David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In the last sitting period we saw the Senate at its best, uniting to pass a motion in solidarity on the atrocities in Sudan, forcing the government back to the drawing board on a bad defence honours bill that they had done absolutely no consultation on and using the Senate's powers to force the government to come clean on a jobs-for-mates report that they've been sitting on for two years. By contrast, yesterday we saw the Senate at its worst. Rather than being a house of review, it became a house of theatre, home to a cheap political stunt designed to sow division and disrespect people of the Muslim faith. We need to be able to have hard conversations in this place, but we need to be able to have them respectfully. Without that, all we do is put people in our communities at risk.

In May this year, right here in Canberra, we saw a cowardly Islamophobic attack on one of our Muslim community leaders, Diana Abdel-Rahman. This was a violent, racially motivated, unprovoked assault in Civic, and this is the type of real-life consequences that come from the kinds of actions that we saw here in the Senate yesterday. It's not just people in our community; it's those who've been elected to represent them. I want to call out the heinous death threats that have been made against colleagues in this place and the other place, specifically against Senator Fatima Payman, Senator Lidia Thorpe and the member for Wentworth, Allegra Spender. This is totally unacceptable. We need to call it out, and it needs to stop. I pledge my solidarity with and support for my colleagues and those in our community suffering such unacceptable persecution. We need to do better as a country.