THE SENATE

PROOF
ADJOURNMENT
Racial Discrimination Act
SPEECH
Tuesday, 17 June 2014
BY AUTHORITY OF THE SENATE
Tuesday, 17 June 2014 THE SENATE 74
CHAMBER
SPEECH
Date Tuesday, 17 June 2014 Source Senate
Page 74 Proof Yes
Questioner Responder
Speaker Milne, Sen Christine Question No.
Senator MILNE (TasmaniaLeader of the
Australian Greens) (19:59): Australia is a tolerant,
multicultural nation. We value free speech and
democracy and we celebrate the fact that we have
built a society where people can live without fear of
being verbally or physically abused because of their
ethnicity, religion or cultural traditions. Section 18C
of the Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful
to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate a person or
group because of their race, colour or national or ethnic
origin. This legal measure enables people subject to
racial discrimination to pursue those who harass them.
Removing or weakening section 18C will mean that
targets of racial vilification will have no option but to
appeal to pre-existing criminal offences which serve
quite a different purpose and which have a much higher
standard of proof. Until now, 18C has served us well
by giving the public robust instruments to fight insults,
humiliation and racial vilification. Weakening 18C will
signal to some that they are now safe to engage in racist
attacks against vulnerable minorities. The Greens have
zero tolerance for racism, and we stand alongside all
Australian minority communities and condemn racism
completely.
The importance of preserving 18C is clear but made
even clearer by my own experience of Fredrick Toben
and his persistent and ongoing vilification of the Jewish
community. Mr Toben is an Australian Holocaust
denier who insists that the Holocaust is a lie. He
maintains that it is a deception that millions of people
were murdered in Nazi gas chambers. For making
these false assertions he was imprisoned in Germany
for defaming the dead, and attempts have been made
since to have him deported to Germany to face similar
charges. Toben routinely insults and tries to humiliate
the Australian Jewish community. Not only are his
websites vehicles for spreading historical falsehoods
and extreme anti-Semitic sentiment but he and his
associates have also mailed offensive materials to
members of the Jewish community. He has attended
talks given by Jewish survivors of the Holocaust
with the intent of creating a disruption. He constantly
demeans and disparages Holocaust survivors by calling
them 'unreliable witnesses' or says they are 'lying'.
In 2013 I gave a comment to The Australian newspaper
that Toben is a Holocaust denier and that in so doing
he fabricates history and is an anti-Semite. In spite of
calling the Holocaust a lie, in spite his being jailed
in Germany for insulting the dead and in spite of his
anti-Semitic writing on his websites, Toben took these
comments to be defamatory and, as a result, I am now
being sued for defamation. Even a cursory examination
of Toben's prolific writings and numerous interviews
shows that these observations are true. He repeatedly
refers to the Holocaust as a 'myth', a 'fiction' and a
'physical impossibility'. In a letter to Jewish academic
Deborah Lipstadt he writes:
I refuse to believe, without physical proof, in the
systematic extermination of six million European Jews
in homicidal gas chambers.
The Holocaust believers have never proven their case

Not only does he repeat a falsified version of history,

saying the Holocaust 'did not happen', 'there were no
gas chambers', and the existence of the Holocaust is
simply 'war time propaganda'; he says it is just 'prison
gossip' concocted by concentration camp prisoners. He
entertains the notion that the Holocaust was invented
for Jewish financial gain. He writes:
All anyone needs to do is draw the Nazi card and the
coffers open and the scrum is on to see who can get a
snoutful out of the Holocaust trough. There is, indeed,
no business like Shoah business!
He has also said:
The Jew fury knew no bounds and succeeded in
smearing Germans with the Holocaust-Shoah lies,
something that admirably suited the Anglo-American-
Zionist financial internationalists.
He has compared notable Australian Jewish figures
to the Jewish stereotype of Shylock, saying that they
are after 'their pound of flesh'. He routinely refers to
so-called Jewish supremacism and maintains that the
Jewish authorities are behind horrific events like 9/11.
In 1996 Jeremy Jones of the Jewish Council of
Australia challenged Toben's anti-Semitic writings
in court. The judges agreed that Toben's website
contained anti-Semitic material and ordered that it
be removed. In defiance of this, Toben continued
to produce content that was anti-Semitic. The courts
ultimately found Toben guilty of contempt of court and
Toben was fined and sentenced to a short stint in prison.
Tuesday, 17 June 2014 THE SENATE 75
CHAMBER
Toben's complete contempt for the legal system and the
Australian judiciary then led him to reflect:
In my case the judges involved in my matter were not
Jewish but they bent to Jewish pressure, which enables
me to state they became morally and intellectually
bankrupt.
As a result of all his persistent breaches of the law
and litigious behaviour, Toben is now an undischarged
bankrupt and, having nothing more to lose financially,
with the assistance of financial backers he will continue
to use the courts as a platform for his anti-Semitic
views, to the great personal and financial cost of those
he sues and the Jewish community he continues to
vilify. He wants show trials.
It is clear that Toben's views are detestable
and denigrate the Australian Jewish community.
Furthermore, the existence of his denialist claims
sullies the memory of all those who were brutally
exterminated in the Holocaust. His views are a
shameless attack on Holocaust survivors and their
families. I have stood at the Dachau concentration
camp. I have been to the Yad Vashem Holocaust
museum in Jerusalem. It is a powerful memorial to the
six million Jews who died. I have been to the Dachau
memorial and the concentration camp memorials at
the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Parismemorials of
Auschwitz and of Bergen-Belsenand I will never
stand by or allow the likes of Toben to so insult the dead
or to belittle their suffering or the suffering of those
who survived or those who have come after. Whilst
I will continue to stand up for a peaceful two-state
solution in the case of Israel and Palestine and whilst
I will continue to criticise the government of Israel
for its illegal occupation of Palestinian territories, I
will never stand idly by and fail to condemn anti-
Semitism. So I am defending the defamation charges
in court not only to protect my personal reputation
and that of the Australian Greens but also to make a
stand on behalf of the whole Australian community in
challenging Toben's abhorrent views.
But it will not be enough just to win this case against
Toben. There must be adequate legal recourse to
protect people from racial vilification in the future.
That is why we need to retain section 18C of the Racial
Discrimination Act. Without it, Toben and his ilk will
be let off the leash, free to vilify and insult Jewish
people in the name of political debate. Toben is deeply
invested in the repeal of 18C. He cannot wait for it to be
removed so he can continue his assault on the Jewish
community unrestrained. He has even gone so far as
to call 18C the 'Toben law' because he egoistically
claims that it targets Holocaust deniers in particular. He
has claimed that 18C finds its origins in an Australian
Jewish effort to silence dissenters.
If we take away the protections offered to us by 18C,
then we expose racial, ethnic and national minorities
to vilification and abuse with no effective protection
against these racist predators. That is not the kind of
society that wave after wave of migrants have built in
Australia, and it is not the kind of society the Greens
will stand by and allow Australia to become.