It has long been my view that Gerard Henderson and Michael Danby and Colin Rubinstein do not actually accept the logic behind having freedom of speech. Instead, they have jumped on the fashionable bandwagon that seeks to control how one’s ‘group’ is portrayed, hence their support for legislative piffle like s 18 (c) of the RDA.
Here’s a tip, gentlemen: outside the very limited protection provided by the tort/delict of defamation, attempts to control how others represent you is not just a dead end, it’s a pointless dead-end, much like all those university cafeterias and Oxbridge colleges that refuse to sell the Sun on account of page 3 girls.
Students don’t read the Sun anyway, you see. The cafe or student shop or college is making an utterly empty gesture.
Section 18 (c) will not stop people disliking minority x. It will just make them inclined to dislike minority x in private, and probably with greater intensity. Banning porn will not stop people seeking it out, also with even greater intensity. Etc.
Laws regulating representation just don’t work. Seriously, activists who think they can use the law to make others think well of [insert oppressed group here] are absolutely kidding themselves. Because belting your opponents over the head with a statute-book will not make them think well of you. In fact, they may suspect you’re a control freak.
Oh yeah, and equating support for freedom of speech with support for terrorism is quite possibly the lowest, cheapest stunt you can pull, and Catallaxy’s Sinclair Davidson is entirely correct to call you on it:
It is simply astonishing that Henderson should single out for special criticism the two men who did a lot – a very, very lot – of the heavy lifting in the free speech campaign that the IPA, under John Roskam’s excellent leadership, ran against Conroy’s obscene media laws. We are all in their debt, yet Henderson does the smear. In his op-ed he is attempting to link concern for civil liberties to support for terrorism.
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There are always a few malcontents who engage in acts of extreme violence. It doesn’t matter if they profess to be Muslim or Marxist or Anarchist or Patriots or whatever. Their acts of terror condemn them whatever their motive. Anyone who says different is a moral dwarf.
Liberal societies maximise the freedoms of their citizens. Illiberal societies do not and usually contrive excuses to limit those freedoms. Being “at war” is a common excuse to limit freedom.
Linking a domestic campaign to retain free speech rights and privacy against the State to a act of terrorism on the other side of the world is not just a long bow, it is incredibly grubby.
I am also somewhat surprised by the allies Henderson has enlisted. Michael Danby – a member of the ALP who would have voted for Conroy’s anti-free speech legislation and Colin Rubenstein – a supporter of s18(c). Shame on you both. Unsurprising that those two would criticise Chris Berg and Simon Breheny. Danby and Rubenstein lost the free speech debates.
Look, I get why Jewish people and gay people and women and [insert minority/oppressed group here] don’t like being accused of conspiring to take over the planet or being reduced to a headless torso in news photographs or called ‘unnatural’ or whatever, but the point is that as soon as you try to protect groups qua groups you paint yourself into the same intellectual corner as the Cretan chap who told the world ‘all Cretans are liars’. You also start to forget what’s important, and what you can control (ie, the limits of law).
It is possible to have recourse to fact when discussing an individual (this is why defamation exists). It is very, very difficult to have recourse to fact when discussing groups: look at the tangled mess in which evolutionary psychology finds itself because it so often fails to make the point about ‘statistically, our research indicates…’
Whole academic disciplines have foundered on this particular shoal. The law should not aim to be one of them.
And for those who wish to change how they are represented, just keep on doing pointless stuff while abortion rights remain insecure in several Australian states, wingnuts blockade the entrance to a shop run by a well known Jewish chocolatier, and same sex marriage in Australia looks like being about 10 years off thanks to a combination of the Shoppies and Tony Abbott (ie, it doesn’t matter which party occupies the Aztec temple in Canberra).