Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1014 ..

MR WOOD (continuing):

There is a newer element in migration - the numbers from Asia. But we have been built on it, and I can remember because I am of that age. I do not have to sit in front of the television set and watch the old film clips, because I saw them in the newsreels in the cinemas when I was young. I have a vivid memory of Arthur Calwell welcoming shiploads of European migrants. "We have to build our nation", he said. That is clear in my mind. I lived through this period, and I believe that Australia is a better, stronger, wiser nation and a mostly united nation as a result of that long migration program, and despite the fact that Pauline Hanson is now endeavouring to drive a wedge.

Beyond the Pauline Hanson media releases and speeches, there are unnamed people joining in this book. It is quite clear that the radical Right in Australia - never significant in number, though sometimes noisy - have joined in enthusiastically behind Pauline Hanson. The rhetoric is all there - "international elites", "one world government" and the like. It is all I heard many years ago when I was on the Darling Downs; it is all I heard in Far North Queensland; and it is what I hear down here. It is that old rhetoric. It is that old Butler rhetoric and the rhetoric of other people, and it is nonsense. You want to read some of this stuff. Perhaps you have. Members have had the advantage, if not for long, of access to this book. It is all that old, tired prejudicial rhetoric. The sum total of this book is the representation of an alien culture. That is what is alien - all that is in this book. It represents an intolerant, divisive and selfish culture. It is contrary to the fair go, to the care for the underdog approach, that is typically Australian. It is not part of our Australian ethos, and the Assembly ought to reject the views in this book.

MR MOORE (10.48): In speaking to this motion, I think it is most important to indicate - and I imagine this is shared by members - that I support the right of Ms Hanson or anyone else in our Australian democracy to express their own view. That is what she does and that is what she should be able to do. Indeed, Mr Speaker, part of that same right to express a point of view gives us the right to criticise her perspective as well, and that is what I would like to see this debate being about today. There have been claims that people just simply attack Pauline Hanson. If those attacks were about the way she dresses, the way she wears her hair, her size or something like that element, then I would be most critical. What this debate has been about so far has been Mr Wood expressing his view in response to what Pauline Hanson sees as the truth. In fact, I have to disagree with Mr Wood in the sense that he was suggesting that perhaps there is very little truth in what Pauline Hanson has said. I think what makes it much more dangerous is that there is a considerable element of truth in what she says. But she then takes it to the extreme, and that is what makes it dangerous.

Let me give just a couple of small examples. In the book she gives the idea that everybody should be equal and that we should give equal funding to Aboriginal people, for example, and other Australians. Unfortunately, that fails to recognise a fundamental principle, and that is that not everybody has an equal start. It is that failing to have an equal start that I have spoken about on many occasions here when speaking about public education and the need to ensure that public education is available to everybody and is of the highest possible standard, so that everybody has a reasonable chance to have the tools with which to compete in a society where we have some equality. Because we start on

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .