About the Racial Discrimination Act amendment...

Michelle Grattan has a column at The Conversation about the amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act, and I agree with it completely.

I like this analogy:

There is a respectable case to be made that the present act is too wide. If drafters were starting from scratch, with no law on the books, they would probably be better to leave out “offend” and “insult”.

But there is not a clean slate, and changing the status quo has disproportionate dangers. It’s rather like punching a hole in an asbestos shed – a stable if not ideal structure suddenly turns into a hazard, its particles scattered with unpredictable risk. It would be easier and better to leave well alone.

I think that's a brilliant summary of the attitude of Warren Mundine, and (probably) of all the ethnic bodies that have urged the government not to intervene.

She goes on to note that until the current law resulted in a friend of the PM losing a purely symbolic battle (one caused by his own poor research and failure to simply apologise and correct errors in lieu of defending a court action)  this was not an active issue for the Coalition at all.    She writes:

And, apart from keeping faith with an outraged columnist, what is this about? There have not been other troublesome cases; the law has mostly functioned well.

Brandis claims that (unnamed) journalists tell him there is this “chill” of censorship. But who precisely wants to say what that they are not saying now?

One can’t imagine that Abbott himself would want a heightened debate on race. On indigenous affairs in particular, he’d be appalled – not least because it would endanger his push for indigenous recognition in the constitution.

Yet the government’s rhetoric over 18C and related sections of the RDA suggests that free speech is being suppressed.

That highlighted line is pure right wing bulldust, talked about by the likes of the teeth grindingly annoying fake culture war commentator Nick Cater (the UK's gain, and our loss, when he migrated here.)   As is typical of the Tea Party inspired Right in Australia now, they are setting up a straw man to attack by insisting that matters that the centre Right won about 20 years ago are still alive and crushing the nation.  Look at aboriginal issues - Labor was embarrassed by being gullible on Hindmarsh Island, and Bob Hawke weeping over claimed aboriginal sites; by the end of the Howard government, they were supporting the intervention in the Northern Territory and had a tougher approach to limiting alcohol than the current Liberal government.  (In truth, both parties have moved somewhat to the centre.  The Coalition's panic about native title is now seen as greatly exaggerated, and most in the party were fairly gracious about the Rudd apology.)

Given Andrew Bolt's behaviour, I find the line taken by Tim Wilson, as repeated by Brandis and all the FOB's* actually pretty nauseating - that the way to a better society is for there to be no limit on offensive expressions and for "good" people to vigorously attack objectionable views.  As Michelle writes:

Those worrying the most about the alleged chains on free speech can be sensitive when the exchanges become too robust. Bolt was outraged when outspoken indigenous figure Marcia Langton threw around allegations about him on television. “I was so bruised … that I didn’t go into work on Tuesday. I couldn’t stand any sympathy — which you get only when you’re meant to feel hurt,” he wrote.

He pointed to inaccuracies; after Langton apologised to him he demanded the ABC apologise too (she had made the comments on Q&A).

The Langton-Bolt exchanges contributed little to the public debate, but if you are going to complain there is not enough opportunity for unfettered free speech, it seems more than a little inconsistent to be upset by someone saying offensive things about you. Isn’t the aim supposed to be a world of unrestrained biffo all round?

And, of course, "classic liberals" like Wilson, Berg, and Sinclair Davidson in particular (who seems to be trying to make up for not having lived out a boyhood dream of being a righteous Rambo, or  comic book superhero, by being really nuttily belligerent on free speech) argue for "unrestrained biffo" from a position of white, male, social success. 

If they had an actual case where they could show some important issue has not been adequately canvassed in Australian society because of the RDA, they might have a case. The fact is, they don't.  I also strongly suspect that they have run so hard on this because of media donations to their think tank, which (I would guess) may have been inspired more by the Gillard government's clumsy attempt to revise media self regulation than the Bolt case.

I know it won't be an instant social disaster if the Act is amended, but it is the matter of why and by whom this is being argued now that paints a picture of a government with completely inappropriate  priorities interested in protecting mates who least need it. 

And, as such, it is yet another example of poor judgement by Tony Abbott.



* Friends of Bolt, of course.

And further:   I see from an article that Jason Soon links to, that at least some of those who support the free speech case in principle still feel uncomfortable with the way it is being argued.  I also agree with the take on Chris Kenny:

Hypocrisy is compounded, however, even by the principled. Chris Kenny suing the ABC for defamation for showing a manipulated image of him having sex with a dog is case in point.* People look at the kind of cases that have been brought forward under 18C and have (rightly, in my opinion) determined that some of these are a case of ‘hurt feelings’, to the extent that the judgements significantly impinge upon free expression. This line of argument has since been expanded to suggest either implicitly or explicitly that all the cases of racism and racial insensitivity are simple matters of ‘hurt feelings’ - everything, from a taxi driver being racially abused to a demented columnist with an axe to grind is ‘hurt feelings’.

On the other hand, the way most people have treated the Kenny case suggests that such belittling is reserved for 18C. There are those who would defend the concept of defamation law as it protects one’s property (reputation), which is not a terrible idea in itself. The issue is that there seems to be no recognition that there are gradations. The idea that a manipulated image from a group long known for satire would actually damage Kenny’s reputation is simple nonsense. But there seems to be this desire to see cases of alleged defamation as uniformly are valid and legitimate - in other words, a valid restriction of speech - whereas all cases under 18C are equally illegitimate. One kind of complainant deserves the benefit of the doubt and another kind does not.

What is happening is that there’s a peculiar blindness about how wide a net defamation law really casts, whereas there seems to be perfect 20-20 vision on 18C.