Ralph Babet (Victoria, United Australia Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a society, we are tolerating the intolerable, and it is destroying our once great country. Tolerance is an important virtue, but like any virtue it can be twisted and misused. When we tolerate what is wrong, when we call evil good and good evil, the problems it creates are immense. Tolerance is for people, not for bad ideas. When we tolerate bad ideas out of fear of offending someone, we become complicit in the harm that those ideas can cause.

Look around: there is so much that has become normalised simply because we have tolerated the intolerable. We have tolerated the sexualisation of children, dressing it up as inclusivity or education. We've tolerated a bloated government, where the majority of new jobs are taxpayer funded—that is not prosperity; that is dependency. We've tolerated things like drag for children; woke morning teas for soldiers; lectures on pronouns from people who wouldn't survive a week in the real world; and welcome to country ceremonies, which are a constant reminder that we are divided by race rather than united as Australians. We've tolerated the Chinese military harassing our servicemen, and our own government's inaction in response. We've tolerated mobs marching through our cities and shutting down our business districts, while Australians feel unsafe in their own streets. And we've tolerated a prime minister who promised us a $275 power price cut, which has now become the punchline of a national joke.

How did we get here? How did common sense become controversial? How did courage become so rare? It's time to stop apologising for common sense. It's time to stand up to speak plainly and to take our country back.