Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Four hundred and seventy days ago, the Race Discrimination Commissioner launched the national antiracism framework, a road map for building a genuinely antiracist country grounded in First Nations truth-telling and justice. But 16 months later this is still gathering dust on some government shelf—no response, no action, no funding, not even a peep about this framework.

Racism in this country is more open, more vicious and more dangerous than I have ever seen. This month a white-supremacist terrorist was arrested after planning attacks on mosques across Perth. In January another white-supremacist threw a bomb into a crowd of First Nations people and allies. Mosques and Islamic schools are receiving increasingly violent threats. Overnight we learned of another attack on an iftar in Ballarat. Across this country migrants are abused and attacked. We saw the Bondi terrorist attack recently. This hatred is not confined to the fringes. Report after report documents the depth and spread of racism across our schools, our universities, our workplaces and our institutions. These are not isolated incidents. They are symptoms of a system that has allowed racism to rot and fester.

The framework acknowledges structural racism which operates alongside other systems of oppression. Its 63 recommendations called for action across sectors and institutions and for the embedding of antiracism work into and across government policy. The solutions are written plainly in black and white, yet Labor refuses to even respond let alone take any action. Perhaps that is because the problem is not only on the streets. It is also right here within these walls.

I tried today to move a motion marking the seventh anniversary of the Christchurch Mosque massacre, where 51 Muslims were murdered by an Australian white-supremacist. I asked the Senate to acknowledge rising Islamophobia. Instead, the minister stood up, attacked the Greens and whitesplained racism and Islamophobia to a brown Muslim migrant woman. This is where Labor is at. Labor and the coalition, just like One Nation, voted against the motion, and hearing Senator Blyth today you can understand why. The coalition has zero understanding of what racism is. Surely, they must live in another Australia to the one that we live in today. When you vote against confronting Islamophobia and you refuse to fund a framework that charts a path towards eliminating racism, you are the problem.