Senate debates

Wednesday, 28 September 2022

Statements by Senators

Australia

1:40 pm

Photo of Malcolm RobertsMalcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | | Hansard source

As we return home to our families this weekend, I am reminded of the reason many came to this chamber in the first place. We are here for our families, our children. With my first grandchild on the way, my role as a senator takes on new meaning, refreshed and clear. I stand in this place to build a future that will allow my grandchild to become all that she or he can be, irrespective of gender, sexuality, religion or skin colour. Australians should not be born into a world that is divided on the very things that have made Australia such a beautiful tapestry of humanity. I will not bow to those who are using skin colour to divide us.

I will not allow an ideology advanced in this chamber that every new Australian, including my grandchild, must have less so that the ruling elites can have more. I will not allow my grandchild to be born into an Australia where greed and evil subvert freedom. I will defend my unborn grandchild's right to life, and I will defend every Australian from the evil notion that, having ceased to be healthy, taking one's own life, which God gave us, is somehow noble.

To do anything else would be a betrayal of the oath of office that I took here with my hand on the Bible. In the last parliament, I was disappointed, deeply disappointed, when a group of leading senators, most of whom who took the oath of the Bible, voted against my motion against gendered language. Instead, these senators chose to defend an agenda that's meekly described as woke, but accurately described as neo-paganism. It is not inclusive to exclude the fundamental tenets of a civilized Christian society: mothers, fathers and family. I will not be told I have lost any battle I came here to rectify, for surely this means the next generation have lost before they are even born—if they are born. We have one flag. We are one community. We are one nation under God.