Right-wing crossbench Senator Ralph Babet is defying parliamentary orders to attend behaviour workshops for “using racist, homophobic, sexist or other language” to demean others.
The order relates to two keys breached of the parliamentarian standards after social media posts by the elected United Australia Party Senator in November 2024.
An official standards panel had found in September 2025 that his comments on Elon Musk’s platform X had fallen short of behaviour expected by parliamentarians and wasn’t respectful of differing views.
Sign up to The Nightly’s newsletters.
Get the first look at the digital newspaper, curated daily stories and breaking headlines delivered to your inbox.
By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.
“The Panel considered Senator Babet’s posts to be offensive, disrespectful and harmful to individuals who are Commonwealth parliamentary workplace participants,” the Independent Parliamentary Standard Commission shared in a statement.
Senator Babet was supposed to participate in one-on-one training conducted by the Parliamentary Workplace Support Service before December 20 but is yet to front up.
The training would focus on “Safe and Respectful Workplaces” and “the Behaviour Code”.
He was also supposed to enter into “a behaviour agreement” with the Standard Commission “wherein he provides an undertaking to refrain from using racist, homophobic, sexist or other language demeaning of others”.
Senator Babet declined to comment on the orders and his compliance with them when questioned by The Nightly but highlighted a motion he moved in the Senate for freedom of speech.
The motion calls for the government to repeal the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism (Criminal and Migration Laws) Act 2026 which he claimed “infringes Australians’ fundamental rights to freedom of expression and association”.
“As long as someone doesn’t specifically call for, let’s say, burning a building down or actual physical, legitimate violence, you should be allowed to speak freely in a democratic country,” he said.
“I think most people, if you sat them down and asked: ‘do you value free speech?’ they would say ‘yes, we do’.”
Senator Babet was elected as the sole federal representative for mining billionaire Clive Palmer’s UAP in 2022 before it was deregistered but the Victorian still identifies under its name.
