Like the Greens, Labor reserves a special rancour for media outlets that hold them to account
Those who obsessively denounce “hate speech” are motivated by egotism and vindictiveness.
When it comes to Labor and the Greens, there is no doubting the sincerity of their climate policies. Both parties will make full use of public resources to reducing the temperature, as they have done before. No, I am not talking about the climate in the literal sense. Rather, I mean the “chilling effect”, that being legislation designed to make you self-censor.
This week Herald-Sun columnist and Sky News presenter Andrew Bolt revealed video footage of Greens leader Richard Di Natale telling his supporters last March of his plans to silence conservative journalists.
“We’re going to call out the hate speech that’s been going on,” he said. “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 – and I could go on and on and on. If they want to use hate speech to divide the community then they’re going to be held to account.”
BOLT: What if the Greens' definition of hate speech, what Richard Di Natale calls hate speech is actually just speech he hates. When speech is stifled, banned, punished as a crime then problems too often are left hidden and not fixed. #theboltreport MORE: https://t.co/rlBuIO0r6z pic.twitter.com/TbtRbDhZCX
— The Bolt Report (@theboltreport) May 6, 2019
On and on and on? Di Natale’s list of journalists he intends to prosecute must be a long one. “We need to have new laws that make it a crime to engage in hate speech,” he said. “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.”
There it is, that nebulous expression “hate speech”. It is a cliched, all-encompassing, and infantile pejorative often used by those who are either unwilling or unable to refute a dissenting opinion. The beauty of that phrase, at least for those who parrot it, is that it cannot be held to an objective definition. Anecdotally, however, one might conclude the truthfulness of the offending remarks and the intensity of hate speech denunciations have a close correlation.
Strangely, Di Natale does not seem to regard certain racial insults as an example of hate speech. For example, he continues to support the Greens candidate for the Northern Territory seat of Lingiari, George Hanna, who shared a despicable Facebook meme that described indigenous woman and Liberal candidate for the same seat, Jacinta Price, as a “coconut”.
“As far as I am concerned, both these men (Di Natale and Hanna) resemble the epitome of racism and sexism,” said Price yesterday.
Interestingly, in 2011 during his maiden speech, Di Natale championed the Greens as “a party that represents the best traditions of liberalism, expressed through its support for individuals to make decisions without interference from government”. Now he uses his position as a senator to intimidate journalists and implies they will answer to the state for pointing out truths he finds unpalatable.
Presumably he would claim it would be hate speech for me to say this is proof of his hypocrisy and demagoguery and that the Greens leader is full of — well, let’s just say hate.
Last week shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus announced a Shorten Labor government would, if elected, “beef-up” the Australian Human Rights Commission in order to defend section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate someone on basis of race. He stated that hate speech would become worse if there was a “continuation of right-wing government in Australia,” claiming the Coalition had made “very serious attempts to allow more hate speech in our community in the form of their attacks on section 18C”.
Never mind that 18C is a deeply flawed section that relies largely on a subjective test to determine wrongdoing. The Coalition had unsuccessfully tried to legislate instead this test be determined by the standards of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community, not by the arbitrary pronouncement of a minority group. To suggest this, as Dreyfus did, amounts to licensing hate speech is disingenuous.
Exactly how Dreyfus proposes the AHRC utilise its increased funding to enforce 18C we do not know. Perhaps that august body will commission more of those risible videos, worthy of a Razzie award, featuring evil white men gleefully preventing people of colour from entering lifts or catching taxis. Or it could employ activist organisations like GetUp! and Sleeping Giants to monitor social media and report wrongdoers. Even better, let’s have an anti-racism campaign focusing on educating school children. We could call it the “Sadly you can say what you like around the kitchen table at home” campaign in honour of former AHRC president Gillian Triggs.
Lest you think that is far-fetched, remember Dreyfus’s response in 2017 when asked whether 18C should be expanded to cover gender and disability. “One of the things we’ll be looking at is this very point of whether or not we should set a standard about speech generally,” he stated. In 2017, Labor backbencher Anne Aly called for 18C to cover religious vilification, stating discrimination against Muslims was a “new form of racism”.
In fairness to Dreyfus, however, he is acting in accordance with a Labor tradition of curtailing free speech. In 2012 then Attorney-General Nicola Roxon introduced the draft Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill under the banner of consolidating the five federal anti-discrimination statutes into one act. Had this dog’s breakfast of a bill been enacted, it would have rendered it unlawful to subjectively offend someone on the grounds of their family responsibilities, industrial history, medical history, nationality or citizenship, political opinion, religion, or social origin in a work environment.
As one lawyer pointed out, these provisions were so ridiculously expansionist it would even outlaw sledging on the football field. Worse still, this legislation would have shifted the burden of proof onto respondents of complaints. It was withdrawn only after an intense campaign led by the Institute of Public Affairs and News Corp newspapers. Conversely, ABC and then Fairfax journalists were, for the most part, indifferent. As The Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen observed, the ABC became interested in the free speech ramifications only when Triggs, then AHRC president, voiced concerns the draft laws had “gone too far”.
Labor’s obsession with suppressing free speech in the name of tolerance goes back a generation. In 1994 the Keating government proposed legislation that would have criminalised threatening to cause harm to another person or group based on their race, colour, nationality or ethnic origin, the maximum penalty being two years imprisonment.
The basis for this draconian measure was a report by the then Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, The National Inquiry into Racist Violence in Australia, which recommended both criminal sanctions and civil provisions for racial vilification. But its findings were based on flimsy, partisan and unreliable evidence, as then Canberra Times journalist and now Nine’s political correspondent, Chris Uhlmann, noted. His observations are worth repeating.
“The report is a shoddy base of research which does not attempt to disguise its own prejudices,” he wrote. “Racist violence was reduced to violence by ‘Anglos’ and inter-ethnic violence was not discussed.” While acknowledging some of the claims of racism detailed in the report had no doubt occurred, Uhlmann noted the evidence collected, “was not tested in a way that would stand up in court”.
Although the Keating government had consulted with the public about the proposed changes, Attorney-General Michael Lavarch announced the results had “been put to Cabinet” and “would not be released publicly”. As Uhlmann surmised, the reason for this was it was unlikely the results supported the government’s proposed action. When the criminal provisions of the bill failed to pass the Senate, Lavarch was apoplectic, saying this had sent worst possible message domestically and internationally during the Year of Tolerance. You might say these measures are as much about symbolism as they are about censorship.
Like the Greens, Labor reserves a special rancour for newspapers that hold its politicians to account, as demonstrated by its decision in 2011 on spurious grounds to commission the Finkelstein Inquiry into the Australian media. Had those recommendations been realised, it would have resulted in newspapers answering to a government-funded and euphemistically titled “Public Interest Media Advocate”.
The party’s paranoia during this time was also evident when The Daily Telegraph reported in November 2011 then Foreign Minister Kevin Rudd was being urged by backers to challenge then Prime Minister Julia Gillard for the leadership. Senator and left faction leader Doug Cameron labelled then News Ltd a “threat to democracy”, claiming the Finkelstein Inquiry should be expanded to examine the company’s “absolute hatred” of Labor. The story about Rudd, he claimed, was a “complete fabrication”. Rudd of course did challenge Gillard less than four months later. Cameron has passed the paranoia baton on to Rudd, who last year called for a royal commission into News Corp, blaming it for the downfall of his government in 2013.
Whether the subject is the “hate media” or “hate speech”, you can be certain those who obsessively denounce it are motivated by a combination of egotism, vindictiveness, zealotry and just plain stupidity. We need less regulation of speech, not more. We need political leaders to respect a free press, not compromise it. We need level-headed and practical people in human rights commissions to deal with complaints, not sententious, authoritarian and overpaid panjandrums. Most importantly, we need politicians to acknowledge the insidious chilling effect of so-called hate speech legislation, and to call these laws out for what they are — one almighty snow job.
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