November 19, 2020
Department of the Senate
Parliament House
CANBERRA, ACT 2600
To the Committee,
RE: Supplementary submission to Submission #8
In my original submission under Part M and N I made mention of a petition – a petition that was also mentioned in submission #1 from Spectrum Labor (a group I co-founded). This petition was titled “Inquiry into hate speech against the Autistic community” and was sent to the House of Representatives for a response by the Attorney General. The petition text is contained in Appendix 5 (I am carrying on the numbering from my previous appendices to my original submission) and call also be found on the Parliament House website under the identification number of EN1285.
74 signatures, including my own as the principal petitioner, were added – and the petition was tabled In April 2020. Naturally the pandemic and subsequent closures and so forth delayed the response, but it was finally tabled on August 24, 2020 and is presented in Appendix 6. In this response, the Attorney General recommended that the petition be presented to you as a submission – not noting that submissions had already closed on July 17, 2020. I suspect the response was written before July 17 but not tabled until after.
I sent an email to the Attorney General’s office pointing this out – not informing him that I had already made a submission as I didn’t consider that necessary at the time. As of the date of this document, I have received no response. After being informed that the Petition Committee was not empowered to pass the petition on at my request as the principal petitioner, it has been recommended by the Secretariat of this Committee that I make this supplementary submission.
This also gives me the opportunity to provide additional information about hate speech. In Victoria, the Parliament there started a Parliamentary inquiry through it’s Legal and Social Issues Committee into Anti-Vilification Protections. Spectrum Labor put in a submission which is relevant to the petition and I provide it accordingly in Appendix 7. Many examples are contained here, including the remarks of Andrew Bolt against Greta Thunberg – which since the submission were ruled by the Australian Press Council as against their standards. Mention is made of Yuval Levental and Thomas Clements, who I mentioned and provided documents by in my original submission along with my responses to them.
In addition to this, I am also providing other examples of hate speech which were provided during the campaign behind the petition in February 2020. This included the statements of Indian Catholic priest Dominic Valanmanal as depicted in a story on the ABC website on July 18, 2019 (see Appendix 8). His statements are horribly ill-informed and hateful without a doubt.
I also want on the record the statement of Solihin Millin, who tried (and failed) to take the matter of vaccines to the High Court. As depicted in the submission to the Legal and Social Issues Committee, Spectrum Labor and I as an individual regard the claim that vaccines cause Autism as another example of hate speech. And yet in his High Court application,
which he made publicly available, Mr Millin tried to claim (without any proof or foundation)
that there would be 1 in 2 Autistic children by 2030 if vaccines weren't stopped. | bring this
to the Committee’s attention not because of what he said about vaccines but rather that claim of 1 in 2 Autistics as though it was a bad thing. One couldn’t be more hateful if they tried in my honest opinion. The document he had the claim in (more than once) is way too
big to be provided to the Committee. For the record — in an unrelated but | believe relevant
event — Mr Millin is facing criminal charges relating to his organisation of the September 5, 2020 Freedom Day Protest in Melbourne. His opposition relates to the COVID-19 vaccine and believing there is no pandemic.
| do recognise that the Committee's Terms of Reference do not include vaccines and this is
respected. However the threat to the Autistic community by the lies spoken by the anti
vaccine community can not be disregarded, and | implore the Committee to take this into
account.
Yours faithfully,