GRIEVANCE DEBATE
Ms COFFEY (Griffith) (12:42): In my family home, three of Peter Drew's 'Aussie' posters hang above our dining table. To me, they say something simple about this country: Australia belongs to all of us. Belonging is one of the most basic promises a country makes to its people.
Racism breaks that promise. Sometimes racism enters public life through words spoken, including, sometimes, in this place. Sometimes it's pasted across a wall.
For a decade, Peter Drew's 'Aussie' posters have appeared on walls across Australia. He launched the series in 2016 and has sprung up around the nation ever since about 5,000 of these posters, each printed and coloured by hand. Over the past few weeks, many have popped up across my local community in Brisbane, including several near my home in Norman Park.
I was heartened to see these renowned works of art appear in my very own community. On Sunday, two racist far-right nationalists continued their petty campaign cowardly in the night by pasting hateful material across these posters. They attempted to hijack this art about belonging and turn it into a threat, suggesting to Australians of colour, 'You are not one of us.' But they are so very wrong, and my community is calling them out.
On Sunday, I was travelling between community events in West End and Cannon Hill when I saw these defaced posters. I felt anger. It wasn't the kind that settles and fades but the kind that lands in your stomach and propels your limbs to act.
So I went home, I grabbed a stepladder and the best tool available—which was a squeegee on a long pole—and I took my tallest son. He asked where we were going, and I told him, 'To fight racists.' He jumped in the car so quickly—quicker than you could believe, that little fella. As we started removing the hateful material, Jacob—a neighbour and a community member who I don't know—drove past, and he stopped his car to come and help us.
Scott brought a tall ladder and a paint scraper, thanks to his wife, Sonia. Locals shouted out, 'Thank you!' They put their hands on their hearts in gratitude. Racism has absolutely no place in our community.
These far-right nationalists tried to tell Brisbane who belongs. Brisbane answered them loud and clear. I will not repeat the names of the far-right nationalists.
Let Hansard instead record Jacob, Scott and the community that refused to let hate speak for Griffith. Peter Drew's work has been part of my family life for years. One of the first gifts I gave my husband was a set of three 'Aussie' posters.
Together these posters could not be more quintessentially Australian. Together they read 'Aussie, Aussie, Aussie.' They hang in our dining room. They have watched over meals, heartfelt conversations and family celebrations.
My children have grown up underneath their faces. The portraits come from records held by the National Archives of Australia and show people forced to apply for certificates of exemption from the dictation test under the White Australia policy. The dictation test operated from 1901 to 1958.
Until its abolishment, not one person passed it. Non-white Australians needed exemption papers to travel or risked being locked out of their own country. Officials photographed them, recorded their features and often took their handprints.
Peter Drew took those records and put them in public view. Beneath each face he placed a single word: 'Aussie'. It was an act to challenge exclusionary definitions of Australian national identity.
Australian identity does not belong to one race, one faith or one family story. To deface this work with racist material is not clever. It is not satire or debate.
It's a deliberate attempt to alienate and to intimidate. I call it for what it is: racism. Griffith rejects it.
Peter's work opens a conversation about Australians who are excluded from our national story. Far-right nationalist ideology tries to intimidate Australians who are living here now. Peter's iconic work represents the inclusive, warm, welcoming Australia that I believe in and challenges the narrow, exclusionary definitions of Australian identity that are pushed by our political opponents.
In 1996, when I was 15, now senator Pauline Hanson used her first speech here to claim that Australia was 'being swamped by Asians'. Those words frightened families and gave others permission to say their quiet, ugly part out loud. At 16 I helped establish Young Australians for Anti-Racism and Reconciliation.
I have opposed Senator Hanson's politics ever since, and I will keep doing so. If this is the political boss fight to be had, I have been preparing for it my entire life. Political leaders carry a heavy duty.
Our words can draw Australians together or put a target on our neighbours' backs. Fear and division weaponised for political gain can become slurs on a wall. Nothing weakens our social cohesion more than people who use our differences to try to drive us apart.
And any honest account of belonging in Australia must begin with the people who have always belonged here. Our First Nations people are first Australians and the oldest continuous cultures on Earth. Every non-Indigenous family story in Australia begins with arrival.
Some came in hope, some fled war or persecution, and others came through colonisation, dispossession and violence. I was raised to welcome strangers, to include others and to stand beside people doing it tough. I was also raised to face the truth of our country and our history.
That truth runs through my own family. My ancestors were Queensland pastoralists who perpetrated terrible violence against First Nations people near Bundaberg and Gin Gin. I cannot change that history, but I can choose the responsibility I carry forward.
We honour that responsibility through our actions today. People should feel it in their daily lives through safety, access to health care, legal help and fair treatment. That was a focus of a recent roundtable I hosted with the Assistant Minister for Immigration and member for Kingsford Smith.
Together we met with representatives from five organisations that support migrants, refugees and people seeking asylum in my community, and I'd like to briefly highlight their work. Multicultural Australia helps new Queenslanders settle, work, study and access health care, including families and unaccompanied humanitarian minors. The Romero Centre helps refugees and people who are seeking asylum to find housing, work, migration advice and mental health care.
The Refugee and Immigration Legal Service, or RAILS, is Queensland's only community legal centre specialising in refugee and immigration law. And for more than 40 years the Immigrant Women's Support Service has helped migrants and refugee women, children and young people affected by domestic, family and sexual violence to find safety and regain control. Finally, World Wellness Group's clinic cares for more than 3,000 people a year, including people without Medicare.
I would like to thank them all for the incredible work they do for our community. A division having been called in the House of Representatives— Sitting suspended from 12:49 to 13:03 Ms COFFEY: Migrants and refugees strengthen Griffith and Australia. They run businesses, care for patients, teach children and build homes.
Many have survived things no person should endure. They helped others build safer lives. The child translating a letter at the kitchen table can grow up to write laws in this place.
The nurse who arrived as a refugee can care for us in our hardest hour. The new neighbour can become the person we call when everything falls apart. The far right wants Australia to fear these stories.
My community sees friends, colleagues and neighbours. We all have a duty to call out racism whenever and wherever we see it. We can leave racist messages standing or we can pull them down and say who we really are.
On Sunday, my community's answer was simple: you do not own the word 'Aussie'. You do not decide who belongs. You do not speak for Griffith.
Those racist far-right nationalists tried to paste a smaller Australia over the real one. Our community peeled it back. Not today racists, not today.