Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-vilification and Social Cohesion) Bill 2024

18 February, 2025

Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (16:00): It is a pleasure to rise to follow that impassioned contribution from the member for Mulgrave, whose words talked about the profound impact that the kinds of harmful, hurtful, offensive, vilifying behaviours that this bill seeks to address and to counter have upon people and had upon a younger member for Mulgrave and her mother. It is also a pleasure to rise to follow the Premier, who set out the journey of the Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-vilification and Social Cohesion) Bill 2024 to this place over a very long period of time. I know that the Minister for Veterans played a central role along with other members of the house in considering these issues very deeply through the parliamentary process and considering whether Victoria’s laws were best placed to deal with the kinds of hatred perpetrated and visited upon religious communities – people who were vilified on the basis of their faith in the aftermath of the abomination that took place in Christchurch in March 2019. The overview of this bill has been well traversed, and the Premier talked about why it is relevant, why it is necessary and the impact it will have in communities like hers.

I want to talk about the impact that this bill will have in communities like mine in expanding anti-vilification protections and building upon protections from racial and religious vilification to also include the attributes of disability. This is something that is very dear to me as a past Parliamentary Secretary for Disability but also as somebody who has a deep personal relationship with people with disability and who is part of the broader disability community. The hurt that is occasioned by people being vilified on account of fundamentally who they are – whether that is on the basis of their race, their ethnicity, their religion or their disability, or any of the other characteristics that this bill seeks to protect – has a consequence. It perpetrates a harm. It inflicts a hurt. Government cannot always do everything and regulation cannot fully regulate away that hate, but governments have a role to play in setting out what is deemed acceptable behaviour in a jurisdiction and empowering police to take action where that action is necessary.

We are dealing with some fundamental precepts here, I think. We are a liberal democracy where diversity is manifest in each one of our electorates. In the member for Broadmeadows’ electorate neighbouring mine and in my area, we know this very well. We represent communities that are drawn together from all over the world. We are at citizenship ceremonies every single week, where 165 new citizens, in the context of Hume, are joining our community. They bring with them historical, linguistic, cultural, ethnic and religious traditions stretching back thousands of years in many instances, and that adds to and augments the diversity that we already have in Victoria.

One of those important characteristics is the faith of those people who are joining our communities. The member for Broadmeadows and I are proud to represent communities where well over 80 per cent of residents profess a faith. It is deeply important to them, to their families and to the way in which they live their lives. I assert, as I have done since I came to this place and did in my very first speech, that faith communities and people of faith have an important role to play, including in the public sphere and in the delivery of services, whether that is faith-based education, the hospitals that so many of us rely upon and many other dimensions.

Fundamentally, I think we are a community that is abundantly tolerant – overwhelmingly tolerant – and it is the exceptions to that which are so offensive I think to our sense of who we are as Victorians and who we are as Australians. Predominantly we are people who live and let live, and we want people to be happy irrespective of their faith, their sexuality or their gender – any of the characteristics that this bill seeks to protect. But too often that is not the case. I loop the member for Broadmeadows into my contribution again, because the communities we represent share so many common characteristics. We have spoken with many of our mosque communities recently about the insidious hurt that is being perpetrated against them, particularly women, because of the visibility of their faith through the wearing of the hijab and other head coverings.

In my current role as the Parliamentary Secretary for Multicultural Affairs, I have also been speaking at great length with faith leaders from the Islamic community and also just people who I meet in the context of my role as the member for Greenvale, who talk about the hurt that ignorant, ill-informed hatred has upon them in their day-to-day lives. It inhibits their capacity to live their life to the fullest, to feel comfortable and confident in professing their faith and being who they are. This bill seeks to do something about that, and I cannot fathom why those on the other side would not wish to protect people of faith from abuse, vilification and hatred. The Muslim community has talked at length with me and other members, I know, about the kinds of episodes that were discussed earlier, at Epping Plaza, but that sadly is not an outlier. It is something which is experienced by far too many people on a regular basis across Victoria more broadly.

I want to talk about a couple of the amendments that the Leader of the House tabled recently, which included adding proselytising and preaching into the civil religious purpose exceptions. I really thank the Leader of the House and others, including the current Attorney-General and the previous Attorney-General, who were engaged in incredibly extensive consultation with religious leaders and others across Victoria to ensure that the bill that we have on the table reflects their concerns and accommodates those concerns about the imperative to ensure that we sustain freedom of faith and freedom of religion in our community.

I share the faith of many people in my community, and I have been privileged to join many of them in sharing the mass at St Charbel in Greenvale, St Carlo Borromeo in Greenvale, St George Chaldean parish in Campbellfield and the Holy Spirit Syriac church just in recent weeks and to hear the feedback that members of our community have had for whom freedom of faith is not an abstract concept. They have come from countries and other parts of the world where vilification of them on the basis of their faith has not just been about words, but it has been something deeply visceral and it has resulted in members of their family being targeted, attacked, killed, forced from their homes, driven into other parts of the world as refugees and ultimately to settle in Australia. So when members of my community raise issues around the freedom of religion, the capacity to freely express their faith, it is not an abstract concept. It is something which matters deeply to my community and to me, so I am deeply glad that the bill now includes the words ‘proselytising’ and ‘preaching’ in the civil and religious purpose exceptions. It was always the case that the government intended to ensure that the capacity of Victorians to practise their faith freely was not trammelled by this bill, and I am confident that it now does not. I thank the religious leaders who provided their feedback to the government to ensure that those amendments continue to protect the rights of people of faith to practise that without hindrance or fear.

There have been too many disquieting occasions I think in this place recently when members of this place have deeply cynically, offensively and divisively sought to mislead and manipulate our faith communities, to suggest and to purport somehow that this Parliament is intending to remove prayer, for example, or is seeking to restrict the capacity of religious communities to have schools that reflect their values, their teachings and their traditions. This is simply untrue. It has been untrue at every turn. It is something which is divisive, which is wilfully misleading, and it seeks to I think stoke division on the basis of faith and within our faith communities. I hope that this bill that is on the table now with these amendments does not become another opportunity for that behaviour to occur.

I again assert the importance of people in my community being able to fully express and practise their faith, whether that be the Chaldean faith, the Orthodox faith, the Islamic faith, the Buddhist faith or the Hindu faith. We have a profusion of faith communities across the north, and they play an integral role in our community. Their contribution to our broader state is also important. It cannot be understated. I thank the Attorney-General. I thank the Premier for her words. I thank all of those who have sought to engage in good faith with religious communities and who have brought the amendments to this place today. It has been a pleasure to speak on the bill, and I wish it a speedy passage.