Lidia Thorpe (Victoria, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I acknowledge that we're on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country, the sovereign custodians of the land, and sovereignty was never ceded to this colony.

I welcome strengthened gun laws, but, if we're serious about gun safety, accountability can't stop at just civilian firearms. Oversight, tracking and transparency must apply to all guns, including those issued to police, prison guards, security guards and defence personnel. I intend to move a second reading amendment in my name, which calls on this parliament to implement robust and nationally consistent oversight of firearms. The public has a right to know what firearms are imported into this country and who imports them, how they are stored and used and what happens to them at the end of their life cycle.

International evidence shows that firearms can and do move from police stockpiles to criminal markets when oversight is weak. Australia should be learning from that, not pretending it can't happen here. We already know that stolen firearms are the biggest source of illegal guns in this country and that most guns used in crime are stolen guns. A recent report by the Australia Institute shows that approximately 2,000 firearms, 2,000 guns, are stolen each year, averaging one every four hours. Recently, firearms were stolen from police in Townsville. We've also seen evidence presented in court cases that shows that weapons stolen from army facilities have been used to commit serious crimes, including murder and armed robbery. These are some of the few cases we know about, but there is no consistent public transparency about these incidents.

It has also been reported that a police issued firearm was allegedly used in the horrific domestic violence murders of Jesse Baird and Luke Davies, which raises serious questions about the management and oversight of police weapons. Police defence armouries remain largely opaque, which limits accountability and undermines our gun control framework. A national firearms register that excludes police weapons is incomplete. If the goal is public safety then transparency has to be universal. This also leads to the point that the armoury and strength of police in particular is used against the very people they are supposed to protect, whether it is violence against protests standing against genocides and war crimes or police deaths in custody.

A 2020 Deakin University study showed that, even though Australia has half the population size of the UK, it had more fatal shootings by police. Shame! Recently, there was the shooting of Kumanjayi Walker by Northern Territory police officer Zachary Rolfe in Yuendumu and also the shooting of 29-year-old Yamatji woman JC, who was shot using hollow-point bullets. The bullets explode in your body; that's what a hollow-point bullet is. That's what the police use in this country. These bullets explode in your body. These bullets have been banned in international warfare by the 1899 Hague declaration. This is why one of my amendments restricts law enforcement from importing hollow point bullets to use against civilians.

We know that globally purchases of militarised equipment are creating a new profitable market for defence contractors rather than really putting questions of public safety first. In 2023, a study led by Brown University's Associate Professor of Political Science Rob Blair studied a militarised crime intervention in Cali, Colombia, and found little evidence to support the idea that military policing reduces crime. Safety cannot be found through violent, colonial institutions, more police, more cops or more prisons, especially for First Nations people.

On the hate crimes bill—I cannot support this bill. Racism, including antisemitism, is a real and serious problem in this country. But this legislation does not represent a good faith effort to combat hate and racism. It seems designed to: suppress legitimate criticism of the State of Israel; restrict protests and political expression, especially on the topic of genocide; and create hierarchies of who deserves protection and who does not. This parliament must genuinely commit to protecting everyone from hate and racism, not selectively and not in ways that undermine fundamental rights or erase the foundational racism against my people.

Expanding hate crimes law for a select few protected attributes and excluding religion leaves communities who continue to be affected by rising hate, violence and vilification at risk. There has been—and you don't see this in the newspapers, especially the right-wing Murdoch media—a 2,297 per cent increase in Islamophobic incidents reported to the Islamic Council of Victoria in 2025 alone, a 2,297 per cent increase! A recent incident in Melbourne saw an imam and his wife attacked, driven off the road and threatened with stabbing. There were 33 Aboriginal deaths in custody just last year, and since the horrific attack at Bondi we have shamefully seen attempts to blame the actions of two violent extremist men on the entire anti-genocide movement and on Muslim and Arab communities more broadly. No-one's talking about the violence of men in this debate. These false and dangerous claims fuel the very racism and Islamophobia this parliament apparently wants to address. In the words of Jews Against the Occupation '48:

To conflate the speech and actions of people motivated by deeply held convictions on justice and universal rights with the speech and actions of people motivated by racist hatred is not only wrong but dangerous. (To do so because the interests of a foreign nation, communicated via politically-motivated lobby groups, coincide with the desire by the state to clamp down on the democratic rights of people in our own country is cynical in the extreme.)

All the while, more than a year after the National Anti-Racism Framework was handed down, this government has still not provided a formal response to getting rid of racism in this country at a national level. You have not even responded to the work of the Race Discrimination Commissioner. You say you want to fix the problem in this country. Believe me, hate arrived on these shores over 200 years ago. My people have been subjected to hate all of that time. You haven't provided anything back to the antidiscrimination commissioner, let alone committed to implementing any part of it, which says that everyone should do racism training in this place. We know that we have racists in this place who inform the legislation. Instead, we are presented with rushed legislation, with a deal done with the Liberals—the coalition—on the hate crimes, a deal done with the Greens on the guns, so the crossbench have no say in any of it. It was a deal done during late night meetings and conversations, and back room discussions, so it's stitched up. The human rights committee is meant to scrutinise legislation but it didn't even come to us, so you haven't even followed your own colonial procedures here, which you tell me to do all the time. You didn't even follow proper process.

So anyway, here we are, with rushed legislation that is very dangerous to everyday people out there, that dangerously expands state power, that is riddled with legislative inconsistencies and that undermines fundamental principles of the rule of law and due process. We don't have a bill of human rights in this country either, so human rights in this country are not protected—people's human rights! Despite removal of the racial vilification offence, the bill as a whole continues to pose a risk of discriminatory enforcement and disproportionate impact on Muslim people, Palestinians, First Peoples and other racialised or marginalised people. For example, it grants sweeping new authority to the Minister for Home Affairs to cancel or refuse visas with minimal safeguards. So the minister can just say, 'Yes, we heard what that one has been saying. Cancel his visa. Forget about the family, children, connection here. He can go.'

This is a government with a long record of cruelty towards migrants and refugees now using the language of antiracism to further undermine fairness, due process and accountability in our immigration system. This bill also treats religious instruction as a risk factor, lending legitimacy to Islamophobic public, political and media narratives that justify heightened scrutiny and over policing of Muslim communities. I see here the same white Australia policy that criminalised, killed and punished my people for practising culture, for gathering and for speaking our languages. If this parliament truly wants to confront hate, it must do so by addressing racism as a whole.

This is a racist country. Australia is a racist country, no doubt about it. But we're not addressing that here, are we? If this parliament wants to confront hate, it must do so by addressing racism, by protecting all communities and by defending democratic rights, including the right to protest and speak freely. Protest is important. Protest is part of democracy—peaceful protests. We've got nothing by standing silent and idle. Who are we waiting for to do it—the government? We have to protect protest. Anything less is not justice; it is shallow politics dressed up as protection. As Chelsea Watego says, it's another day in the colony.