Page 1078 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 21 March 2012
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MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Mr Seselja, just one minute. I have listened for some time to this recent tack that you are taking and I cannot see what it has got to do with egg production. Would you remain relevant to the debate, please.
MR SESELJA: Sure. We are talking about an amendment here—
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: Yes, we are talking about—
MR SESELJA: about condemning illegal acts, advocacy groups and their illegal acts. The amendment is actually specifically on this, so I am speaking to the amendment. It is about condemning, it is about showing leadership and it is about not giving a nod and a wink to groups that it is okay in certain circumstances to go and deliberately destroy property because you believe your cause is just.
Many people believe they have a just cause. I would agree with some of them; I would disagree with others. But it does not excuse people going out there and attacking scientists or attacking property, destroying property, intimidating workers, intimidating business owners, intimidating scientists, as we have seen.
I think what we heard from Ms Le Couteur there was just how uncomfortable Ms Le Couteur, Mr Rattenbury and others are on this point. They went some way to condemning the people at Parkwood. When they are anonymous, they can condemn them. When it is Greenpeace, apparently that is not worthy of condemnation. The Greens are, of course, very closely linked with Greenpeace. So when it comes to their mates committing these kinds of acts, they refuse to condemn them.
They should have condemned them and they should have sent a very clear message that, for the Greens, whilst protest, legitimate protest, is acceptable, whilst advocating for change is completely acceptable, there is a right way and a wrong way to go about advocating for change, and breaking and entering and destroying property deliberately is not acceptable and should be condemned. That was the simple proposition that was put to the Greens on a number of occasions, and they have been unable to respond to that in a legitimate way, unable to respond to that in a clear way that says: “Yes, we support protest. But we don’t support this kind of illegal protest, this kind of intimidation of scientists, this kind of intimidation of industries and this kind of destruction of property.”
So that is why we see now Ms Le Couteur changing the story and saying sub judice is actually why they cannot support this motion. It is actually about sub judice. That is nonsense. That is absolute nonsense. And we have seen time and again on this issue just how uncomfortable the Greens have been. And they have been rightly condemned, as Mrs Dunne pointed out, by some in the media, not necessarily traditional allies of the Liberal Party but just stating common sense, common sense that the community would all agree with.
So I commend Mrs Dunne’s amendments. I think they should be supported. I think we should make a clear statement as an Assembly on these kinds of acts. We should no longer give a nod and a wink to this kind of behaviour. We should say: “There are
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