LGBTI threats against Mercure Hotel show ‘poison’ in public life

‘For hotel staff to be intimidated is a bloody disgrace’: Coalition MP Warren Entsch. Picture: Anna Rogers

The poison in Australia’s public life has reached a point where a casual bystander now can fall victim to the tactics used to win a fight at all costs. The latest sign of the illness came when employees at a Sydney hotel answered the telephone last week to hear threats of physical violence. Their crime? The Mercure Sydney Airport Hotel had taken a booking for a conference room for four Christian groups.

This was not an isolated threat. The phone calls kept coming. The hotel tells The Weekend Australian the calls were intimidating and included threats of physical harm. At the same time, the hotel had to freeze its Facebook page after being bombarded with abuse about the private booking. The protesters then turned their sights on other Facebook pages, escalating the attack to the Accor Group’s headquarters.

Worried about the safety of staff and guests, the hotel asked the Christian groups to consider cancelling the event. The campaigners declared victory. They had shut down a meeting of about 100 members of the Anglican Church, the Catholic Church, the Marriage Alliance and the Australian Christian Lobby. Few stopped to reflect on whether this was a campaign they should really want to win.

This is the latest proof of the new intolerance. It is no longer enough to disagree with an opponent — you have to shout them down, silence them and run them underground. Certain of their moral superiority, campaigners have no qualms about taking hostages. The Mercure hotel staff were collatoral damage.

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The boycott is the favourite tool in this fight to silence. Direct action against the enemy is just the start. The boycott is easily extended to anyone connected to the target on the grounds that they are somehow helping your opponent. In the arena of extreme campaigning, a hotel that lets supporters of traditional marriage walk through its doors is presumed guilty of supporting bigotry.

There is no monopoly on idiocy. Melbourne lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex radio station Joy 94.9 FM was evacuated last Tuesday after getting an email with a bomb threat. “Love is love. We will not be silenced,” the station managers said, as they continued broadcasting. There was strong support for the station on its Facebook page. In a key difference with the Mercure affair, there was no sign of a co-ordinated social media campaign to make Joy a target in the first place.

There are so many glass jaws these days that the notion of free and open debate is being replaced by the idea that opponents should be gagged. When American author Lionel Shriver offended some of the audience at the Brisbane Writers Festival this month, the organiser complained that she “did not speak to her brief”, then removed her speech from the website. Shriver later said she was disturbed by how many people on the political Left had become “censorious” and “totalitarian” towards those with whom they disagreed.

When artists wanted to protest against the treatment of asylum-seekers, they took aim at listed company Transfield Services for running detention centres rather than the Australian government for setting the policy. The pressure point was Luca Belgiorno-Nettis and his family company Transfield Holdings, which owned 11.3 per cent of Transfield Services. The shared name was enough to cause the damage. Belgiorno-Nettis stepped down as chairman of the Sydney Biennale and the arts festival lost a valued sponsor.

All interest groups seek to maximise their influence but there are real questions about when they overstep the mark.

The Catholic Church wrote to Telstra and other companies earlier this year to ask them to withdraw their support for a national advertising campaign in favour of marriage equality. Telstra backed down but then came under pressure from the LGBTI community and rejoined the campaign. In a key difference with the Mercure case, the communications company had chosen a side in the marriage debate. Mercure took no stand either way: it simply wanted to take a booking from a customer.

One of the troubling aspects of contemporary debate is that individuals or companies can be punished for staying neutral.

Marriage equality activitists turned their sights on Bendigo Bank when it chose not to join other companies in the advertising campaign. They could not accept the bank’s argument that the matter was up to individuals.

The idea of sympathy strikes has been frowned on in Australia for years. Consumer law prohibits secondary boycotts, where protesters turn their fire on groups that support the primary target, such as the company that supplies beer cans to Carlton & United Breweries. Yet the ban has an important exemption for boycotts that are “substantially related to environmental or consumer protection”.

This is now the wild west of campaigning, where there’s no consensus on how far a campaign should go. A union that tries to pressure a coal company for better wages by boycotting its equipment suppliers would be breaking the law. A GetUp! campaign that uses the same tactics to save a forest would not.

Nobody can be sure where to draw the line. When Tony Abbott’s government raised the idea of amending the law to end the “environmental or consumer protection” boycotts, the idea galvanised complaints from both ends of the political spectrum.

GetUp! was worried that its business model would come to an end, the Greens accused Abbott of threatening free speech and the conservative Institute of Public Affairs said it would be “entirely illiberal” to suppress campaigns.

Black-letter law is not the answer but the nation is still feeling its way on how to deal with tactics that suppress rather than promote debate. That helps explain why a dispute still rages over the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Max Brenner, the chocolate stores owned by an Israeli company. The complaint is that the parent company supports the Israel Defence Forces by giving chocolate to soldiers, but there is no evidence the campaigns achieve anything.

Just how far should an attack go? The same-sex marriage debate raises the question of whether campaigners are losing control of their own campaigns. This is especially true on social media. If protesters light a bushfire on a hot and windy day, can they really control the flames? This take-no-prisoners world has no room to admit a campaign may go too far. To concede a mistake is to show weakness, or at least betray the sort of thoughtfulness that makes it harder to rally the mob.

When The Weekend Australian revealed the protest against the Mercure had led to phone calls that rattled staff and led to the cancellation of the Christian meeting on the grounds of safety and security, the first response of the protesters was to deny the facts. The second was to blame the media.

One of the leaders of the campaign against the hotel was Pauline Pantsdown, the performer and public face of Simon Hunt. Pantsdown was furious at the criticism of her tactics and refused to accept that threatening phone calls had been made. Yet the comments from the Mercure spokeswoman on Friday and again on Monday were clear: hotel staff were intimidated by phone calls that included threats of physical violence.

Pantsdown badly wanted to believe The Weekend Australian had made it all up. The usual steps followed: her supporters denied the crucial fact in the whole affair — the threatening phone calls — then refused to read the newspaper to see quotes from the hotel that supported that fact. This “blame the media” routine is the death of rational debate. The truth is that once they whipped up the social media storm, the organisers could not say where it would lead.

Yet Pantsdown’s line of argument found quick support — after all, the LGBTI community has been wronged for so long that any campaign it launches looks gentle by comparison. Peter van Onselen dismissed the story. “Must be frightening to have your planned meeting to discuss why a section of society is inferior disrupted,” he tweeted. This was typical on Twitter, where a common response was to assume the story was wrong or suggest there was no real harm in one group shutting down the meeting of another.

One name was central to this response: Lyle Shelton. The head of the Australian Christian Lobby is a red rag to a bull among supporters of marriage equality, infuriating them with his claims that every child in a same-sex family has been “taken” from its biological mother or father. The assumption is that if Shelton is part of an event then he is fair game.

This is a fundamental feature of the new intolerance. Whether tactics are acceptable or not depends on the identity of the victim. Imagine the media response to phone threats and Facebook abuse that tried to shut down a meeting of Australian Marriage Equality. There would be no reluctance to condemn tactics that forced gays and lesbians to hold their meetings in secret. The parallels with the discrimination of the past would be too obvious. Yet the intolerance of the present is shrugged off.

There is obviously a sense of the tables being turned when LGBTI activists wage social war against conservative Christians. Yet the dictum of “an eye for an eye” has never been part of Australian justice. Why should it govern public debate today?

Few stopped to think about this when Facebook exploded with attacks on the Mercure. The hotel company was accused of supporting the ACL by accepting its booking. “I wouldn’t stay at a hotel that supports hate groups,” said one post. “Why are you hanging out with hateful scum?” asked another. “Awful to read that Accor is hosting hate groups events,” said a third. With messages such as that, perhaps it was only a matter of time before some activitists picked up the phone to intimidate the hotel. There were more than 10 calls, although managers will not say exactly how many.

This was different in scale to the single email threat to Joy FM.

South Australian senator Nick Xenophon sees how ludicrous this is getting.

“Does this mean if someone repugnant flies with a particular airline that you boycott that airline?” he asks. “Am I missing something here? It seems wacky to me.” Xenophon fundamentally disagrees with the ACL and is a strong supporter of marriage equality, but he rejects the latest tactics.

The Liberal National Party’s Warren Entsch, who has fought harder than most MPs for marriage equality, calls the campaign against the Mercure a “bloody disgrace”. Attorney-General George Brandis says all sides should respect one another’s freedom of speech. Bill Shorten says he is sick of intolerance wherever he sees it: “If people want to gather to talk about an idea, they shouldn’t be stopped from gathering.”

Australia has spent decades with at least some sense of a line that should not be crossed in civil debate. Freedom of speech was considered essential. Now too many think it has an entirely subjective caveat: if an accuser claims to hear “hate” speech then no rights apply. Freedom of association, also part of the tradition, is being waived too lightly. Those who end up on the wrong side of the crowd can lose their rights in practice, if not under the law.

Threatening phone calls to a Sydney hotel may seem like a minor test of these principles, yet the affair is instructive all the same. When the campaign went too far there was a reluctance to call it out. Australian Marriage Equality refused to condemn it. The Greens have declined a request to comment. The early response from the “progressive” side of politics was to deny the problem. The message is that rights are not always worth fighting for.

Yet wiser activists know that the brutal strategies of silencing debate only backfire on a cause. The bomb threat to Joy FM and the phone threats to the Mercure show there is no success in turning a campaign for social change into a fight over boycotts, political correctness and freedom of speech. They also show that one attack does not justify another.

“Our campaign is about making Australia a better place,” Paul Ritchie writes in his new book, Faith, Love and Australia, the conservative case for same-sex marriage. “It’s about more freedom, not less; more diversity, not less; more acceptance, not less — and everything we do must reflect that.”