Why Officeworks saga should end with employee sacking

For reasons both commercial and conscientious, Greg Craven would sack the Officeworks employee who refused to laminate a Jewish newspaper.

Poor Chris Bowen. With his mangled advocacy for green energy, he seemed a certainty for gold as the worst salesperson of the year. Now he has been pipped at the post.

Officeworks has triumphed. With the pompous, ill-educated, incoherent, casually anti-Semitic wokeness of a worker in its Elsternwick branch.

Her repulsive remarks were not the verbal equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction. She expressly refused to laminate a page of a Jewish newspaper for a Jewish customer because she was “pro-Palestinian” – an Olympic class non-sequitur. But she had priors. On another occasion, she refused to print pictures for another Jewish customer because “the Jews had used all the paper”.

This last slur goes beyond anti-Semitism into the Mel Brooks vault of black, black humour. The Jews as secret paper hoarders, planning to bring Australia down ream by ream. I will check the hall cupboard of my friend Julian Leeser to see how many million packets of A4 he has stockpiled.

Yet numerous eminent commentators are horrified at the thought that Ms Papercut might actually be sacked. They are furious that one of her victims has taken her to an administrative tribunal. Instead, she should be spoken to and wheeled quickly into a Holocaust museum, because it is all the fault of her poor education.

Let’s just forget about this as anti-Semitism and think of it as customer service.

So do we sack people for damaging our brand by appalling behaviour? Blood oath we do. I am not really that vicious, but I have a cricket team of corpses I dispatched for their sheer nastiness across my professional career.

For example, there was the 20-something ministerial adviser who abused one of the most eminent lawyers in the Victorian public service, an elderly, gentle, wise, humble man. We had him out in hours. Then there was the person in my front office when I was vice-chancellor, who sent visitors weeping from the room with her rudeness. She lasted about a month.

But I refused to hire many more than I sacked. The person who could not be polite even in an interview. Those who viciously dissed their former institution. Collingwood supporters. So, would I have sacked the Officeworks employee for anti-Semitism? For reasons both commercial and conscientious, she would have been off the shop floor quicker than a Rolex watch discounted by 90 per cent.

The defenders of the Elsternwick employee all seem to have been victims of the crushing of centre-right opinion by progressive enforcers. They instinctively side with the silenced, even the mercifully silenced.

I have been silenced more times than Aunty Hazel’s raucous cockatoo. I have been simultaneously vilified as a closet monarchist and an insincere republican, a cowardly federalist and a covert centralist, a sleeper progressive and a would-be fascist. Most recently, during the voice debate, I was both a constitutional arsonist and a backslider in the Indigenous cause. And, yes, I understand that it’s adherents of the centre right who invariably are caught in the steely webs of political correctness. You must speak only correct thought on every subject from race, gender and culture, to home bakery and cactus gardening.

But that does not mean we have to adopt a default position that every type of speech is indifferently OK. Ours is not a society of free market speech, and it never has been. We are all confined by the laws of libel and slander. We cannot legally say things that mislead people into losing their money, or that encourage them to risk their lives. We used to have some spiffing laws against slanderous and treasonous speech, but they were repealed by legal bedwetters. The point is that the conservative position is not for rampant free speech regardless of consequence. It is a powerful default position that protects virtually every form of expression, but not the funnel-web spiders of free speech.

It is a pity these issues get tangled with criticism of the controversial section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. That provision notoriously bans not only acts that humiliate or intimidate, but also those that “offend” or “insult” someone on the basis of their race. I personally would not have drafted the section so widely. But nor would I repeal it, particularly now in a world adrift with anti-Semitism. Changing the Racial Discrimination Act would involve a reversal of momentum, which could only signal a greater regard for tangential, racist expression, than for the horror this speech historically has produced and continues to incite.

The Elsternwick episode is not a test of dreaded section 18C. The complaint is made under the much gentler Victorian Equal Opportunity Act, which does not turn on terms such as “offend” or “insult”.

I certainly do not buy the excuse that this poor abuser was the mere victim of a progressive education. Anti-Semitism is grotesque wherever and whenever it appears. The vast majority of young Australians who have survived alternative sex education and content-free history have not become loud and proud anti-Semites.

There also is a large discrepancy between the level of insult free-speechers will accept themselves, and what they expect Jewish Australians to swallow. I will give just one personal example.

Last year, during the voice debate and in this very paper, I accused some of the more vociferous No campaigners of being “chicken littles”. There were foaming hysterics. I had deeply wounded and maligned people. I had traduced their reputations. I had crossed the bounds of civil debate. There were calls for me to shut up. I was not worthy to write.

Yet the dictionary definition of the small chicken syndrome is that of person who is an alarmist who spreads baseless or exaggerated reports of danger. Is this really the end of a worthwhile life, or the transparent tip of a glass jaw?

But much more importantly, how does this trivial insult compare to being told that you belong to a race so disgusting that you should not even be allowed to go into a shop and ask for basic services? You Jews, with your stockpiles of paper.

We live, unbelievably, at a time when the very right of Jews to exist is again disputed. We are watching the Palestinian people being taken hostage by terrorist Jew-killers. Anti-Semitism is a disease, not a position, and anyone spreading its symptoms through their employment should be sacked on sight.

Greg Craven is a constitutional lawyer and former vice-chancellor of the Australian Catholic University.