Labor MPs Maria Vamvakinou and Steve Georganas have come out in condemnation of the controversial motion ‘It’s OK to be white’ put to the Senate by Senator Pauline Hanson last Monday.
The One Nation senator urged her colleagues to acknowledge “the deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation”.
The motion was only narrowly defeated 31-28, with Labor and the Greens voting against, while 23 government senators were in favour.
In a joint statement issued together with MPs Anne Aly and Peter Khalil, Ms Vamvakinou and Mr Georganas likened the motion to “white supremacism”, given the slogan’s historical affiliation with white supremacist groups including the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis.
“We strongly condemn the motion put to the Senate by Senator Pauline Hanson and the decision by 23 government Senators to vote with One Nation to support it,” they said.
“It is not OK to affirm white supremacist slogans in the Australian Senate. It is not OK for 23 members of the Morrison government to endorse white supremacism in the Australian Parliament. This motion should have been defeated easily.”
However the Morrison government has since done a back flip on its vote in favour of the motion, claiming it was due to an “administrative error”.
But the Labor party aren’t buying it.
“Voting for a motion that uses a white supremacist mantra is not an administrative error; it’s a shocking display of just how incompetent this government is, and how out of touch they are with the rest of Australia,” said Vamvakinou and Georganas, going on to claim that the government is more interested in “pandering to an increasingly outspoken far-right fringe in the Australian Parliament because they are desperate to stay in power” rather than representing the majority of Australians.
