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Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Page: 7995

Senator BOB BROWN (Tasmania—Leader of the Australian Greens) (16:13): I seek leave to make a short statement.

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT: Leave is granted for two minutes.

Senator BOB BROWN: Senator Bernardi is rightly indicted by his own words. This is a motion to mark the 55th anniversary of the bloody uprising in Budapest, Hungary, which I remember very clearly. I remember at the time, as a young fellow, being appalled by the failure of the West, including the Menzies government, to intervene. That has since been a matter of some criticism. It came, of course, in the wake of the Suez crisis, and the governments of Dwight Eisenhower and Robert Menzies felt, in the wake of that, enfeebled in terms of the tanks rolling into Budapest.

But this is a motion to remark the travail of the Hungarian people. What we are seeing here is a debasing of that process by Senator Bernardi and his Independent co-host of this motion for a domestic political pointscoring exercise, which I think dishonours the Hungarian people in toto, including the thousands of Hungarians who came to this country and made such a great contribution to it, as would be marked by the amendment from the Greens if it were to pass.