I too rise to speak on the Crimes Amendment Bill 2026, and the aim of this bill is to make a very small but very poignant challenge to the operation of our anti-vilification reforms. I will start by noting that this is the third time that we have tried to introduce this amendment, and each time those in the other place have rejected it – I want that on record.

What this bill is about, to put it simply, is stopping racism. It is so simple. It is about tackling serious racial vilification that goes on in our community. Indeed there is a major impetus for this change, which we have seen over the past couple of months, and a part of that has been antisemitism – hate weaponised and directed against our Jewish community here in Melbourne and of course in Sydney too. Everyone, every single one of us, deserves to live a life free from extremism, discrimination and hate. As I reflect on this, I also want to acknowledge another very important issue that this bill will help address, and that is Islamophobia. We have seen a massive rise in disgustingly vile racist attacks on our Muslim communities that are not warranted in the slightest. In December the Virgin Mary Mosque in Hoppers Crossing, which I have been to on many occasions – a wonderful and welcoming Muslim community – had their fence defaced with the phrase ‘Get some pork on your fork.’ I can tell you that when I speak to the Muslim constituents in my electorate they do not go around telling people who are not Muslim not to eat pork; I cannot for the life of me imagine why someone felt the need to do this. Two weeks later, ICOM, the Islamic College of Melbourne, one of our local fabulous Islamic schools in Wyndham, over in Tarneit, which I had the privilege of visiting many times as the member for Tarneit, was defaced in a similar manner, and it would not surprise me if it was the same person. Their fence was graffitied and defaced with an equally vile message, and do you know what it said? It said, ‘Not okay to eat bacon but okay to’ – and I am not going to say the word – ‘goats.’ This is something that someone has decided to write, likely in the middle of the night under the cover of darkness, at a faith-based school for children, so children can turn up to school and read that. I can tell you what I think they were hoping for: they were hoping that children – students at that school – their parents and their teachers would see this, and they would feel unwelcome in their own community and feel afraid, and worst of all, they would feel threatened.

I want to point out that these attacks on local Islamic schools and mosques are very unlikely to be connected or in response to the horrific events at Bondi. That incident at Virgin Mary Mosque took place around two weeks before the Bondi attack. This is not some kind of retaliatory impulse, and even if it was it is no excuse, but what we know is that there are other factors that are driving this kind of hatred and vilification that absolutely necessitate these reforms. A big part of that, I have to say, is the extremely disturbing rhetoric espoused by people like Pauline Hanson, One Nation and those kinds of supporters. I was absolutely disgusted when she was interviewed recently on Sky News and said quite bluntly that there are no good Muslims. This is the same person who twice wore a burqa into the Senate chamber up in Canberra as a publicity stunt to antagonise Muslims, and in that same interview Ms Hanson thought it would be a good idea to single out and target the suburb of Lakemba in Sydney, a very, very multicultural community and a wonderful community which happens to have a major mosque.

Those comments unfortunately – naturally – led to a series of threats being made to Lakemba mosque, which is surprising to no-one who knows what that kind of rhetoric is intending to do. No-one is surprised by this. I mean, is anyone in this chamber surprised by this? These are stock-standard tactics employed by parties and movements like Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party and their friends. It is deeply, deeply disturbing that those opposite and the Leader of the Opposition have refused to rule out a secret preference deal with One Nation.

As I said in this place a couple of weeks ago, it is all about race. It is all about skin colour – whether you are white or you are not white. When you separate that, for God’s sake, about what shade or flavour of white you might actually be, communities like mine are always, always the first to suffer. When Pauline Hanson first came to prominence 30 years ago, she said that Australia was being swamped by Asians. She was trying to target communities like our Vietnamese community in Melbourne’s west, an amazing, amazing community. Then she returned to the Senate in 2016, and it was all about targeting Muslims. That was the flavour of the decade. We might recall when Muslim communities, many of whom had been here for decades or had been born here, were suddenly cast as terrorists and extremists who wanted to destroy the Australian way of life. Of course the racists never go after the extremists; they always, always target vulnerable people. These kinds of people target people in my own community, like Muslim women, mums in hijabs with their kids at the shops, old men just trying to go about their daily lives or, even worse – and I see this on a regular basis – children. They target schoolchildren, literally kids who are probably more culturally acclimatised and aligned to whatever these people think of when they talk about Western civilisation. This is never okay. It is not who we are. We must stand up against this.

It is funny watching the knots that people will tie themselves up in because they are so full of hate. Very recently I made a number of posts on social media wishing my Muslim communities in my electorate a very warm and welcome Ramadan season. I have made hundreds of little gift boxes with my office to hand out at the community iftar dinners across my communities, like the one I attended with the Australia Light Foundation in Tottenham on the weekend. This is just so sad. These posts attracted hundreds of the most vile comments, the majority of which came from trolls and the majority of which were not actually from Victoria. Ironically, what they were saying was, ‘What about Lent? Are you going to be doing Lent boxes for Christmas?’ That was what the majority of those comments were about – Christians, or so-called Christians, who were triggered by a local MP wishing her Muslim community a happy Ramadan. They forgot the whole point of Lent is to give up something or sacrifice something. Why be consistent with your faith when you can beat up on another religious community instead? It was a very sad state of affairs.

I have no patience and no tolerance for this kind of hatred in our community, and it is why I overwhelmingly back these anti-vilification reforms. It is why we need to remove the requirement that only the DPP may sign off on prosecution of serious vilification offences and allow police to do the same, because what has happened until now is that until Victoria Police can get the sign-off from the DPP, the offenders, these terrible people who spread this kind of hate, have more time to continue to commit these awful offences unabated. This needs to change, because we cannot allow racism to fester unchallenged. That is why this is such an important bill.

This side of the chamber will always stand up for our communities of faith and our multicultural communities. We talk about it each and every single day here in this place and out in the electorate time and time again. What makes Victoria a great place to be and what makes Australia a great place to be able to have the privilege to live and raise a family is that everyone has the freedom to be who they are and to practise their faith. Whatever colour they are, whatever colour their eyes are or their skin is, whatever language they speak or country they were born in, they came here for a better life, and we raise our children and our grandchildren together.

We must push back against this vile hate. It is deeply, deeply disturbing that the Leader of the Opposition has refused to call out a secret preference deal with One Nation, who continue to spread the most vile racism across our communities, inciting hatred. It must be called out. You cannot pretend to stand with multicultural communities, as the Leader of the Opposition did in Footscray Park with our Vietnamese community on the weekend, and then behind closed doors do secret preference deals with racists. It is wrong and it must be called out. I commend the bill to the house.