Joe Hildebrand: We need to hear hate speech, not ban it

This week has seen an attempt to ban another controversial speaker from Australia but those trying to hold back the far-right tide are in the wrong.

OPINION

It is a primal human response to want to eliminate things we perceive as uncomfortable, offensive or threats to our way of life.

It is why cavemen killed each other and Northern Territorians killed crocodiles. It is why so-called civilised Western societies once banned bare legs and homosexuality, and fundamentalist Muslim societies still ban blasphemy and music. It is why Stalin killed Trotsky and why Hitler killed Jews.

It is primal but it is also primitive. And it is stupid.

It might have taken us several thousand years but we now live in a world that has reached a broad consensus — albeit a frequently violated one — that governments and nations cannot simply wipe out or suppress people and things they don’t like.

In the scheme of human history this is a remarkably recent revelation, and it took us two world wars and tens of millions of deaths to reach it. Indeed, it was only really in the aftermath of World War II and once the full horror of the Holocaust was realised, that a full global rules-based order was embarked upon and achieved.

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This ranged from the establishment of the United Nations, to the rapid decolonisation of nations in Africa and Asia, to the European reconstruction and unification effort, the establishment of global trading protocols, maritime laws, the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and a world ever shrinking with borders unprecedently traversed thanks to the explosion of international air travel.

And now, finally, the internet revolution has eliminated the last remaining barrier between people and cultures. A few years ago UK researchers developed optical fibres that could transmit data at 99.7 per cent of 299,792 kilometres per second.

In other words, ideas can now travel at the speed of light.

Information, misinformation, words both good and evil, can never be contained again. We are living in a golden age for both genius and lunacy. It is still unclear which one will prevail.

Now consider against this vast global and historical backdrop the push to ban a far right UK commentator from entering Australia so he can speak at a conservative conference.

If you are trying to hold back a right-wing tide this isn’t sticking your finger in a dyke, this is trying to catch a tsunami with a thimble. And in this case the person supposedly trying to do it is Labor Senator Kristina Keneally.

Senator Kristina Keneally. Picture: Sam Mooy/AAP

Now before the predictable pile-on starts, let me give it the finger myself: I like Kristina Keneally a lot, she is a friend of mine and she is an incredibly good politician. And to understand this story we need to dispel some of the bullsh*t about her right now.

Senator Keneally was first tapped on the shoulder by Labor to climb over a pile of premiers’ corpses and lead the charge at the 2011 NSW election at a time when the ALP brand had a similar approval rating to the Ebola virus. Her second suicide mission was to steal a blue-ribbon Liberal seat held on a margin of almost 10 per cent from a retired tennis star who had devoted his entire political career to never upsetting anybody.

In both cases she knew she was being handed a hospital pass but she stepped up and fought like a Trojan. Blaming her for electoral failure is like blaming a kamikaze pilot for not bringing his plane back.

Finally, after taking two king hits for the team, it took Sam Dastyari’s shock resignation for her to be finally given an opportunity to serve the party as something other than a sacrificial lamb. And instead of treating the Senate as a leatherbound retirement home, as many of her predecessors had done, she landed in it like Rambo.

Far from being the princess with a parachute that many have made her out to be, Senator Keneally is someone who has not just borne witness to the brutality of politics but borne the brunt of it.

January, 2012: Former NSW premier Kristina Keneally congratulates Opposition Leader John Robertson upon the win of Ron Honeig (in foregfround) of her old seat of Heffron, in Sydney's south.

And so the idea that she started a one-woman campaign to stop the hard right UK activist Raheem Kassam from coming to Australia to speak because she is a delicate PC petal is laughable. Senator Keneally is a fierce and brilliant fighter and she has fought this war incredibly well. In fact she may have already won it, but we’ll get to that later.

Banning controversial people from speaking in Australia is almost a national sport. The reprehensible Holocaust denier David Irving was perhaps the modern catalyst for this, having been allowed in 1987 then denied in 1993. Others since include the mercurial free speech extremist Milo Yiannopoulos, the far right bovver boy Gavin McInnes, the WikiLeaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning and the nutbag lizard-people conspiracy theorist David Icke.

So let us begin with one simple question: Has it actually worked?

Raheem Kassam. Picture: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Has there been a decline in Neo-Nazism since we banned Irving? Is Milo any less vocal since we cut short his speaking tour? Has the far right been neutered because we banned McInnes? Is WikiLeaks less of a lightning rod because Manning got a banning? Do fewer people now believe in alien lizard people?

The answer is blindingly obvious. Not only have far-right movements and activists become more prominent and emboldened over this period, but such bans have almost certainly fuelled their growth.

This is firstly because of the millions of dollars in free publicity given to once obscure fringe-dwelling activists.

Honestly, who in Australia had even heard of Raheem Kassam before there was a push to ban him? Now he has dominated the news for a week and even got the Trump family backing him in. If you were a far-right politician on the make you simply could not pray for a better outcome — for him this is a Hollywood fairy tale come true.

Secondly, banning or shutting down lunar right figures feeds directly and perfectly into their narrative that it is they who are the victims in society.

Today @AustralianLabor's Leader in the Senate @SenatorWong, @SenatorDodson & I took a stand in the @AuSenate against the spread of the extreme right wing in Australia and the upcoming CPAC event next week. @SenatorDodson's speech is a must watch 👇https://t.co/E8HixSwEyE

— Kristina Keneally (@KKeneally) July 31, 2019

We have Big Tech constantly trying to silence conservatives and now one of the major political parties in Australia is trying to silence @RaheemKassam because of his conservative views. The insanity needs to stop! https://t.co/vtPEZcGl47

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) July 31, 2019

This is something the extreme left constantly and spectacularly fails to understand, which is why they think the answer to every piss-weak white nationalist rally of four skinheads, three virgins and a cocker-spaniel is a hundred student socialists with sandwich boards.

Unfortunately the solution to all the world’s ills isn’t determined by a few dozen underemployed people having a West Side Story dance-off.

On the contrary, every time the far right get chased off the street, have their speeches shut down or get banned from entering the country it plays right into their hands. Because while the left might like to see them as all-powerful fascist oppressors, they are busy painting the left the exact same way. And when they are banned, shouted down or harassed off campuses it looks a lot like they have a point.

But the third and most sinister effect of such bans is that it turns peddlers of hate into poster boys for free speech. Suddenly their platform becomes not whether you agree with whatever they’re saying but whether you agree they should be allowed to say it at all. And given that all Western liberal democracies are effectively built on a principle of freedom of expression — it is enshrined in the US Constitution and the High Court has ruled it is legally implied in our own — that is a pretty strong platform.

Put these three things together — limitless free publicity, the perception of being the underdog and an effectively unassailable argument — and you have the holy trinity for any political movement. And all of them delivered to them in one fell swoop.

Milo Yiannopoulos’s tour of Australia was highly publicised. Picture: Mark Graham/AFP

There was pushback against conspiracy theorist David Icke’s speaking tour.

David Icke seminar.

And of course none of this will stop Kassam being heard. In case anyone missed it, we now have something called “the internet” via which any information can potentially travel at the speed of light – even if this is obviously still news to the NBN.

To demonstrate, let’s do a back of the beer coaster calculation — and in keeping with the theme let’s make it an ultraconservative one. The maximum capacity of the hotel conference room that Kassam is addressing is apparently 550. Now let us say that a mere 5 per cent of Australians — a bit more than a million — have read or heard the blanket coverage of his visit on the ABC, Sky News, SBS, the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian, The Guardian or Australia’s number one news site right here. And let us say that just 5 per cent of that audience — less than the proportion of Australians who voted for One Nation — decide to google him. That’s more than 50,000 people.

Congratulations censors! You’ve just increased his audience a hundredfold!

As for Senator Keneally, she has played her game masterfully. She knew this douchebag would never be banned. All she wanted to do was paint him as an extremist and thus tar all the Australian conservatives attending the same conference with the same brush. The truth is her target was never really Kassam, it was the Coalition, and she shot them square between the eyes.

Australia’s elected government has granted me a visa.@KKeneally is not in government. Didn’t even win an election to win her Senate seat.

You don’t seem to understand much about how government works 🤡 https://t.co/ON0Ezn7lRJ

— Raheem ‘the Randy Dandy’ Kassam (@RaheemKassam) July 31, 2019

As a result you can probably expect a couple of last minute cancellations — you know, family reasons, overseas trips and diary complications — and for the brave few who still turn out rest assured there’ll be an Excel spreadsheet with their names on it for future reference.

Anyone who doubted why she was elevated to a leadership position need only look at how she has taken an obscure conference rundown and turned it into the biggest news story in the country. Novices on both sides should watch and learn. She is a political ninja warrior.

But there is one reason above all else that we shouldn’t ban views we don’t like or even those that are offensive and wrong, and that is our own survival.

While there can be no tolerance for the incitement of violence, the deluded thinking that is often its precursor needs to be heard precisely so that it can be defused. It is far safer for us to know who is out there thinking these things and holding crazy or dangerous views than to have them seething or plotting in secret.

The most uncomfortable truth is that we don’t need to ban hate speech, we need to hear it. We don’t need to shout it down, we need to talk it around.

And we might also — dare I say — need to acknowledge from time to time that perhaps not everything is hate speech just because we hate it.

Joe Hildebrand co-hosts Studio 10, 8.30am weekdays, on Network Ten. Continue the conversation @Joe_Hildebrand