Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

Sunday changed Australia. It stirred the people. The people are waking because Australia is dying. We can feel it. It's dying at the hands of Labor and the Greens. Sunday terrified you—it absolutely terrified you—because the people woke up. Sunday changed the whole nation. What you have done now is change the whole motion. I will read Senator Hanson's motion:

The need for the Senate to take immediate action to make it an offence to wilfully burn or desecrate the Australian National Flag.

That has been changed under bastardry by the Labor and Greens parties to:

The need for the Senate to recognise that Australia is a nation that welcomes different races, religions and views and today is home to the oldest continuous culture on the planet—

we agree with that—

and to people from more than 300 ancestries. The Australian National Flag, and the other national flags, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, represent our shared values and our rich history and any actions to desecrate these flags should be condemned.

Rubbish! We have one national flag. I will tell you what Google says about the Aboriginal flag—'It was proclaimed as an official flag of Australia but is not the primary national flag.' It is not a national flag. You don't even know that. That's disgraceful. You don't even know. You said 'the other national flags'. How is the Aboriginal flag a national flag when it doesn't cover the whole of the country, when it doesn't cover the Torres Strait Islands? How is the Torres Strait Islander flag—good people in the Torres Strait; Aboriginals are fine people—a national flag when the flag of the Torres Strait Islands does not cover the whole of the country? These are not national flags. I cannot support this Labor-Greens bastardisation of an amendment.