MATTERS OF URGENCY
Senator McKIM (Tasmania—Australian Greens Whip) (18:18): There's something quite sinister going on with immigration policy in Australia today, and it needs to be called out. Here's what's happening, folks. One Nation is pulling the strings on immigration in this country, and the Labor Party and the coalition are trying to outcompete each other to dance to the One Nation tune.
Here is how it's working. Labor wants a bipartisan immigration policy, which means that the Labor Party wants the coalition to agree. This is the very coalition that is currently engaged in a race to the bottom on immigration policy with One Nation—a race to the bottom on who can demonise migrants in the most unfair way.
You've got Senator Pauline Hanson driving the bus, and Mr Albanese and Mr Taylor are just along for the ride. Labor is letting One Nation and a Liberal Party that is racing to outflank them on the right dictate its migration policy. This attitude from Labor is craven.
It's weak. It's cowardly, and migrants to Australia and First Nations people will pay the price and are paying the price for Labor's cowardice. I'll tell you what.
When the far right demands migrants be blamed for housing, for wages, for the state of our hospitals, for infrastructure or for the cracks in the footpath outside people's homes—whatever real or imagined problems that migrants are going to get blamed for next by One Nation—Labor's response should be to fight back. It should be to call it out. It should be to fight back, and it should be to absolutely have the backs of migrants in this country, but what does the Labor Party do?
It caves. It accepts the One Nation premise. It shifts to the right.
It gives the far right another victory and then wonders why the far right keeps on growing. Let us never forget a couple of things about the Australian Labor Party. They have spent more years in their history supporting the White Australia policy than they have opposing it.
Labor invented the torture of indefinite immigration detention, and that history ought to impose a particular responsibility on the Labor Party to stand up against radicalised anti-immigration policies today. Instead Labor is showing Australians that, if One Nation and the coalition shout loudly enough, Labor will retreat. You cannot spend one day denouncing Senator Hanson and the next day let her ghostwrite your policy.
Every Labor surrender legitimises the far right. The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Blyth ): The question is that the urgency motion moved by Senator Hanson be agreed to.