Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

Senator Pauline Hanson likes to present herself as a patriot, but here is the truth of the matter: she is no patriot. The truth is, she seeks to destroy Australian values. The truth is, Senator Hanson is one of the most anti-Australian political figures this country has ever produced.

One Nation is built on a hatred of modern Australia, and it is built on a hatred of our diversity as a country. It is built on a hatred of our multicultural success story. It's built on a hatred of the concept, the very idea, that people from different backgrounds, and different kinds of people, can live together in peace and mutual respect. One Nation despises the generosity, the resilience and the decency that ordinary Australians show each other every day.

For 30 years now, Senator Hanson has been the ugly voice of white resentment in Australian politics, forever searching for a new group to blame for all the challenges in our society. Migrants, Asians, Muslims, First Nations people, refugees, international students and, most recently, transgender people have all taken their turn in Senator Hanson's firing line.

Tellingly, for most of One Nation's history, almost every Australian has rejected them outright. Until a few years ago, the best One Nation could hope for when running for office was getting their deposit back, meaning the candidate—usually Senator Hanson herself—could make a tidy profit. That was because Australians saw right through Senator Hanson and One Nation. That was before dark money from international far-right organisations started pouring into culture-war politics in Australia. That was before billionaires from this very country, like Gina Rinehart, started pouring rivers of gold into One Nation's coffers. Before then, Senator Hanson was nothing more than a political sideshow. She ran unsuccessfully whenever she could, while One Nation repeatedly collapsed under the weight of its own clown-car incompetence.

What changed? Today, One Nation is a willing tool of international far-right organisations and an international dark operation that seeks to divide Australians and undermine our very democracy and the institutions that serve our country. For all the AI slop we see from One Nation, featuring Australian flags and laugh-emoji patriotism, One Nation puts Israel first, the United States and Donald Trump second, Senator Hanson herself third and the rest of us dead last. They are the emerging face of fascism in this country, and the Greens are here to fight them.

One Nation is not a serious political party. It has candidates and office-bearers that are white-collar criminals, multi-level marketing operators, sex offenders and barely disguised Nazis. It is grifters and chancers all the way down from the very top, and, despite all this, so much of our media continue to act as Hansonism's handmaidens. The Liberal Party are predictably trying and failing to outflank her on the right. What a fool's errand that is to try and outflank fascists to their right. I'm telling the Liberal Party and Mr Taylor now if you try and outflank them to the right that will just encourage them to descend further into fascism.

The Labor Party still imagines that Hansonism can be defeated with a spreadsheet and a press release. But I say to the Labor Party, do you really think that people who boo welcome to country ceremonies and want to kidnap family court judges are going to listen to you when you say, 'Actually, the migration number is going down'? Let me be really clear about this. The answer to fascism and the answer to a politics of hatred is not managerialism. It is not assimilation. The answer to fascism is moral clarity and a willingness to resist and fight at every turn. That, colleagues, is where the Greens come in, because we will fight against these politics. We will proudly defend a diverse, multicultural Australia and we will never stop calling Hansonism what it is—a billionaire and dark, international-money funded politics of division that seeks to succeed by encouraging Australians to hate and fear each other.

Nowhere, colleagues, is the poverty of Hansonism more obvious than its obsession with transgender Australians. Sadly, it is an obsession shared by too many members of the Liberal and National parties. Of all the challenges facing our country, of all the challenges facing everyday Australians as they go about their lives, Hansonism has chosen to dedicate an extraordinary amount of time to policing where a tiny minority of people end up going to the toilet. That's what this is about. What a sad, pathetic way that is for these Hansonites to spend their lives. Beneath all the slogans and manufactured outrage of transphobia lies a simple fact. The anti-trans movement is a group of people utterly devoid of empathy and utterly devoid of compassion. The central claim of the anti-trans movement is so absurd that it collapses the moment you say it out loud. We are expected to believe that someone would turn their entire life upside down; expose themselves to hatred, ridicule and abuse; risk estrangement from their loved ones, and become the target of relentless political attacks just so they can walk into a particular toilet or win a high school sporting trophy. That is nonsense. It is deeply harmful, and it is based on hatred and lies.

Transphobia is a movement that spends an extraordinary amount of time obsessing about other people's genitals, other people's bodies and other people's private lives, while accusing everyone else of being obsessed. It is a movement that presents itself as defending freedom, while demanding the right to scrutinise, judge, control and police other people's identities, other people's bodies and other people's lives. Well, most Australians are better than this. They understand that kindness costs nothing. Most Australians understand that somebody else's gender identity is none of their damned business. That is what this debate reveals. It reveals nothing about transgender Australians, and it reveals everything about transphobes and transphobia.

Hansonism is a politics so devoid of solutions, so bereft of hope and so bereft of compassion that it has convinced itself that the source of Australia's problems is a tiny group of people simply trying to live their lives and be who they are.

It's very instructive that last week Senator Hanson used the phrase 'transgender insurgency' at the Press Club. But the relevance, I suggest, is lost on her. An insurgency is actually a group that fights back against tyranny and fights back against an invading force. Given One Nation's reliance on imported culture wars and foreign money, they should be seen as the tyranny. They should be seen as the invading force. If Senator Hanson wants an insurgency, the Greens are here to give her one—an insurgency to fight fascism, an insurgency to fight corporate power, an insurgency to fight billionaires, to defend trans people, to defend multiculturalism and to defend human rights. An insurgency that fights and resists the poison and filth spewed by One Nation, that's what the Greens are here for. (Time expired)