Without the right to free speech you have no other rights | Caleb Bond

Labor’s last-minute backdown has spared Australia from a set of dangerous new laws – for now, writes Caleb Bond.

One man’s hate speech is another man’s free speech.

Perhaps I should write man or woman because I wouldn’t want to exclude females – that would be sexist.

Oh heck, now I’ve suggested that gender is binary and thus I have excluded transgender, non-binary and God-knows-what-else people.

I suppose that could be considered hate speech.

Send me off to the gulag.

I jest, of course, but that is genuinely how some raging narcissists – who think their identity puts them at the centre of the universe – would have people dealt with for saying the wrong thing.

You may remember a decade or so ago when debate was raging about Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

It makes it illegal to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate someone on the basis of race, colour, nationality or ethnicity.

Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus during Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

That somehow fell away as an issue amidst other elements of the culture wars but the fact is it remains illegal to make someone cry by using hurtful words.

No matter how much we may abhor racism – as we should – it is absurd and dangerous to legally protect people from something as subjective as offence or insult.

One’s right to freedom of speech should always trump someone else’s right to not be upset.

Without the right to free speech you have no other rights because you have no means by which to defend them.

We have, by only a whisker, avoided this being extended to gender, sexuality, disability and religion under new hate speech legislation.

The Albanese government was set to introduce a bill on Thursday that would have outlawed derogatory language used against the aforementioned groups, cloaked under concern for anti-semitism.

The laws were promised earlier this year.

But at the last minute, the plan was watered down by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to combat only incitement and acts of violence.

Many in the Jewish community will be upset, as will powerful LGBTIQ lobby groups.

But they would do well to remember that if you can have someone else criminalised for saying things you find hateful or offensive, those powers can just as easily be turned back at you one day.

It is no business of the law to protect people from non-physical instances of hate or offence.

We all experience those emotions differently so how is the law supposed to adequately define what they actually constitute and the threshold for what is and isn’t criminal?

Are some homophobic slurs legal and others not?

Would depicting Mohammed – which is forbidden in Islam and cost the lives of 12 people after a cartoon appeared in French magazine Charlie Hebdo – be deemed hateful and therefore illegal on the basis that it is deliberately offensive?

It is positive that the government finally scrapped these dangerous proposed laws.

But this will not be the end of the matter.

Language is under constant attack from the left as it seeks to redefine the most obvious truths, such as the fact that men cannot have babies or breastfeed.

That will not stop.

We must defend our right to offend.

Originally published as Without the right to free speech you have no other rights | Caleb Bond