No joke to offend Coalition of censorious in these Roxonated times

YOU only have to read The Sydney Morning Herald to see how easy it has become to take offence and how difficult it is to crack a joke. On Friday the tabloid devoted two mirthless pages to the semantic crimes of Jeremy Clarkson, who was reprimanded for sexist, racist and homophobic humour.

Clarkson's most egregious expressions were published in a handy list. He described one car as "very ginger beer", which, as you won't be amused to learn, is slang for a gentleman who is good with colours. He declared Romania was "Borat country, with gypsies and Russian playboys", and proposed a design for "a quintessentially German car" with Hitler-salute turn signals and a "satnav that only goes to Poland".

None of that should be considered the least bit funny; we can be sure that these are verbal blunders with no satirical or ironic intent because they are printed under the headline "Foot in mouth". Nanny blogger Mia Freedman wagged a finger in all the right places, telling the Herald that Clarkson and his fellow Top Gear presenters were "dialling up sexism under the guise of 'aren't we being naughty boys'." Indeed they are, Ms Freedman, and therein lies the program's charm.

Australians, as we know, don't make anything any more. We can't even make people wince in a way that once came naturally; we are forced to import British television programs to satisfy our need for umbrage.

A generation ago, Australia was a net exporter of semantic subversion. The trade peaked in the early 1970s when The Adventures of Barry McKenzie introduced the upright Poms to the one-eyed trouser snake. In an Olympics for transgression, Bazza would have been a shoo-in; no man past or present has been able to drop his daks so quickly.

A year earlier, Richard Neville, then editor of the satirical magazine Oz, was charged with "conspiring to produce a magazine containing divers lewd, indecent and sexually perverted articles, drawings and illustrations".

Prosecutor Brian Leary cross-examined the magazine line by line, ever on the lookout for what he liked to describe as "kinky". "Rubber gear, men dressed as maids, leather gear, all perversions -- they're pandering to the diseased mind, aren't they?"

Neville begged to disagree: "They're pandering, if you like, to people who are an unfortunate minority." As Geoffrey Robertson commented afterwards: "They don't write laws like that any more; neither should they."

Yet they have, and it's called the Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill, the parting gift of former attorney-general Nicola Roxon. Like the British Obscene Publications Act, 1959, Roxon's bill fences in the taboos of polite society. It does so, in part, by restricting vocabulary, eliminating language judged to be obscene or, as we now like to describe it, inappropriate.

This time, the minorities Neville championed are siding with the puritans. The National LGBTI Health Alliance, the Victorian Gay & Lesbian Rights Lobby, Organisation Intersex International (Australia), the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby and the Equality Rights Alliance are willing members of the coalition of the censorious.

Like the prosecutors in the Oz trial, and the adversaries of Socrates before that, the stated concern is the corruption of youth. Liberty Victoria, in a deeply illiberal submission, claims that "hateful words, written or spoken" produce "a climate of homophobic prejudice" harmful to same-sex attracted youth. "The old rhyme is wrong to assert that 'names can never hurt me'," it argues.

Any form of colourful language is a potential own goal in contemporary public debate. Offence is actively sought, gratefully received, and used as ammunition to shame opponents into silence. The words of public figures are meticulously examined; every syllable is a potential excuse for righteous indignation. Scott Morrison is condemned as racist for using the demonstrative pronoun "these people"; Mark Butler is obliged to apologise for mentioning Benny and Rooty in the same sentence.

Politics has become a bland and humourless business in these cheerless, roxinated times. It is an offence not only to crack a joke, but to be in the proximity of the cracker. As The Australian reported in October: "Treasurer Wayne Swan admitted poor judgment yesterday for not objecting soon enough to an offensive joke."

Australia, it seems, is fast turning into the Respectorate of I, the nation of thin-skinned rats described by Salman Rushdie in the fairytale Luka and the Fire of Life. The Respectorate is uniformly grey; some rats hated the colour yellow because of its cheesiness; others disliked red because of its similarity to blood. Since all colours were offensive to someone or the other, all were banned.

The Respectorate's authorities fear the corrupting power of language as strongly as Liberty Victoria. A sign at the border reads: "Mind your manners". The border guard tells Luka and her companion, Nobodaddy: "Here in the Respectorate we expect visitors to behave."

"Don't worry, sir," says Nobodaddy. "We will most definitely mind our p's and q's. Sir."

"What about the other twenty-four letters of the alphabet?" asks the Border Rat. "You can do a lot of damage with those, and never use a q or a p."

There was something particularly dispiriting about the Prime Minister's recourse to effrontery with her accusations of misogyny last year. It is hard to believe that a prime minister who was once proud to proclaim herself a ranga could seriously approve of the colourless direction in which we are heading.

It is a world in which unelected commissioners and judges would decide what could and could not be uttered in polite society.

"And who chooses the Over-Rat?" Luka asked.

"He chooses himself," said Nobodaddy. "Actually he chooses himself over and over again, he does it more or less every day, because he likes doing it so much. It's known as being Over-Rat-ed." Nick Cater's book The Lucky Culture will be published in May.