Julian Hill
Bruce · Australian Labor Party · Australia
“We want people to aspire to home ownership and to get into the housing market, and yet for the past 20 years it has felt like, however fast they save on the treadmill, house prices just race ahead twice as fast—and that's what the data shows. The opposition's policy depends on who you ask.”
“For those listening at home, Narrabundah is a pretty wealthy suburb in Canberra. He was standing in front of a flat this morning that, in 2006, sold for $420,000. The asking price today is $900,000. He thinks that's not a problem. He thinks nothing needs to change.”
“One of the things that we've been hearing over the last couple of weeks, out in the community—I was at the Berwick market on Sunday morning; around Dandenong at lunchtime—is the question of house prices. What's going to happen with house prices with the government's tax changes? I want to make a couple of points.”
“The definition of insanity, of course, is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, which is what we see from the Liberal Party. Actually, I'm going to contradict myself; I'll finish on this point. They do have one policy for housing: super for housing.”
“Seven out of 10 for performance art. There were a few questions I was actually looking forward to responding to, but unfortunately the opposition chose to call a bunch of silly divisions and has eaten into the time, so we've run out of time. Proposed expenditure agreed to.”
“The truth is, from when the government was elected four years ago, debt is in a better place. It's lower, deficits are lower and the debt-to-GDP ratio is lower. The fact is—and you can see it in the budget papers in black and white—the budget is in far, far better shape than the mess that the Liberals left behind.”
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“If the minimum wage that's paid to migrant workers isn't sufficient, then it drags down the wages of Australian workers. This has been proved over and over again. It's also proved in aggregate with one of the worst, stupidest policy decisions the former government made to uncap the—”
“We're not experiencing what we're seeing in Europe. We're not experiencing the long-rolling issues on the southern US border that dominate the media and infect our politics. We have a highly controlled, tightly managed migration program. It can go up, it can go down, but governments of the day are in control of that program. The exploitation of migrant workers—this creation of a permanently temporary underclasses hidden from the view of society—does us no credit as a people. It also harms Australian workers. This is the point. When we fail to act on the exploitation of migrant workers, it puts downwards pressure on the wages of Australian workers. It hurts everyone, not just morally, not in the conception of who we are as a people, but economically. I gave the example before and it remains current.”
“It's an explanation of the lived experience of a lot of people in our country—people who do critical work, people who work in food service, people who work in hospitality, work in agriculture, work in aged care and so on. I think everyone would agree—and I hear those opposite and I believe them—that the exploitation of migrant workers is wrong morally but people accept that. It's not who we are as a country. We've done very well as a country over centuries now from a model of permanent migration, where those people who come and make a contribution and meet our labour market standards over time can seek permanent migration and build a life here and contribute with security. We've done well from that. We don't have mass migration. Some of them like to bang on on Sky News. We have a highly controlled, orderly migration program.”
“But, for those of us born in Australia, it's really hard to understand, viscerally, the vulnerability that a temporary visa status has over someone, the extreme power that an employer can have over a temporary worker, the threat: 'I will have your visa cancelled. I will report you. I will cancel your sponsorship unless you do what I say unless you work extra hours, unless you pay me kickbacks, unless you put up with these foul living conditions, unless you give me sexual services,' or worse. That threat, that insecurity, in itself, creates an enormous power dynamic that those of us who take our citizenship for granted just don't truly understand. It's not a criticism.”
“It's not good enough that every now and again we see the media splashes—and people go 'Oh, that's quite bad'—of people living in squalor, being underpaid, with sexual and financial exploitation, human trafficking and slavery They're strong words, but that's actually what's going on in our country with vulnerable migrant workers. Those opposite want to argue for lower wages, argue for employers to be able to bring in more and more workers on low wages and argue against the role of unions in exposing exploitation. I say this very genuinely: I was born in Australia. As far as I can tell, we go back four generations. Hopefully, they were convicts and had a good time—I don't know.”
“But, at times, for too many Australians, including many in my electorate—I spoke at the African Music and Cultural Festival in the middle of Melbourne. Forty per cent of Australia's African-born population, to illustrate the point, live in Victoria. For too many people in that community, it's structural racism that means they don't get a fair go. You see it in employment data. Mostly, we live up to our promise, but one of the most shameful, disgusting examples of where we fail as a nation and undermine our own values is the exploitation of migrant workers.”
“But, when push comes to shove, every time, the thing they always get most angry about—it's the age-old debate of workers versus employers, isn't it? The Labor Party believes in bringing capital and labour together, but what really triggers those opposite is the idea that workers should actually get paid properly, get their fair share and be looked after. The great Australian promise, so we say, is a fair go. The great Australian promise of Australian multiculturalism is a fair go—that everyone gets a fair crack at life here and gets treated fairly under the law, no matter their ethnicity, their circumstances, how long they've been here, their visa class and so on. We're all equal under the law. Mostly, we live up to that promise. Mostly, we do well.”
“That's the debate they want to have out there, but the debate which they want to have in here is, 'Bring more migrants in, pay them less, drag down wages and give employers greater flexibility.' That's exactly what the member for Nicholls was arguing—exactly. It's unbelievable. The hypocrisy! I thought that this bill would be routine. I did. Aware of the history, the briefing is clear, the case is clear, a lot of fine words about combating migrant worker exploitation—I genuinely thought it would be routine. But then we find out, with 58 seconds to go for the previous speaker, that the opposition is going to oppose this bill. He talked about unions. It was cute. He said that unions have a place in Australia—in history—and that unions did fine work, historically.”
“So, when you hear all the hysterical rhetoric and the chest beating from most of the opposition backbench, undermining their leader and calling for massive cuts to migration—they'll never actually specify what they want to cut. Is it Australians falling in love with people from overseas? Are they going to cut the partner visas? Is it working holiday makers, who actually do the agricultural work in regional Australia? Is it international students, who keep the hospitality sector going? They're never prepared to outline which regions are no longer going to have GPs or healthcare workers or which aged-care centres are going to close.”
“When employers can too easily bring in migrant workers and pay them a pittance, it holds down the wages of low-skilled Australians. That was absolutely clear. It was established through parliamentary inquiry after parliamentary inquiry with labour market submissions and labour market analysis. But, of course, they did nothing about it. They wouldn't index the minimum wage that you could pay migrant workers, because that was their agenda—to hold down wages. Their ministers actually said it. I want to be very clear about and put on the record what they actually meant by that. Secondly, we learned about the opposition's argument for 'greater flexibility' in visas so that it's easier for employers to bring in low-paid workers.”
“That's not a surprise, given the entire economic management philosophy of the previous government was a 'deliberate design feature' of their economic management to keep wages down. The member spoke of the shock and outrage at the TSMIT. For those listening at home, that's the temporary skilled migration income threshold. It's the minimum amount that an employer bringing in a migrant worker has to pay them. He said: 'This is terrible! It's jumped from $53,000 to $70,000!' Shock, horror! Well, do you know why? It's because, in their nine years in government, those opposite didn't index it. They held it at $53,000. So, in real terms, employers were able to bring in workers year after year and pay them less and less. Guess what that does? The economic labour market analysis was absolutely clear: it holds down the wages of Australian workers.”
“I think you had 58 seconds to go, after all those fine words, when you finally fessed up that, despite all the concern about exploitation of migrant workers and all the noble sentiments, you're actually not going to vote for the bill. This is not 'a half-baked proposal', to quote you; this is something that came out of the Migration Strategy, following the migration review, that is responding to a serious problem, which is the foul, disgusting, shameful, ongoing exploitation of migrant workers. Let me address two of the points that the member for Nicholls made. Firstly, in relation to the TSMIT, let's be very clear about what we heard there. We heard 3½ minutes of a circular argument, but, when you strip it back, what the member opposite was arguing for was lower wages.”
“That's where I choose to put my energy. But the idea that it should be rejected again for the same reason is frankly ridiculous.”
“I'd just make the principled point that I can imagine multiple scenarios where it would be an enormous advantage for the parliament, for the government and for the defence establishment to have a skilled, experienced crossbencher on the committee who is able to talk persuasively, having been briefed in, to that part of the Australian polity to speak up for the need for defence or a contingency or an armed conflict. Those things do and can and will divide societies in the future. I just think the idea that was put forward and that some are still playing footsie with in the opposition, that somehow their political enemies have to be locked out, is actually not good for our national defence, and it's not respective of our parliamentary democracy. I make those points on a very principled basis. I believe in parties of government.”
“If we're serious about arguing for greater defence expenditure, if we're serious about persuading that quarter—perhaps larger in some places—of the Australian people who don't vote for the major parties, then we shouldn't be terrified of the idea of having one appropriate crossbencher on the committee. I'm not speculating about the government's intentions; I don't know what the government's intentions are. It's not my portfolio.”
“They bring together people of similar values, not always the same ideas, and they do the hard work of actually putting forward a platform for government, because you change the country for the better through being in government, not through sanctimonious press releases, nice speeches and media stunts. That's my belief. Others can have a different belief. I don't believe overwhelmingly in Independents in the parliament. I don't think they do the work of an opposition, and I don't think they do the work of a government. I respect the individuals and the nature of their service. But Australians have every right to make their own choices, and we need to respect the choices that are made.”
“This committee has an extra provision that the Prime Minister has to appoint them for obvious reasons, for extra safeguards so that they're appropriate to serve on the committee in terms of handling the kind of information that they handle. The idea that we should write into legislation forevermore a requirement that large proportions of the parliament be deemed unsuitable or locked out from ever engaging in our national defence is offensive and ridiculous, but I'll finish on the point that it's also incredibly naive. The fact is that about a quarter of Australians now don't vote for the major parties. I'm a big defender of the party system. I know you. We were elected together. We've had this chat. We have different views on this. I think, in a Westminster democracy, political parties perform an essential public good.”
“I'm just going to finish on the sticking point, if you like, which is the hand grenade that was thrown in at the last minute by the Leader of the Opposition for the shadow minister for defence's aspirations to support this bill last term. It was their venal, political outrage that their political enemies on the crossbench could ever be appointed to such a thing as the statutory committee of defence. The points that I've made in private—then, before then and since then, as this matter has continued to be talked about around the halls—I've said publicly, and I'll say them again. The composition of this committee is modelled on the tried and tested model of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security. The composition of committees is a matter for the parliament of the day, rightly, and we put that in legislation here.”
“It hasn't been identified as a priority through the proper, thoughtful work, but that was their election platform: fighter pilots. Actually it wasn't fighter pilots; it was some planes. Because they hadn't budgeted for the fighter pilots, they hadn't budgeted for the sustainment and they hadn't budgeted for the petrol, so their genius idea was to order another squadron of planes that would sit on the tarmac and, I don't know, scare the enemy, knowing they couldn't fly. It was as clever as the press releases. They thought the ADF could run onto the battlefield waving press releases of capability that never actually came.”
“You could have the ATMs whirring, flowing the cash right through the wind, out on the oval and out on the forecourt of parliament and everyone could pick up their money. Billions of dollars were completely wasted. They never placed an order for a submarine. They're the kinds of things that can and should be explored in a classified forum. Then, of course, the former shadow minister for home affairs and former defence shadow minister the member for Canning—as I said, he makes car fetish videos now, but, when he wasn't doing that, he was putting out the one policy he was allowed to release at the last election, which was their genius idea to order another squadron of F-35s. You can argue the case for that capability.”
“Of course it does. The audit office does its job; the new defence committee will be able to do its job. I would point out that it was not our government but the coalition that saw 28 projects run a collective 97 years late. It was the previous prime minister in particular who was all about announcing but never actually delivering on the capability. We'd all remember the press releases. You'd run out of Australian flags, often, for the announcement, but then, when you'd go and look in the budget papers, there'd be no money or it'd be underbudgeted. They'd announce the capability but they wouldn't put the order in. How many submarines did they announce? We had the Japanese, then we had the French and then they ripped them up—literally billions of dollars.”
“I want to put on the record that the importance and the significance of this change for the relationship between the parliament and our democracy and the defence establishment shouldn't be underestimated. As the former government said and as this government has rightly continued to say in our statements but also the official documents—the Defence Strategic Review and our national defence strategies—we do face the worst strategic circumstances which our country has seen since the Second World War, and they're deteriorating. In response the government has sensibly and rightly increased significantly the investment in defence. That will continue at record levels and is set to grow. I noted some of the backhanders of the previous speaker about the government's management of defence and their suggestion that it all had to be held to account.”
“Part of the point of this committee is to improve the transparency and accountability of how those decisions are made to provide a statutory, classified forum where parliamentarians from both sides—the backbench and non-executive members—can be briefed in order to understand the rationale of the intelligence and, importantly, to then have better oversight of a government's conduct of armed conflict operations in war. There are appropriate restrictions and protections in the legislation for the secrecy of the information which would be provided to this committee, including criminal offences and jail terms for members who may choose to try and leak or misuse the classified information. Those provisions are built into the bill.”
“It was an inquiry that the member for Macquarie, here, and I served on—that I chaired—which was the first serious examination for decades of war powers, of how Australia goes to war. I think there is no graver decision which executive government could make than to take our nation to war, to commit to armed conflict, to enter into armed conflict and to put the lives of the men and women of the ADF and their service personnel at risk, and indeed, if the worst happened, to risk the future and survival of the nation. That is the gravest responsibility any government bears. There are legitimate questions, and there have been in the committee for a long time, about how those decisions are made and the transparency of them.”
“That's been a function of the PJCIS for decades—senior members of the opposition serve on that committee and are better prepared to take on their roles if there is a change of government. Obviously, I hope, that's a long time away, but, of course, it will happen, in a Westminster system, one day in the future. I acknowledge the point the member for Goldstein rightly made. He defined the core purpose as being 'to scrutinise public expenditure and raise the standard of the ADF'. He said that's the core purpose of the committee. I don't fully agree with that. I think that's part of the purpose, but there is more. There's another, broader purpose, which was actually the genesis for this piece of legislation.”
“This is not a universally loved proposition, but it does have a lot of supporters in the defence establishment, once they've thought it through, because this committee has the potential to do a lot of good: to transform the institutional relationship between Defence and the parliament over time; to support our Westminster system; and to prepare, as the former speaker rightly said, the alternative government—because there are changes of government—to actually move straightaway into their critically important job in defence, because they will have had classified briefings. They will understand the threats that we face. They will understand the capability acquisitions and the rationale for them. They'll understand which projects are on track and off track, and they'll understand the job that they're walking into.”
“Parliamentary oversight of this part of our national enterprise is important. It does matter.' It was legislated into being and, as I said, I think it's stood the test of time. This prime minister, Albanese, with the support and stewardship of the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister for Defence, will, I think, in future years and decades to come, be seen to have made the right leadership call, finally, in doing what has long been called for, including by numerous Liberal MPs—yet their own leadership was too spineless to stand up to those in the defence establishment.”
“I pay tribute to the Hawke government, particularly to former prime minister Bob Hawke, for the creation of the then parliamentary joint committee on ASIO, as it was, which later morphed into the PJCIS. That was an act of courage, because those who've studied the history of this would know about the two Hope royal commissions—in the late 1970s and, I think, the early eighties. There were two royal commissions headed by Justice Hope to examine the intelligence agencies. The second of those Hope royal commissions explicitly recommended to the Hawke government that there be no such committee. The royal commission said to the government, 'Do not set up a parliamentary committee to oversight the intelligence agencies.' Prime Minister Bob Hawke and his cabinet made the right call—to reject that recommendation and say: 'No.”
“There's an inherent tension in the security domain in particular—a little bit in defence but not so much. There's this inherent tension in a liberal democracy between our collective security as a society and notions of individual liberty. And, when the parliament considers natural security laws, in my view, that's actually the tension, the eternal tension, which we're reconciling and making judgements on. If the security agencies have more powers, they can be used covertly. That does impinge on individual liberty. If they have fewer powers, it can diminish our collective security. The ability of parliamentarians to interrogate legislation, to understand the need for it, to see the classified intelligence through the PJCIS, has been well established.”
“The PJCIS—I served on that committee for some years—has been critical to building the social licence for intelligence agencies and also to enhancing the parliament's ability to do its job. Inherently, necessarily, most of the work of the intelligence agencies is classified. That's the nature of their work. But it is still important, in a parliamentary democracy, that parliamentarians, not just the executive, can do two critical things: (1) hold executive government to account for their use and control of these agencies—the same parallel operates for defence—and (2) have appropriate forums in the parliament to interrogate and hold the agencies to account. The parliament's role, of course, as we know, is distinct from the executive. Having served on that committee, I think it does well.”
“The then shadow minister for defence then got appointed shadow minister for home affairs. Now he's the immediate past previous shadow minister for home affairs, if you don't count the interim shadow minister for home affairs, who was in the job for a week or two during Senate estimates after the member for Canning quit. He cut and ran from his post just before Senate estimates and he now makes car fetish videos—but, anyway, perhaps he will return to greater things one day. The committee here is modelled on the longstanding Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security, which has stood the test of time. This is a really important thing, and I'll draw the analogy.”
“We ended up in a very weird set of circumstances where the then shadow minister, who was strongly in favour—I read the quotes from media interviews where he was in favour into the Hansard when I spoke on the bill last term, and, to his credit, it was a principled view and a well-articulated view—got rolled at the last minute in the shadow cabinet, when the then leader, Peter Dutton, ambushed him. It was pretty shocking. That's a matter of public record now, all the entrails of the campaign. Peter Dutton also seemed to criticised the member for Canning for not doing the work as the shadow minister for defence, but that's their civil war that's ongoing in the bin fire that is the opposition. But I really pay tribute to those who've advocated in a principled way for this reform to have a standalone statutory joint committee on defence.”
“It builds, as I will acknowledge in a moment, on a legacy of many coalition members, including Senator Fawcett, the late Senator Molan and Senator Reynolds, who have advocated for this reform. The irony for poor Senator Reynolds, of course, was that, as chair of the subcommittee, she advocated for the reform and then they made her defence minister. Then she wasn't allowed to implement her own bill because the government wouldn't actually support it. But, anyway, here we are. There is a clear and urgent need for this. It should have passed in the last parliament.”
“We're a few months into this parliament, and it seems that we're seeing a pattern where he wants to speak on everything as part of his ongoing leadership campaign. I suggest that he provide a little more structure and purpose to the contributions. It might stand him in better stead. The first six minutes yesterday, as with today and as with the day before, were completely irrelevant. Yesterday, after 4½ minutes, he called relevance on himself before the deputy speaker pulled him up. But here we are. I spoke very strongly in support of this bill on 24 July, and I do so again today. It's something that's very dear to my heart because, when I was chair of the defence committee, I did the work to put this forward.”
“I'll put on the record that I agree with bits of the previous speaker’s contribution, and I thank him for bits of that contribution. I'm fairly sure that, having listened to the speech, he's suggesting that he may support the bill or that the opposition supports the bill this term. I didn't hear an unequivocal statement that they will vote for this bill this term, because they voted against it last term. I will remain reasonably optimistic. It is a bit hard to know. You missed the point of order on relevance. I did invite him to take a detour into irrelevance, when he wanted to have an extended go at the crossbench. I thought that might be nice to have on the record. But there were some useful bits in the second half that I could agree with. That's the third speech in the last two days that I've endured from the member for Goldstein.”
“It requires political leadership, it requires faith leadership, and it requires leaders from business communities and sporting clubs, but, perhaps most importantly, day in, day out, it requires the contributions of thousands of community leaders and multicultural communities who stand up for their communities and who speak up for these norms, and the overwhelming number of decent Australians who support our multicultural character.”
“I will close on this: being diverse is not the same thing as being a successful multicultural country. We can all think of countries that are diverse but are not successful and not cohesive. Success requires legal foundations and norms which this act provides, amongst others. It requires investment, particularly to help people new to Australia to settle in and build their lives and build the nation, but it also requires leadership.”
“I also observe the sad irony that if the Liberals had their way in 2017 then the protections of section 18C would not have been available to the Jewish community, who brought a complaint with the AHRC in 2024 rightly calling out racist, antisemitic hate-preaching. The Federal Court upheld that case and said that the lectures were fundamentally racist and antisemitic, and offensive and insulting statements. This law would also not have been there to call out Senator Hanson's disgusting, racist remarks against a fellow senator, telling her 'to piss off back to Pakistan'—clearly a racist attack, as the Federal Court found. This 50th anniversary would be a great time for the Liberal Party of today to apologise for their carry-on and sustained attempts to weaken Australia's Racial Discrimination Act, and to promise never to try this again.”
“I haven't seen anyone on the speaking list—maybe the member for Goldstein is here to speak. The question, though, in all of this debate and all of this footsy with weakening the law that they pretend to support today is that they've never actually said what racist things they think people should be able to say to each other that they can't say today—literally what? Be precise; be specific. They've never been clear on that. It might be an intellectual debate in the IPA. Maybe they could've drafted the law differently, but the fact is that it's stood the test of time. When you unleash these debates, they have real world consequences in electorates like mine. That's just the truth of it. I ask the shadow Attorney-General if he still wants to water down section 18C of the act. Is that still the Liberals' policy?”
“I was incredibly proud of the thousands of people that we stood in front of when Labor stood with modern Australia, multicultural Australia in the Springvale town hall and right across the nation—including the Jewish community, most loudly and proudly—to stop the Liberals' attempts to weaken this law that today they say they love. I'm glad we did. It's strange how the shadow Attorney-General this morning forgot to mention, amongst his fine prose, his steadfast advocacy to weaken the Racial Discrimination Act—the very law he claimed to support and embrace today. He gave multiple speeches in 2017 arguing to repeal section 18C and the protections against racist hate speech. I wonder if that remains his view. I wonder how many other Liberals will have the courage to come in here today to speak on the debate and state what they really think.”
“I was stunned to discover, on arrival in Canberra, that the then government's main legislative priority—poor old Malcolm Turnbull had been dragged to the right by the IPA brigade, who'd come in; here he is, the member for Goldstein!—was to weaken the Racial Discrimination Act, to water down the protections of section 18C. That might have been a great, fun debate to have in Canberra, but the lesson I learned then was that leadership matters. The tone, the words and the propositions that political leaders put forward into the country impact daily life in the suburbs and communities. I saw it in my community, because, while that debate was raging, we saw a spike in public racism. We saw people abused on the bus, we saw hijabs ripped off, and we saw turbans ripped off, because of the debate on—as they said—the 'right to be a bigot'.”
“There was the shameful failure to stand up for Australians of Chinese heritage experiencing shocking racism during COVID, including in my community. It's ultimately a matter for the Liberal Party of today—I don't say the 'modern Liberals'—to explain why they continue to get embroiled in a race to the bottom on issues of race and migration. Increasingly, it seems that some of them just don't love our country; they don't love the reality of modern, multicultural Australia. As I said, this is not a new thing. In my first 12 months in parliament, back in 2016, I was bright eyed and bushy tailed, with ideas and things I wanted to do.”
“They failed nationally and they will always fail in our vibrant, diverse democracy. Real leaders cannot talk out both sides of their mouth. It's clear that the Liberals have still not yet learned the lesson of the last election. Some of them are trying; some very decent people are trying. But we saw it with Senator Price's comments relating to Indian Australians, for which she still refuses to apologise. We have, for decades, had a proudly non-discriminatory migration policy, and long may that continue. The former opposition leader was never above a crack at groups of Australians if he saw a political advantage to try and divide Australia on issues of race—the Africans had a turn, Lebanese migrants 'shouldn't have come', Muslim Australians.”
“We see it in the daily lives and the decency of the Australian people in schools, workplaces, sporting clubs and the community. As I said, I love our country; I cherish our diversity. But still today the sad reality is there's a very small, loud—increasingly loud at the moment—minority who deny the basic reality of Australia as a multicultural nation or those who choose to play footsy with issues of race and migration. Some of them have long been here in this parliament—One Nation, of course, but not just in One Nation. Sadly, some are also amongst the opposition—not all of them, but too many. We saw at the federal election, when Australians overwhelmingly rejected the politics of fear, division, discrimination and toxic negativity, that those leaders who operate in the echo chamber, pandering to their most extreme supporters, will fail.”
“As has been said, of course the act has not cured all racial ills, no law can. A law cannot and does not seek to stop racist beliefs or determine what people think. This law focuses on behaviours and seeks to establish the legal and societal norms for how Australians relate to each other regardless of ethnicity, fostering mutual respect and social cohesion. Now, an Australian, to me, is anyone committed to our country and our democratic institutions and to the principle of mutual respect for their fellow Australians, who are likely to be, or most certainly are, very, very different—be it their ethnicity, their identity or their beliefs. Overwhelmingly, I believe, Australians love and cherish our multicultural character. I love our multicultural nation. We see this in the research, in the Scanlon Foundation's work.”
“At the proclamation of the bill on 31 October 1975, 11 days before the dismissal of the Whitlam government, then Prime Minister Gough Whitlam described the aims of the act as to entrench new attitudes of tolerance and understanding in the hearts and minds of the people, saying the new act 'wrote it firmly into the legislation that Australia is in reality a multicultural nation, in which the linguistic and cultural heritage of the Aboriginal people and of peoples from all parts of the world can find an honoured place'. The significance of the Racial Discrimination Act for modern Australia, or I could say multicultural Australia because modern Australia and multicultural Australia are the same thing, cannot be overstated. We are a better nation for the vision and courage of the Whitlam government.”
“The then backbencher John Howard stated, 'One does nothing towards reducing the incidence of racial tension by legislative coercion.' As we know from the 1980s, he has a lot of form on issues of race and migration. Some conservative MPs even tried to debate the third reading of the bill in April 1975 to protest its passage. But when the bill passed both houses of the parliament in June 1975, Australia was made a better nation.”
“The Racial Discrimination Act stood the test of time for 50 years. It sets the legal foundation for modern Australia as the proud multicultural nation that we know and love today. It was an attempt to legislate for human dignity and equality of all people regardless of race, ethnicity or origin. I listened carefully this morning in the chamber to the speech of the shadow Attorney-General earlier. There were nice words and noble phrases but it was also a whitewashing of the history of this law. The truth is in 1975 numerous conservative politicians rallied against the introduction of the Racial Discrimination Act. Contrary to this blurred historical vision and pretence that everyone embraced it in some kumbaya fest, the bill was hard-fought in the parliament then.”
“I thank the Minister for Multicultural Affairs for that address. She may be often quietly spoken, but this parliament has been a better place from the moment she stepped into it. I know from our many personal conversations—she is also a friend—just how much racial abuse she has put up with every day, be it in direct messages, on social media, threats to her office or even to her face. I thank you for your service and I thank you for being an inspiration for so many people in my community. Thank you. The 50th anniversary of the Whitlam Labor government's Racial Discrimination Act was a moment worth reflecting on for our entire nation. One of the Whitlam Labor government's last major acts was the Racial Discrimination Act, having earlier in its term abolished the last vestiges of the old racist white Australia policy.”
“This bill enables Australia to comply with its obligations under the Geelong treaty. Under the Geelong treaty, Australia and the United Kingdom will not impose value added taxes, excise and customs duties and other similar charges on imports and exports of goods in connection with the Geelong treaty. If those charges are levied, the Geelong treaty provides that the levying party will be liable for payment of the charges. The bill implements Australia's obligations under the Geelong treaty with respect to customs duties. This bill amends schedule 4 to the Customs Tariff Act to insert a new table item, item 58A, which will prescribe a free rate of duty for goods that are for use under the Geelong treaty. I commend this bill to the chamber. Debate adjourned.”