ADJOURNMENT

Senator FARUQI (New South Wales—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens) (19:39): It has been curious to watch the outpouring of support for multiculturalism from Labor and the Liberals since Senator Hanson unveiled her sad, bleak vision of a monocultural Australia, where she decreed that we must all live under the same so-called cultural umbrella—the same food, the same dress, the same ideas.

This is the iconic Paul Hogan's assessment of Senator Hanson: She's a pelican, yeah. Outrageous, so racist. It sounds very much like this stupid boofhead over here, Trump.

I knew there was a reason I loved Crocodile Dundee. The fact is nothing that comes from her surprises me. One Nation has been pulling the same racist con job for the last 30 years.

Around the time I came into this parliament, Senator Hanson was publicly describing my religion as a disease we need to be vaccinated against, so I'm not surprised when she descends further down the pole of human decency to farm outrage and generate clickbait. Here is the part that should really sting. Labor and the Liberals don't get to pat themselves on the back.

The reality is their vision of multiculturalism leaves a lot to be desired. If Pauline Hanson's monoculture is a nightmare, then the Labor and Liberal version is no dream either. It's still assimilation, just with more colourful clothes, better garam masala and a few more brown and black people in parliament.

They still reduce multicultural communities to observers in the political process—where we are to be seen and not heard, where we are the cause of every problem in this society, where we are too successful and taking too many jobs or not successful enough and sitting on welfare, where we are taking up all the housing but you stay silent about property barons holding homes and the hundreds of thousands of dwellings that remain vacant.

The real question is: why have Senator Hanson's repugnant views—which, to her credit and to the detriment of everyone else, have been remarkably consistent—found a home after 30 years of her beating the same drum? Sure, we can point to the bot farms pumping out ridiculous, AI-generated One Nation slop. We could point to the billionaire patronage of people like Gina Rinehart, who told a summit recently that we should hand over free land in Queensland to Israeli weapons manufacturers to build their child-killing drones.

But the deeper reason is successive governments, Labor and Liberal, have made our place—a migrant's place—in Australia conditional. A good migrant, apparently, is one who shuts up, smiles into photo opportunities and invites politicians to their cultural events with no expectations of being treated equally. I know this makes those believers in fairytale land over here uncomfortable, but let's look at the evidence.

This Labor government has decided that international students will be the scapegoat for the housing crisis that they did not cause. You have passed some of the most draconian antirefugee and antimigrant laws in this country's history—worse even than John Howard's laws. You gaslight communities of colour which oppose genocide and oppose their homelands being bombed and their families being killed by your ally Israel.

You put ten-year-old First Nations kids behind bars without any qualms. You refuse to even respond to the National Anti-Racism Framework, let alone implement it. So don't you swan around here telling multicultural communities that you are the ones saving them from One Nation when you are the very ones who have created the conditions that have allowed One Nation and its particular brand of racist, far-right hate and division to thrive.

Multicultural Australia has become very skin-deep. While politicians are quick to point out the advantages of multiculturalism through cherrypicked cultural celebrations and economic contributions of migrant communities and have been quick to quote us as voting blocs, they have completely ignored the deeper issues of equality, racism, discrimination, lack of support and exploitation.

We want an antiracist country where there is a true sense of belonging for everyone who lives here. This is about embracing true multiculturalism, not one that is assimilation disguised as such.