Illiberal rules that stifle free speech

IT'S not that your view is wrong. It's that your view is immoral and must not be aired.

ONE might imagine that free speech, or at least its broad parameters, had been settled some time ago.

Say around the time of John Stuart Mill or Voltaire or maybe well before them, when Socrates told a jury at his trial in 399 BC that "if you offered to let me off this time on condition I am no longer to speak my mind, I should say 'Men of Athens, I shall obey the Gods rather than you."'

As highly contestable, controversial topics of debate go, one might hope that freedom of expression was not one of them. Sure, we might argue at the edges. But, the central tenet of free speech seems rather uncontroversial. We might not all agree with one another, we may feel vehemently opposed to the views of another, but each of us will defend the right of others to say it. Alas, if you imagine such a commitment to free speech in modern, liberal 2012, you would be sadly mistaken.

Last Thursday, protesters from the Aboriginal tent embassy bashed against the glass walls of the Lobby Restaurant intimidating the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the emergency workers receiving awards inside. Predictably, much of the media moved quickly on to the dark arts of political scheming when it transpired that a Gillard staffer leaked Tony Abbott's whereabouts.

But rewind a moment longer to consider a more important principle. The thuggish activists saw no irony in proudly exercising their right to free speech by using violence and intimidation to shut down those with whom they disagreed.

The protests personify a strain of illiberalism found more often among those on the Left than the Right. Far from being progressive, members of the illiberal Left often work from one of two basic premises to curb free speech.

First, the masses are too dumb to be trusted with the unpredictable consequences of too much free speech. Accordingly, these self-appointed moral guardians of the great unwashed impose politically correct rules to proscribe free speech. Examples of this "protecting the dumb" rule have become so commonplace they often go unremarked. Classic literature is routinely sanitised lest the uncensored versions stoke racism among the uneducated. Enid Blyton books are similarly cleansed and so are television shows such as Sesame Street. More recently and more seriously, the Bavarian state government, which holds the copyright to Adolf Hilter's manifesto, Mein Kampf, will not allow the book to be reproduced in case "evil memories" encourage anti-Semitism.

Paternalism is not the only premise used for limiting free speech. In Australia a few years ago, American author Lionel Shriver, a regular at fashionable literary festivals, touched on one of the critical flaws of the Left. Talking at the 2010 Sydney Writer's Festival, Shriver said she was turned off by the Left's smugness. "It's what annoys me about [left] liberals in general. Conservatives, as a type, do not assume when they meet someone that you are also a conservative. They tend to be a little more careful. [Left] liberals are presumptuous, especially if you seem like a halfway decent human being. The assumption is, of course, you are wildly left-wing."

The flip-side of this mentality is that if you happen to take a different political view on important matters, then you can't be a decent human being after all. And if that's the case, it would be best if you did not air your indecent views. In short, the second premise used by moral guardians on the illiberal-left to constrain free speech is the "too evil to talk freely" rule. Those with different views are too evil to be trusted with free speech. It's not that your view is wrong. It's that your view is immoral and must not be aired.

Hence, protesters set upon Tony Abbott on Australia Day -- not to express their disagreement -- but to shut down his views as so wicked as to warrant intimidation and violence. Of course, there are myriad ways of applying this "too evil to be trusted to talk freely" rule. More sophisticated adherents don't use violence. They might cleverly promote free speech, intellectual debate and diversity and then simply ignore opponents. Or they might try to erase someone. Social pages medico Kerryn Phelps recently suggested the Margaret Court Arena be renamed to expunge the tennis champion's name. Court's crime? She has a different view about homosexuality to Phelps.

In this "too evil to be trusted to talk freely" equation, it matters a great deal who does the talking. When former NSW Labor Premier Bob Carr writes on his blog that "the tent embassy in Canberra says nothing to anyone and should have been quietly packed up years ago", his comment passes as unremarkable. If arch-conservative Abbott says something far less remarkable, he is targeted as too evil to talk on such matters.

Just about each week, manifestations of these two illiberal

constraints on free speech occur around the globe. Not always from the illiberal-left, it must be said. Muslim extremists who threatened violence at the Jaipur Literary Festival in India last week succeeded in silencing Salman Rushdie after organisers decided that even a video link was too dangerous. The author of Satanic Verses was deemed by religious extremists to be too evil to be allowed to talk at the festival.

Lest we become too self congratulatory about our western liberalism, the actions of the tent embassy protesters in Canberra give off a whiff of intolerance similar to events in India. It was a case of members of our own intolerant secular Left coalescing with members of India's intolerant religious Right. In both cases, violence and threats of violence were aimed directly at strangling free speech. And in both cases, those who came out defending free speech tended to be those who agreed with the silenced views.

How much more powerful it might have been to have free speech defended by those who disagree with Abbott. The Greens, for example, are a long way off defending free speech for its own sake. Instead, Greens senator Christine Milne took a wet feather to the actions of the protesters and launched an impassioned objection to Abbott's words. By contrast, whenever there is, say, a debate about art and pornography, otherwise mute members of the Left find their free speech tongues. Sadly, for so long as the Left's illiberal rules are allowed to curb free speech, a Voltaire level of commitment may be too much to hope for.