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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 4 Hansard (7 May) . . Page.. 1020 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

Ms Hanson attacks foreign aid and calls for it to be abolished; on the other hand, she calls for a halt to immigration. Ironically, Bob Brown was making his inaugural speech to parliament on the same day as Ms Hanson was making hers. I was interested to see, as Mr Moore pointed out, the media was very interested in Ms Hanson's speech but not in Bob Brown's. It would have been a wonderful opportunity to actually compare the two speeches given on that same day, because of the total difference in the world view that was demonstrated by those speeches.

In his speech, he highlighted that if we cut out all foreign aid, particularly foreign aid targeted at assisting women to gain control of making their own decisions about childbirth, surely the end result can only be more people trying to come to Australia. One of the most effective ways of assisting women to gain control over their lives, particularly as far as reproduction is concerned, is appropriate aid. The irony about Ms Hanson's argument is that if we cut off foreign aid altogether we are more likely to get a flood of people coming to this country because of population and resource pressures. As Bob Brown pointed out also, the number of environmental refugees alone is growing very rapidly, and there are already 50 million such people. Another irony is that 100 years ago women were viewed as an underclass or minority group in our society. The only reason Ms Hanson has the opportunity to be in parliament today is that women struggled for that right to be representatives, even though they were very strongly criticised at the time. I wonder whether she would have been one of the women who condemned the suffragettes as radicals who were threatening to destabilise society and so on. There were a number of women who were very strong opponents of the suffragettes.

Having said that, I must say that Pauline Hanson is correct when she says the bipartisan support for economic rationalism has left a negative impact on the community. It is equally correct to criticise Mr Howard for his lack of a strong stand against the misinformation which has come from this book and from Pauline Hanson in the time that she has been an elected leader. Leaders in the community have an obligation to show leadership on these important issues, and it is a very disappointing response from the Federal Liberal Government. We all know that a small piece of misinformation can become completely distorted, particularly in this age of mass communications. Do we want a divided country or do we want a country where people work together, not against each other, to find solutions? In fact, the whole debate about political correctness has been completely manipulated by Mr Howard for political ends. If political correctness means that the voices of people who have been discriminated against or denied access to basic services or the same opportunities as everyone else are now being heard, then that is hardly something to be criticised.

Noel Pearson spoke last week about how the Federal Government is assisting with the creation of division in our society. He did not place as much blame on Ms Hanson as on the Liberals, because he said the subliminal message behind their campaign "for all of us" was to drive a wedge between groups in society. The stupid thing about the argument is that, once you single out Aboriginal people, women, gays, environmentalists, anyone else who is not of Anglo-Saxon background, then what is left? What is mainstream anyway? Noel Pearson described what has been going on over the past 16 months as a US-style "wedge politics", trading off resentment of one group against other groups in our

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