Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Link to this | 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)

Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources and Northern Australia) | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, we know that Australia is a country of people who work hard, not just for themselves but for their families. Australians work hard to build a better life for themselves, for their children, for their communities. This is the country that we know and we love. Aspiration has always been an important part of the Australian way. It has been the reason why so many people over generations have chosen to come to Australia to live. It's something that we celebrate in North Queensland—the different cultures and peoples who have come to this country but are united in a desire to be a part of a common culture, the Australian culture, where, when you work hard and you're fair, you are accepted and part of a greater Australian community.

But under this government we have never seen such an attack on the Australian way of life, the Australian standard of living, indeed everything about that common culture that Australians love and value. The dirty deal done this week with the Greens party is nothing short of a complete sell-out. The Prime Minister said 50 times that there would not be changes to negative gearing, there would not be changes to the capital gains tax, there would not be death duties and there would not be changes to testamentary trusts and yet that is exactly what was announced in this budget.

This is another of Labor's lies. This is not lower power prices. This is not securing a reliable, predictable economy. This is change to CGT, to the very robust, agile economic environment that we have not only to allow mum-and-dad investors to invest in startups, tech companies, but also to junior miners and explorers, to innovative farming businesses, to businesses of every type and location. All of Labor's budget announcements go to the heart of attacking those things. What have they had to do? Well, they've watched the backlash across Australia, as Australians say, 'No, we did not vote for this.' In fact, at the 2019 election, they rejected Bill Shorten's campaign on exactly these kinds of issues. So it has taken us until 2026 for Labor to sneak these announcements back in despite having no approval from the Australian people to do it. And what's it resulted in? Four years of a Labor government has resulted in out of control inflation. I mean, Labor would have you say that they inherited a higher cost of inflation than now. But to be clear, they are taking a point in time, a spike, following the lockdowns in Victoria and New South Wales, a very short point in time. In fact, on average, under the coalition, inflation in Australia was half of what it is now under Labor.

Now, inflation is a tricky thing. Most people don't really understand what inflation means for them but it means three things that we all care about passionately. Inflation means that prices for every single thing that you do are higher. The price of food on the shelf is higher. The price of clothes in the store is higher. The cost of rent is higher. It is the government's job to manage inflation, to not have out of control spending. But that is a hallmark of this Labor government. Indeed, the amount of money that this Labor government is spending is nearly double what it was under the coalition prior to COVID. This is extraordinary. It is that out-of-control spending that has created higher inflation in Australia than in comparable G7 countries.

The RBA's singular job is to keep inflation under control, so the government has given the RBA no choice but to increase interest rates. So Australians who are struggling with their mortgage and the price they pay to keep their home have some of the highest interest rates in the world. There have been 15 interest rate rises under Labor. The government's out-of-control spending means you pay more for every single thing that you buy and you pay higher mortgage rates. The third thing it leads to is higher taxes, which is, of course, what Labor has just delivered under this latest budget, because they're out of control spending means that, once they've spent all of their money, they're coming after yours.

We have seen massive increases in insurance of over 40 per cent; in gas, 40 per cent; in electricity, 37 per cent; in rent, 20 per cent; in education, 20 per cent; in food prices, 17 per cent; and, in health costs, 17 per cent. We have seen the biggest collapse in living standards in the developed world right here in Australia. If Australians think they're worse off, they are. But they're worse off because of this Albanese Labor government's policies and out-of-control spending and inability to cut that spending. What are we left with? We're left with higher interest rates, higher prices and now higher taxes. Labor lectures us about intergenerational inequality, but it is delivering higher government debt to future generations because of its inability to manage its own budget.

The message to young Australians is that, under Labor, aspiration and building something for your family are bad. That's what Labor is telling Australians. What Labor is telling Australians is that they should expect less from whatever their parents or their family may have left to them. A family home, death taxes, is well on this government's agenda. The government has taken none of the risks that young business people and old business people take and none of the risk that investors take to establish new mining ventures, new tech companies and new ag businesses. The government has taken none of that risk and yet wants to take 40 per cent of the reward.

Regional Australia is really copying it, though. Regional Australia has just seen a smashing of the sort of financing and support that we receive post-disaster. In fact, Queensland has led the way on moving to a betterment model, making sure that every flood is handled better than the last, that Australians, that Queenslanders, have better results. But, under this Labor government, they have slashed funding to support states following disasters. They have also slashed funding to Disaster Relief Australia. These are the 7½ thousand volunteers who turn up for months at a time to help Australians at their greatest time of need. Every day, Australians—farmers, tradies, small businesses—in regional Australia are worse off thanks to this Labor government.

The small-business carve-out that the government is talking about in the budget is another con. Nine out of 10 small businesses are worse off under Labor. Canberra is going to decide who's innovative. If that is not the greatest hypocrisy you have ever heard—to have bureaucrats and government departments deciding what innovation and tech is—I don't know what else could be. This is an attack on our productive industries, on mining and on resources. Confidence has been undermined, investment has been discouraged and projects have been delayed. We know that, under the coalition, we will restore Australians' living standards. We will protect Australians' way of life because the coalition backs Australians.