The new Vice-President, who’s quickly becoming the intellectual spear carrier of the Trump administration, mocked the growing obsession with censorship – including attempts to criminalise “hateful conduct” – among European governments.
Unless the continent changed, the US would seek a more distant relationship, he explained, rattling off some recent prosecutions, which I hope would still shock most Australians. German police recently raided the homes of citizens suspected of posting anti-feminist content online. British police arrested a man for praying outside an abortion clinic.
Vance could have delivered a similar speech about Australia, where federal and state politicians have taken advantage of a despicable spate of anti-Semitic graffiti and arson committed by a handful of idiots to ram through new laws that will fundamentally abridge Australians’ ability to speak freely without incarceration.
“Under Donald Trump’s leadership we may disagree with your views, but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square, agree or disagree,” Vance said, in a nod to Voltaire’s famous dictum. “We shouldn’t be afraid of our people, even when they express views that disagree with their leadership.”
These principles are becoming as alien in Australia as they are in Europe, as Australia seems to be adopting a similar model of governance. We’re moving in a direction in stark contrast to our most important ally and ultimate defender, the US.
With little debate last month, federal parliament rushed through new laws that criminalise the display of “hate symbols”. It also removed the intent requirement to successfully prosecute someone for hatefully urging crime against a targeted group.
Now, speech that is merely “reckless” as determined by a “reasonable” person, can land someone with a mandatory sentence of years in prison.
Had Elon Musk performed his (admittedly somewhat) bizarre thankyou gesture to a crowd of Trump supporters in Australia, rather than the US, he could have found himself in jail.
Parliaments in Victoria and NSW are falling over themselves to introduce laws that are even worse. Victoria is planning to criminalise being “hateful or seriously contemptuous of, or reviling or severely ridiculing” a so-called targeted group, as determined by a hypothetical member of that group! Cartoonists and comedians will be out of work soon.
Sweden’s free speech laws, as Vance explained, do not grant “a free pass to do or say anything without risking offending the group that holds that belief”. Australia is moving in that direction.
Free speech is entirely about protections for undesirable speech; no one would bother passing laws to protect desirable or even banal speech because no one would be offended.
The contrast with the freedoms that Americans enjoy and our own is increasingly stark. In 1969 the US Supreme Court, in what became the benchmark case, overturned an earlier conviction of one Clarence Brandenburg over his racist rantings about forcibly expelling black Americans.
Only speech that was “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action” and, crucially, “was likely to produce such action”, could be penalised, the judges found.
It’s an extremely high threshold and one that’s now sadly unimaginable in Australia. Personally, I struggle with the whole concept of a “hate crime”: how is physical assault, say, worse if the perpetrator in question also hated the victim? Isn’t hate an element of all crime to some degree? How can hate even be measured?
Vance could also have made similar observations about immigration. European governments clearly have ignored their citizens’ increasingly overwhelming desire to slow rates of immigration amid high inflation, growing social discord and straining public infrastructure.
According to a Scanlon Foundation poll last year, 49 per cent of Australians believe immigration levels are too high, up from 33 per cent a year earlier. Yet both major parties over the past decade have overseen record inward immigration, which will ultimately prompt a backlash.
Australia’s reputation in the US has suffered hugely since Covid, where the government’s totalitarian response shocked many Americans who associated Australians with Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin.
“For a place that is so tough, where everything on land and in the water can kill you, you have the biggest pussies in the media I’ve ever seen in my life,” said visiting UFC supremo Dana White, among Donald Trump’s best friends, on a recent trip here.
In his speech Vance pointed to the outrageous censorship of individuals who suspected SARS-CoV-2 might have emerged from the China’s Wuhan Institute.
Australia’s government went much further during that time, even demanding social media remove a tweet that accused Daniel Andrews of being a “dick” alongside a picture of the then premier wearing a mask bearing the words “This Mask is as Useless as Me”.
“It would be insane that we would support a military alliance if that military alliance isn’t going to be one that is pro-free speech,” Vance said in September.
European elites were angry with Vance for humiliating them. Our elites should instead be worried: we rely on the US a lot more than Europe does.
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