Di Natale wants to have me banned, claims Bolt

Columnist Andrew Bolt has accused Richard Di Natale of wanting to have him banned.

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. Picture: Aaron Francis

Columnist Andrew Bolt has accused Richard Di Natale of wanting to have him banned, criticising the Greens leader’s call to introduce media legislation to stamp out alleged “hate speech”.

Dr Di Natale targeted Bolt and fellow commentators Alan Jones and Chris Kenny in a tirade against hate speech in March in which he spoke of the need to hold journalists to account. Bolt wrote in his Herald Sun column yesterday that Dr Di Natale’s accusation that he had engaged in hate speech “sounds damaging, until you realise Di Natale’s definition of hate speech is ‘speech I hate’. That’s so broad that few of us will be safe from these enemies of debate.”

Kenny, who writes for The Australian and, like Bolt, has a program on Sky News, yesterday described Dr Di Natale’s calls for regulation as “big brother stuff”.

In video of a speech delivered in Melbourne in March, Dr Di Natale vows to set up a parliamentary inquiry to “codify” what hate speech looks like from a legal perspective.

“Were going to call out the hate speech that’s been going on,” he says. “We’re going to make sure that we’ve got laws that regulate our media so that people like Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones and Chris Kenny ... if they want to use hate speech to divide the community then they’re going to be held to account.

“We need to have new laws that make it a crime to engage in hate speech. At the moment when you look at the regulators for the media ... they don’t have the power they need to hold these really powerful voices to account.”