What can we read into this council book ban? Perhaps we lack minority rapport

When 61.7 per cent of Australian voters supported same-sex marriage in the 2017 postal survey, 17 electorates voted no. Twelve of them were in western Sydney.

The highest no votes nationally were in the seats of Blaxland (73.95 per cent), Watson (69.64 per cent), McMahon (64.93 per cent), Werriwa (63.74 per cent), Fowler (63.66 per cent) and Parramatta (61.62 per cent). Adjacent were the no-voting seats of Greenway (53.64 per cent), Chifley (58.69 per cent), Banks (55.12 per cent) and Barton (56.36 per cent). Western Sydney, much more than the mythical redneck deep north, deep south or deep west, was Australia’s no-voting heart.

Councillor Steve Christou says he has not read the book he wants to ban from council libraries.

Blaxland, McMahon, Parramatta and Greenway are the federal electorates included in the Cumberland Council area, so it can’t be said that the councillors who have voted to take the book, Same-Sex Parents, by Holly Duhig, out of public libraries are not representing the majority of their community. Cumberland is “not Marrickville or Newtown”, stated the former Labor and now independent councillor Steve Christou, who led the vote.

Now is the time for someone like me to thunder away about book burnings in Nazi Germany and the MAGA movement’s book censorship drive that is viciously attacking libraries in the United States. To deride the self-evident homophobia in the ban and mock Christou, who admitted not having read the book. To extol Australia’s progress in giving marriage equality to everybody. To cast Cumberland into the non-Marrickville, non-Newtown wilderness.

But it doesn’t sound quite right. It is to speak the language of yes voters, whether they be in inner-city seats such as Sydney (83.67 per cent yes), beachside Wentworth (80.85 per cent yes), teal Warringah (75.01 per cent yes) or small-c conservative Bradfield (60.58 per cent yes). Sydney Morning Herald-speaking electorates.

I would do so with relish because book-banning is so abhorrent to me. Once you start bans, where do you stop? If same-sex marriage books are to go, then so are gay authors. Out with gay books by gay authors such as Patrick White, David Malouf, Christos Tsiolkas, Sophie Cunningham and Ben Law. If children must be protected, that’s the end of Leigh Hobbs, Catherine Johns (Me Mum’s A Queer) and Margaret Merrilees (Fables Queer and Familiar), whose books have exposed children to the dangers of same-sex tolerance.

Marriage equality supporters on Oxford Street celebrate the result of the 2017 postal survey which paved the way for same-sex marriage legislation.Credit: Louise Kennerley

If Cumberland is not Marrickville or Newtown, does that mean that their councillors, representing their majorities, can start banning books by Tony Abbott and Boris Johnson? Are teal-voting seats to ban books by Michael Crichton or Ian Plimer or Barnaby Joyce that question the science of climate change?

While such a rant might make me feel better, it all sounds a bit like a sermon to the converted. Absurd and offensive as it is to me and those who speak my language, the Cumberland Council decision expresses the oldest criticism of democracy, what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority”. Once debates have been run and won, how much are Australia’s winners doing to protect the rights of the losers? Do we listen, or do we just name-call?

Whether in churches or cultural groups, those who voted no in 2017 found themselves in a clear minority with, as they saw it, the worse side of a democratic outcome: majority rules unbalanced by the protection of minority rights. Banning books from libraries is a clumsy and one-sided expression of this, but it is a response to a legal and cultural climate that has classified the beliefs and practices of three-quarters of the local population as laughably primitive at best, and outside the law at its most extreme.

Christou is right: no-voting Cumberland is not Marrickville, Newtown or, for that matter, North Sydney or Randwick. It is significantly younger than the Australian average, with a higher marriage rate. The spread of ancestry and country of birth is diverse: 24.5 per cent of residents have Lebanese or Chinese ancestry (compared with 6.5 per cent across Australia); 39.7 per cent were born in Australia (compared with 66.9 per cent nationally); and the next most common country of birth, after Australia, is India. More than 22 per cent are Islamic (3.2 per cent nationally) and 14.7 per cent have no religion (against 38.4 per cent of all Australians). Household weekly income is marginally less than the national average, but the proportion of the population with university degrees is higher. Almost three-quarters (74.6 per cent) of households are composed of entire families (70.5 per cent nationally).

Those who voted no to same-sex marriage are in the same post-poll limbo as those who voted yes to an Indigenous Voice to parliament.Credit: Wolter Peeters

A demographic snapshot of Cumberland does not lend itself to tired and somewhat in-house debates about culture wars. I doubt Cumberland can be accused of setting itself up as a free republic of homophobia in the same sense as, say, Sky After Dark.

What it speaks to instead is a democratic failure with which we are less and less able to come to terms.

The promise of democracy has always been twofold: the majority rules while the rights of the minority are protected. Those who voted no to same-sex marriage are in the same post-poll limbo as those who voted yes to an Indigenous Voice to parliament. They both lost, and subsequently they were both neglected, shunted off the agenda, and ridiculed. It’s not like your party losing an election. You don’t get a chance to go again three years later. In Australia, those who win majorities quickly lose sight of how to look after minorities, all the more so when the minority group is culturally and religiously outside the mainstream.

Where this leaves democracy’s outsiders was amply demonstrated by Cumberland Council’s action. In banning a book about same-sex marriage, the council was only reflecting what the larger polity has done to it: the majority celebrate their new powers while alienating a vulnerable minority group. The blunt object of a book ban is a mirror image of the broader community’s blunt object of majority rule.

As sometimes happens, I find myself arguing something close to the complete opposite of what I believe in. For books and libraries to be targeted with censorship is not just distressing, it shouldn’t be allowed. (Ban the ban!) But if we had tempered our self-congratulation over marriage equality and given more thought to those who voted no, not from bigotry but from deep-seated, authentically felt, inherited and important cultural traditions, we might have left more outlets for frustration than the brute signal of banning books.

As America and other places have shown, when people run out of ways to express themselves, they go to the library. They turn to politicians who offer not solutions for their problems but the theatre of expressing their anger. If we want to protect our libraries, maybe our community has to be more eager to listen, learn and protect the rights of those on the other side of the debate.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, author and regular columnist.