21 March 2023, 13:18
Victorian Legislative Council, Melbourne
David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan):
What a weekend of jarring and contrasting public displays it was. On Sunday I had the pleasure of attending the family fun day at the Australian Islamic Centre in Newport. Families representing the extraordinary diversity of our great city of Naarm gathered in peace, happiness and love to celebrate life, inclusiveness and the coming month of Ramadan. Sunday was 19 March, four years to the day since an Australian neo-Nazi and white supremacist killed 51 people and injured 40 others at two mosques in Christchurch. Who cannot remember the horrors of that day, the brutal realities of neo-Nazism writ large with the blood of innocent members of the Muslim community?
What a contrast to Newport on Sunday was Saturday’s spectacle of black-clad Nazis parading on Spring Street, spewing their vile propaganda, this time against the trans and gender-diverse community.
Let us be clear: while these Nazis may be a tiny excrement smear on the fringes of our community, they create the sort of monster that slaughtered those innocents in Christchurch.
They are the enemies of our multicultural society.
They are the enemies of our inclusive society, be that in terms of faith or political persuasion or, as we saw on Saturday, of sexual preference and gender identity.
I call on every member of this place to unite in condemning these Nazis and their transphobic fellow travellers and to take concrete action to stop the vilification –
[Time expired]
