David Penberthy: Freedom of speech should be celebrated - but attacks on Bill Leak and Catherine McGregor show this isn’t so

David Pemberthy | OURS is a nation that celebrates freedom of speech – unless, of course, people don’t agree with you.

Controversial cartoonist Bill Leak.

IT says a lot about the censorious nature of these times that a woman who has actually gone to the trouble of having a sex-change operation can be cowed into silence for the impurity of her thinking on the transgender question.

The last thing the world needs is another opinion piece on that issue, and this isn’t one.

It is, instead, about the issue of freedom of speech – a freedom which should be a straightforward one to define. With the exception of genuine incitement towards acts of violence, people should be allowed to say what they like.

In 2016, there is an insidious and growing insistence in some quarters that speech which is troubling, challenging or confronting should be run through a filter and, if necessary, shut down. These days, it doesn’t take much to trouble, challenge or confront – living as we do in an increasingly hypersensitive world – where so-called “micro-aggressions”, or what’s known (excruciatingly) as non-inclusive language, can be elevated to the level of full-blown hate speech.

Catherine McGregor is the best known transgender advocate in Australia. The journalist and soldier was controversially nominated as Australian of the Year. I had no quarrel with her nomination as her life story is a pretty wild one that has encouraged people like me to challenge their thinking on this issue.

Bizarrely, it was McGregor who found herself in strife for challenging the thinking of some in the transgender community who have doggedly defended the Safe Schools program, despite widespread concerns about whether some of its contents are age-inappropriate or unnecessarily explicit.

McGregor dared wonder aloud whether it made sense to let four-year-olds decide which gender they wished to choose.

Her view, and I am paraphrasing, was that at such an age these really little kids are not mentally equipped to deal with these more adult concepts. For the crime of uttering this fairly bland opinion, she has now been sacked as a spokeswoman for Kaleidoscope, a not-for-profit group that promotes the rights of LGBTI people.

Prominent transgender advocate Catherine McGregor.

If you think this is a bit of a joke, consider the case of Bill Leak, someone who makes jokes for a living, and usually hilarious ones at that.

As the chief cartoonist for The Australian, he is technically a colleague of mine, working for News Corp, but this isn’t some suck job for a sister publication. Indeed, as a tabloid person, I am hardwired to regard The Australian as often dull and ponderous, which helps make Bill such a breath of fresh air.

He is one of the funniest people I have ever met. I know nothing of his politics and doubt that he really has any. Based on my meetings with him, he strikes me as a nihilist, yet, over the past few weeks, Leak has found himself being utterly smashed as a fascist, a racist, a white supremacist – all on the basis of a cartoon.

It was a cartoon that demonstrated that the power of comic illustration comes not just from cracking jokes but causing outrage. Inspired by the fallout from the Northern Territory royal commission into the treatment of indigenous juvenile prisoners, the cartoon depicted an indigenous police officer presenting a wayward indigenous teenager to his father.

“You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility,” the copper says. “Yeah righto, what’s his name then?” the dad replies, holding a long neck of beer.

The cartoon is definitely not funny and is wholly provocative.

The point Leak is making, to my mind, is not dissimilar to the complaints you hear from many female indigenous elders about how the ravages of addiction mean some indigenous fathers play no role in their children’s lives. Others would disagree with that assessment. I imagine many Aboriginal men would.

Friends and colleagues of mine have differing views, some of them regarding the cartoon as offensive and over the top. Surely, that’s a healthy thing.

What’s not healthy is the fact that more than 700 Australians piled on Leak via the Press Council in a bid to have him punished for daring to express his view. This bid paid no mind to Leak’s intentions in drawing that cartoon. He is not even close to being a hateful person. His intentions in drawing such a cartoon would have been driven out of sorrow and anger, rather than any desire to ridicule people for the sake of it.

The sinister nature of these hundreds of Australian Press Council complaints was that they were demanding that Leak be forced to retract and repent. They wanted him to be punished for stating an opinion, and forced to apologise for something he is not – a racist.

This is the sort of stuff you would expect in North Korea, or during Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

There will be more of it, too, as the professionally offended become more organised on social media, more active through witch-hunt-enabling websites such as change.org, so they can busy themselves being angered by the scandal du jour for 24 hours, before heading off to find fresh outrage.

To its credit, the Press Council threw out the complaints and issued a strong statement in defence of free speech, which you can read on its website.

The people who lodged these complaints are dangerous and deluded. Dangerous, insofar as the greatest crime you can commit in a free society is not agreeing with them.

And deluded, in that they are unable to see that the end result of this censoriousness is the emergence or re-emergence of genuinely divisive figures such as Donald Trump and Pauline Hanson.