws and been feeding the anti-immigrant, anti-asylum-seeker rhetoric? Well, in the last three years, it has been Labor passing laws that are the most vicious attack on multiculturalism this country has seen since we abolished the White Australia policy.

In the same week that they're up speaking about their support for multiculturalism and their opposition to racism, they're going to be trying to ram through this parliament laws that take away procedural justice rights for people seeking asylum. In the same weekend that they were condemning these rallies, they were out there pumping their secret deal with Nauru to deport people who have sought asylum—against their wills and contrary to the refugee convention with Nauru—and to dog-whistle about that themselves. I'll give you two quotes that happened this weekend. Here's quote A: 'We need to send them back—no debate, no discussion.' I'll give you quote B:

Anyone who doesn't have a valid visa should leave the country.

One of those quotes was given by a Neo-Nazi at a rally on the weekend and one of them was given by a Labor government minister on the weekend. The fact that you cannot tell one from the other shows where modern Labor has got to. It shows what they're willing to do: on the one hand, pretend to oppose the coalition but, on the other, drive the political debate that demonises asylum seekers and seeks to say—as they have time and time again in their public utterances—that people coming here to seek asylum are somehow inherently criminal. And they seek to say that people who are seeking relief in the High Court are inherently criminal, to try and to give themselves political cover for their appalling laws. Every time they do that, every time Labor ministers and Labor members come up here and seek to demonise people seeking asylum, seek to draw a false equivalence between seeking asylum and being a criminal, they give the coalition cover for their dog whistle and they give the hateful neo-Nazis who came out on the weekend another reason to beat up on multicultural Australia, beat up on people of colour. That is what Labor has done.

Government senators interjecting—