Lack of first principles speaks to the depth of our cultural rot
Grace Tame’s headline-chasing incivility at The Lodge was not political speech, even if it suits her supporters to argue it.
In a democracy, we start from first principles. That is the point of a democracy. We hold a handful of fundamental values so dear that they are the starting point and the end point. In the real world, sure, some will come into conflict with each other. How we manage conflicts matters. In the past week, it hasn’t gone well.
Witness Tennis Australia’s heavy-handed ban on fans at the Australian Open wearing T-shirts that say “Where is Peng Shuai?”. They failed to start with the most basic premise in a free country: we value freedom of expression, including expression of political views. In that same country, it is also true that an organisation is free, within reason, to set down its rules of admission. Within reason is the key. It is how reasonable people deal with rights that can, on occasion, clash.
When Tennis Australia ditched reason, it bungled that balancing act. By banning those Peng Shuai T-shirts it chose to look out for the sensibilities of its Chinese sponsor rather than tennis fans expressing, on a T-shirt, their concerns for a tennis player who has not been seen since making an allegation on Weibo in November last year of sexual assault against a former member of China’s politburo standing committee.
Tennis Australia behaved like a Chinese sporting body, not one in a Western democracy. Yes, after an international uproar, TA was forced to backflip. But what counts is where you start.
TA’s about-face hasn’t done much for its credibility either. It was a half-hearted shrug towards free speech. Tennis Australia’s chief executive Craig Tiley said if you had a “personal” view about Peng, “that’s fine”, but nothing “political”, you understand.
No, I don’t understand.
Defence Minister Peter Dutton clipped TA over the ear for its stupidity. He is a rare cabinet minister, speaking up promptly to defend democratic values. So quickly, it suggests he skipped the Morrison government’s internal training session about checking polls before speaking.
Dutton is of course right that this is a human rights issue. But he is wrong in trying to distinguish concerns about Peng’s welfare from political speech. When we speak out against human rights abuses at the hands of a state, that is most definitely political. And Australia’s premier tennis body should have been proud that a few Australian tennis fans put the Chinese Communist Party on notice that the world is watching out for the former No.1 doubles player.
Instead, as Martina Navratilova said of TA’s cowardice: “Sport has always been at the forefront of social issues, now we are going backwards.”
Perhaps this debacle can lead TA, and other organisations, to set out, in no uncertain terms, a new rule when a conflict arises between taking Chinese money and our own values. A rule that says no organisation, sporting or otherwise, will take money from Chinese sponsors, or any other one-party state that routinely abuses its own people, at the expense of our values. We don’t barter those values with dictators and one-party states. This rule shouldn’t have needed saying. But now we know it does.
As rotten as TA’s initial starting point was, they could avail themselves of the Miley Cyrus defence in one of her recent songs: “You dare to call me crazy? Have you looked around this place?”
And they would have a point. When first principles about free speech – in this case wearing a T-shirt – are briskly set aside, it points to the depth of cultural rot in this country.
Plenty of people – our political leaders, university vice-chancellors, most recently the bozos running the Victorian Electoral Commission – are not very good at holding true to first principles when it comes to free speech.
Universities were dragged kicking and screaming into finally adopting an academic freedom code. Think. About. That. Institutions premised on intellectual freedom needed government to step in and tell them about their core mission. Quite frankly, universities should have been issued with this simple directive at the start of this interminable process with: if you don’t support intellectual freedom, you are not a university worthy of taxpayer money.
The problem is that universities would have quietly laughed at such a threat because the Morrison government is hardly a credible authority on defending free speech either. Scott Morrison famously said he wasn’t interested in reforming a federal law that curtails free speech because that wouldn’t create a single job.
What a miserable position for a prime minister, a Liberal one, wiping his hands clean of defending free speech in a democracy because he’s too busy creating jobs. That’s the kind of thing you hear from a tin-pot dictator, or a leader with a marketing background who is too afraid to fight for what’s important without checking the polls first.
It’s the latter, of course. This is a democracy. More the shame then that the Prime Minister’s Australia Day speech on Wednesday was a blancmange arrangement of watery words that could have come from the Greens leader. Lots of fluff and bubbles that flutter on a breeze. Nary a word, let alone firm conviction, about the values in a fine democracy – freedom of expression, freedom of association, of religion, of movement. Just a quick mention of “freedom” in the last line, like a tick-a-box exercise.
Morrison’s boring speech didn’t have a hope of making headlines after former Australian of the Year Grace Tame decided to grimace and refuse eye contact when meeting him the previous day at the Lodge to celebrate the 2022 Australian of the Year finalists. Tame’s headline-chasing incivility was not political speech, even if it suits her supporters to argue it is. Her rudeness was nothing so grand. It was more quotidian; just another immature woman who doesn’t seem to understand that if you want to speak truth to power, you must be able to speak to power, in different ways, in different contexts. Visiting the Prime Minister’s home is not the same as standing on a podium outside parliament or sitting across a table negotiating reforms.
Maybe none of that matters to Tame. That is her business. But she and her supporters are wrong to turn her into a martyr by claiming there is a terrible conspiracy among powerful men that tells women to keep quiet, to smile. No one expects that. This was a moment in time. That’s all. Not the politics of silence.
If the expression of political speech in Australia has become complicated, and muddled, the Morrison government has itself to blame. The government encouraged our Olympic athletes to express their political opinions at next month’s Olympics in Beijing. Yet the same government deported a tennis player because it claimed in court documents that his political views against mandating vaccination would whip up similar ideas in a country that has the highest vaccination rates in the world.
As Prime Minister, you may not agree with anti-vax sentiments, but tolerating different views is the essence of being a leader in our messy and brilliant democracy. Stifling them is a very Chinese thing to do.
When it’s not clear when you can safely express your political views without police stepping in, then the safest thing is not to do it. Is that the kind of country we want to live in?
The word from inside the Morrison government is that the decision to kick Novak Djokovic out was based on “dozens of polls and focus groups”. Quibbling over the number of internal polls in that week won’t alter the fact polling has become the lodestar for the Prime Minister and his cabinet, even when it means turning their back on first principles.
For example, Morrison and his ministers should be more than outraged that West Australian Premier Mark McGowan continues with draconian border restrictions in 2022 that you would struggle to find anywhere in the world, except in parts of China. After a quick swipe at McGowan on television, Josh Frydenberg said it “was a matter for the Western Australian government and was not a federal issue”.
Freedom of movement between the states is embedded in section 92 of the Constitution. Surely, at this point, the Morrison government should have found some conviction to do something tangible for those suffering at the hands of McGowan’s incompetence. What is holding the Morrison government back from asking the High Court to reconsider an earlier decision it made in favour of Western Australia’s border policy? Those polls again, and a blase attitude in cabinet to first principles.
When people in leadership positions don’t start from first principles, they are easily led astray. When a few polls direct them away from basic freedoms, they’re not really leaders, just followers. That does not augur well for a healthy democracy.
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