Abolish the Human Rights Commission, and return us to the Enlightenment’s positive values
IMAGINE if there were a women’s rights organisation that said women should stay in the kitchen and leave the world of work to men. Or a gay rights group that argued homosexuality was sinful. We would think that was weird, right?
Well, it is no more weird than having a human rights commission that has devoted itself not to the expansion of freedom but to the strangling of it, to the straitjacketing of liberty in the name of protecting people from offence and defending public morals.
Australia’s Human Rights Commission must be one of the worst cases of Orwellian doublespeak in the modern world. It has the word rights in its name yet in practice this vast bureaucratic outfit that is funded by government to the tune of $25 million a year does far more to thwart freedom than it does to promote it.
Slyly misused political lingo is used “to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable”, George Orwell said in 1946. Today, the language of liberty has been twisted by the HRC to make illiberal things sound liberal, authoritarianism seem just and tyranny appear enlightened.
Anyone with a reasonable grasp of the English language might expect an organisation such as the HRC to defend something such as freedom of speech, the most important of all rights.
This is the right on which every other right we enjoy is built. Without the freedom to speak our minds, publish our ideas and hawk our ideologies, everything from the right to vote to artistic rights becomes meaningless, impossible even.
So does this group of well-paid, well-fed rights defenders defend the foundational right of people to say what lurks in our minds and hearts? Nope. Its commissioners seem to break out in hives when freedom of speech is mentioned. They’re forever reminding folk their right to free speech can be rescinded if they say anything too outrageous or risky or threatening to public morals.
So in the debate about section 18C, in this key ideological clash over whether the state should have the authority to tell individuals what they can think and say, most of the HRC has come down on the side of the state control rather than the individual liberty.
Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane says we have to keep 18C because racist speech can “damage our cohesion as a multicultural society”. He defends the 2011 court ruling against journalist Andrew Bolt for using “inflammatory and provocative language” in his columns about fair-skinned Aborigines.
This is a classic argument for censorship. The paternalistic notion that certain ideas must be hidden from view because they have the power to rattle society — or “damage social cohesion”, as Soutphommasane prefers — has fuelled every act of censorship, from Torquemada silencing morality-corrupting heretics during the Spanish Inquisition to British censors banning Lady Chatterley’s Lover on the basis that it could unleash dangerous sexual impulses and harm family life. Arguing prejudiced speech must be quashed to preserve social harmony may sound PC, but it’s the bastard ideological offspring of the thirst for social control and fear of the unpredictable public that have motivated every censor.
Soutphommasane’s defence of state censorship isn’t a case of one HRC person losing the plot and forgetting that he is supposed to be defending rights, not celebrating their destruction. The HRC itself is forever reminding people that freedom of speech is conditional and can be restricted if the authorities think your utterances are bad or corrupting.
Its website says: “Everyone shall have the right to hold opinions without interference.” Which sounds nice. But then it says this right may be “subject to certain restrictions”, including the need to uphold “the rights or reputations of others” and to protect “national security or public order or public health or morals”.
So the HRC gives Australians freedom of speech with one hand and takes it away with the other. Codifying the state’s right to restrict speech that harms someone’s reputation or just “public morals” is to give officialdom carte blanche to clamp down on anything from stingingly critical political invective to porn, outrageous art or anything that may crash against what our betters decree to be the public morality.
The HRC also demonstrated its innate hostility to freedom of speech when in 2012 it backed Julia Gillard’s ill-fated Human Rights and Anti-Discrimination Bill, which would have forbidden people from “engaging in any conduct which offends, humiliates, intimidates, insults or ridicules another person on the basis of (their attributes)”.
It was basically a proposal to outlaw offensiveness, to strangle strong views, to make ridicule illegal. That the HRC supported such a shocker showed just how allergic it was to the idea of free speech and open, honest, rowdy public debate.
The problem here is not with the individuals who make up the HRC (though they do seem a miserabilist, freedom-fearing lot)but the whole idea of human rights. Human rights, introduced after World War II, are different from the democratic rights that were established in the more enlightened, hopeful period of the late 18th century. Where those democratic rights were about restraining the state, about telling the state what it should never do, human rights are more concerned with reining in individuals and allegedly bad habits and backward behaviour.
Consider the US bill of rights, written in 1789. It outlines, beautifully, what “congress shall not do”: it shall not pass any law prohibiting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion or the right to protest.
Fast forward 150 years to the postwar human rights period and we have new international treaties that are long and turgid rather than short and sweet, and that tell individuals rather than states what they mustn’t do.
So the European Convention on Human Rights, from which so much human rights law is born, says freedom of speech may be “subject to such formalities, conditions, restrictions or penalties as are prescribed by law ... in the interests of national security, territorial integrity or public safety, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, (and) for the protection of the reputation or the rights of others”.
If you are still awake after reading that, consider what is being said here: that individuals must effectively obey the state if they wish to continue enjoying certain rights.
Where the era of democratic rights was concerned with limiting the power of the state, the era of human rights empowers the state, allowing it to judge what we may say, when we may say it and even, if the case of Bolt is anything to go by, the tone in which we can say stuff.
Democratic rights emerged from a great positive moment in human history, from the Enlightenment, when trust in mankind was in the ascendancy. Human rights, by contrast, came out of the darkest moment — the Holocaust — and thus have a tendency to emphasise man’s destructiveness, his threat to his fellow citizen and his apparent need to be controlled by the state for the good of “social cohesion”.
Thus we end up with the HRC, an organisation that uses the language of rights to denigrate rights and that instinctively views people as the potential destabilisers of society and morality.
If you want more freedom in Australia, if you want your rights to mean something, then there’s an important first step to take: to abolish the Human Rights Commission.
Brendan O’Neill is editor of Spiked Online.