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representatives vote 2023-03-22#1
Edited by
mackay staff
on
2023-04-14 11:05:21
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Title
Business — Consideration of Legislation- Business - Consideration of Legislation - Don't change day's order for MP of Berowra's bill
Description
<p class="speaker">Peter Dutton</p><p>I seek leave to move the following motion:</p>-
- The majority voted in favour of *disagreeing* with a [motion](https://www.openaustralia.org.au/debates/?id=2023-03-22.12.2) to suspend the usual procedural rules - known as [standing orders](https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/how-parliament-works/parliament-at-work/standing-orders/) - in order to let another vote take place. This means that second vote will not take place.
- ### Motion text
- > *That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the following from occurring immediately:*
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- > *(1) the Member for Berowra presenting a Bill for an Act to amend the Criminal Code Act 1995, and for related purposes;*
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- > *(2) debate on the second reading of the bill proceeding immediately for a period of no longer than one hour; and*
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- > *(3) any questions required to complete the passage of the bill then being put without delay.*
<p class="italic">That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the following from occurring immediately:</p><p class="italic">(1) the Member for Berowra presenting a Bill for an Act to amend the Criminal Code Act 1995, and for related purposes;</p><p class="italic">(2) debate on the second reading of the bill proceeding immediately for a period of no longer than one hour; and</p><p class="italic">(3) any questions required to complete the passage of the bill then being put without delay.</p><p>Leave not granted.</p><p>I move:</p><p class="italic">That so much of the standing and sessional orders be suspended as would prevent the following from occurring immediately:</p><p class="italic">(1) the Member for Berowra presenting a Bill for an Act to amend the Criminal Code Act 1995, and for related purposes;</p><p class="italic">(2) debate on the second reading of the bill proceeding immediately for a period of no longer than one hour; and</p><p class="italic">(3) any questions required to complete the passage of the bill then being put without delay.</p><p>I rise today to support the suspension motion that will allow the member for Berowra to introduce a bill to amend the Criminal Code Act of 1995. The coalition is seeking to have the Criminal Code amended to prohibit the display of Nazi symbols. Nazi symbols are, of course, associated with one of the most heinous regimes in history. Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany carried out the deliberate, calculated and organised mass murder of six million European Jews as well as five million prisoners of war and other victims. The Nazis' systemic and state sponsored campaign of persecution dehumanised an entire people and its industrialised extermination resulted in the Holocaust, one of the worst crimes committed in history. In all, the Nazis murdered 11 million human beings they considered to be life unworthy of life.</p><p>The Nazi regime is one of the greatest evils ever visited on humanity. Nazism is an ideology of unparalleled hate. It's an ideology which, through its contempt for the rights of man, can lead only to darkness and to the destruction of humanity. Thus, in what they represent, Nazi symbols are no ordinary symbols. They must be condemned wherever and whenever they are found and displayed. Today, we must stand united as a parliament. Those who display Nazi symbols are either ignorant of history or they are knowingly lionising an evil, which must never be revisited upon humanity. Sadly, and repugnantly, there is growing incidence of the glorification of Nazism in Australia. A Nazi symbol is a symbol of action commonly associated with the Nazi party. It would include the Nazi swastika, the Nazi salute, Nazi uniforms and other types of symbols identified in the Executive Council of Australian Jewry's anti-Semitism reports.</p><p>In seeking to amend the Criminal Code, we seek to make it an offence to display such symbols without a reasonable excuse. A person would have committed an offence if the person displays a Nazi symbol or the person knows that the symbol is a Nazi symbol. The penalty would be 100 units or 12 months imprisonment. In these amendments there would be exceptions, and to avoid doubt the display of swastika in connection with Buddhism, Hinduism or Jainism does not constitute the display of a Nazi symbol. Moreover, to ensure the prohibition does not interfere with the vital work of teaching young people about the evils of the past, there are limitations and carve-outs in terms of genuine educational, scientific and artistic purposes such as films and documentaries. Furthermore, the prohibition does not apply to journalism or where symbols are displayed for another purpose in the public interest.</p><p>There will be those who complain about these amendments to the Criminal Code being an infringement of civil liberties. To those people, I can say that the historical context here is everything. We owe it to all of those who were victims of one of the greatest crimes ever committed that such crimes are never repeated. As a parliament and as a people, ours is a duty to the present and the future, informed by one of the greatest sins of the past.</p><p>We seek support from the government today to suspend standing orders to bring on an important bill. It goes to the points that I raised earlier in this contribution. It allows us as a parliament to deal with this issue as a matter of urgency. It's clear to this parliament that there is no matter on the agenda today which has precedence over this matter, which we seek to bring in a bipartisan way into this chamber. It's obvious, through the drafting by the shadow Attorney-General, that we have been able in a concise way to provide words to the parliament that will enhance the Criminal Code and give the ability to authorities to stamp out a repugnant practice, a practice which is on the rise and which we must condemn.</p><p>As the Minister for Home Affairs in 2020, I wrote to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security and asked the committee to examine this very issue—the issue of symbols—particularly in the context of coming from a period where we had been worried about ISIL attacks, including attacks that had taken place in our own country, and a rise in the incidence of right-wing extremism, which is not to be tolerated by anybody but to be discouraged by all. The committee, to their credit, said that they had a heavy agenda and that they would consider it in due course. The now Attorney-General was a member of the PJCIS at that time. The government says that it will examine this through the PJCIS process. That's a commitment that I understand the government had given. We're 10 months into the period of government, since May of last year. The government still hasn't dealt with this matter, even though I had written to the committee in 2020.</p><p>We seek to work with the government, through this suspension, on a particularly important issue. The Leader of the House has the opportunity now to read through the proposal that we put, and we would ask for his respect in allowing the chamber to deal with this important matter.</p><p>I want to join with everybody, not just on this side of the House but on both sides of the House, in working as one to do what we can to make sure that the Criminal Code reflects the reality of having to deal with this scourge. That is why it is important for us as a parliament to suspend standing orders to deal with this in a balanced way. We call on the support of the Independents, who have come into this place saying that they have an open mind, and many of them have made a commitment to considering each bill that comes before them. There is no more compelling bill before the House than that which we present this morning.</p><p>We ask for the support of the Leader of the House, who's good enough to be here in the chamber, and the Attorney-General as well, and we respect that. We don't seek to divide; we seek to unify through this action in the parliament today. We don't seek to vilify people for spurious reasons. We don't seek to cast completely baseless aspersions on their character. We don't seek to occupy that ground. In fact, it's completely the opposite. We seek to work together to send a very clear message, particularly to young Australians, predominantly young males, who may be influenced and indoctrinated quickly online. As the Director-General of Security in our country has pointed out, it can happen very quickly. A period of history may be glorified, and denialism may somehow appeal to them as it did in a previous generation.</p><p>We come together to send a very clear message that it is not Australian to adopt these symbols, to publicly display them and glorify that period of history. It is Australian to condemn that period of history. It is Australian to stand with people of Jewish faith. It is Australian to stand against those anti-Semitic incidents that we see globally and in our country as well. It's on the rise. Today it is an opportunity for our parliament to show our country and, frankly, to show the world that we will take action which is significant and will send a clear message to those that might otherwise be influenced by people of bad faith.</p><p>There are Australians who live to this very day with the horrors of knowing that their loved ones were tortured, gassed, murdered and abused in so many violent ways. They deserve the support of this parliament. They deserve to know that we stand with them in the condemnation of the rise of Nazism and the display of these symbols, which are meant to deliver hate on those people that seek love. We will work with the government. We've allowed them as much time as possible to contemplate, to deal with this matter as a matter of urgency in the parliament. I want to thank the member for Berowra for a lifetime of work in this area. I want to thank him for the drafting. He is a renowned legal expert, as we know, and he's been at work on drafting this. It's not in a complicated form. It reflects some of the legislation in New South Wales as well. There should not be any difficulty for the government to support what we're reasonably proposing today.</p> <p class="speaker">Mike Freelander</p><p>I thank the Leader of the Opposition. Is the motion seconded?</p> <p class="speaker">Julian Leeser</p><p>I second the motion. The events on the streets of Melbourne at the weekend were offensive to all Australians. They are offensive to the memory of the one million Australians who served and the 39,600 Australians who made the supreme sacrifice in the Second World War. They are offensive to me as a Liberal, as a Jew and most importantly as an Australian.</p><p>This offence, this dishonouring of earlier generations of Australians and this abuse of our political discourse, deserves a comprehensive response today. What we witnessed in Melbourne on the weekend was the glorification and mimicking of an ideology whose fundamental tenet is the racial superiority of one group of people over another. We know the idea of racial superiority is a myth, but it's not a myth without consequences. Its consequences are real. Six million Jews were murdered, a figure that represents two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe, and millions of innocents, people of faith, homosexuals, political prisoners and people with disabilities. It was industrial-scale murder the likes of which the world has never seen.</p><p>Last Saturday we saw little men in Melbourne with steroided arms and stunted minds seeking to mimic and impersonate the evil that the greatest generation fought. These cowards, many of them with their faces covered by the cloths of shame, celebrated Nazism. Their actions sicken me to the core. To them I say, we say, 'Not in our country.' Not in the country that took in more Holocaust survivors per capita than anywhere else on earth.</p><p>The worst part of what we saw in Melbourne on Saturday is that it is part of a trend across our country. The Director-General of Security has spoken about the growth of grievance motivated violent extremism. He said, 'As a nation we need to reflect on why some teenagers are hanging Nazi flags and portraits of the Christchurch killer on their bedroom walls and others are sharing beheading videos. Just as importantly, we must reflect on what we can do about it.'</p><p>The Director-General of Security is right. There must be no place in Australia for Nazi-style flags, uniforms, salutes and boycotts, because they are the means by which this sickness seeks to perpetuate and promote itself. Such actions should be and must be a crime. I invite the government to put aside any partisan hesitation and support this motion initiated by the Leader of the Opposition. Yesterday he said in this place that we would support legislation that makes illegal the display of any aspect of Nazi glorification. The bill that we seek to have debated shows that we are true to our word.</p><p>Unfortunately yesterday the Attorney-General did something abominable. He attributed anti-Semitism to someone who is not anti-Semitic, to a whole party that is not anti-Semitic. That action was a mockery of the seriousness of anti-Semitism. The Attorney-General is the first law officer of the Crown and a lawyer of considerable distinction in his own right. He should be an example to so many in this country. The tragedy is that the Attorney-General all too often cannot rise above these appalling political misjudgements.</p><p>By contrast, today we approached Labor and the crossbench in a spirit of goodwill and good faith. I recognise the good work of people in this place such as the member for Wentworth and the member for Macnamara, who I work with so closely as co-chairs of the Parliamentary Friends of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.</p><p>I want to say something of a personal nature. In seconding the motion today I am thinking of a person who demonstrated to me the courage we need during times such as this. Her name was Katie Popp. She was German, had olive skin and wore her grey hair in a bun. She lived in the Dorian Towers apartment building in Double Bay. When I knew her, she was an old lady. When I visited Katie, she would make my brother and I tasty German cakes. She was such a part of our family that she sewed our names on our school uniforms. She was so much from another time and place that she made her home here, like so many Europeans from that time.</p><p>I didn't know it as a boy, but I know now that Katie helped get my family out of Germany in 1936. Katie was Catholic. If you want to know why I have such a deep passion to protect the religious freedoms of other Australians such as my Catholic friends, it's because a Catholic woman saved a Jewish family—my family. Katie had been the family housekeeper, and as Germany went from bad to worse she took risks to help get my grandmother and her brother to Switzerland, then to England and finally to Australia in 1936. I come from a tradition which says 'whoever saves one life, it is as if they had saved the world'. Katie Popp was what we call Righteous Among the Nations. Her decision not to turn a blind eye and not to be a bystander because of the risk to herself, but the risk for all which is right, is an example that lives through time.</p><p>Katie is part of the moral barometer of my life, to know we must confront evil and oppose racial prejudice and do everything we can to keep it at bay. This is what the bill we seek to present is about, and this is why we seek support for the suspension of standing orders.</p> <p class='motion-notice motion-notice-truncated'>Long debate text truncated.</p>-
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