Jana Stewart (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm a little bit out of breath. I ran from another meeting to get here. I was quite the sight, running across the courtyard in heels! On a more serious matter, I want to talk about community safety and confronting the environment in which hatred grows. Violence doesn't begin with a weapon. It begins with words. It begins with choosing to focus on what makes us different from each other rather than looking for our shared humanity. It begins with the normalisation of othering, the quiet everyday act of reducing a person to a single attribute, whether the colour of their skin, their faith or any other marker, and then assigning value or judgement on an entire group on that basis.

Racism grows when division is normalised. In the last week, we have seen distressing acts of racism reported by players of the Fitzroy Stars Football and Netball Club. We've seen Senator Hanson make abhorrent comments against Muslims. Her comments were outrageous, and they must not be normalised. Yet, just yesterday, the coalition refused to support the censure motion that named Senator Hanson explicitly.