Australia news live: Burke wanted tougher hate speech laws but ‘we have to deal with the parliament we have’; Sydney lockout measures end

Follow updates live

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Greens said it would have been ‘betrayal’ to support rushed hate speech laws

David Shoebridge, the Greens’ justice spokesperson, detailed his opposition to the hate speech bill in an interview with RN this morning.

This was legislation that was already extremely expansive, which already had a rushed process when it was presented as draft legislation last week. And then it got radically changed by a deal between the Coalition and Labour in the last 24 hours, substantially expanded. …

I think it would have been beyond reckless. It would have been a sort of betrayal of basic sense of democracy to ram through legislation last night with such broad-ranging impacts when every legal expert we spoke to said it was reckless and dangerous and they didn’t know the scope of it.

Part of delivering safety is doing something about bigotry. The laws that have gone through do give us more tools to effectively to be able to combat antisemitism. They don’t give us as many tools as the government would have liked, but we have to deal with the parliament that we have.

And there’s no doubt that we now have the strongest protections Australia has ever had.

If we can’t get those criminal hate speech laws through in the wake of the Bondi massacre, then I just don’t see how the situation in the parliament’s about to change. …

I wish we had tougher laws than we were able to get through, but we have to deal with the parliament that we have.

Continue reading…

Source: www.theguardian.com

Read full article