Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

On the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination—of all days—we have seen a stunning and shameful capitulation by the Prime Minister to the right wing of his party. The Prime Minister could not have been more definitive in his comments up until a few months ago. Just to take a single example, in October 2016 the Prime Minister told Neil Mitchell on radio:

We have no plans to amend Section 18c.

And he said:

We did not take an 18c amendment proposal to the election in this year in 2016.

Now, just three months into the new year, the Prime Minister has buckled.

This Prime Minister used to stand for something. He used to have courage and principles. How far away that feels now. This Prime Minister is prepared to trade away protections for Australia's multicultural communities in order to save his own political skin. When presented with the choice of siding with bigots or siding with Australia's multicultural communities, this Prime Minister has chosen to side with bigots. It is disgraceful. This sustained ideological vendetta against section 18C is beyond all sense. The government are two sitting weeks out from the budget, and are they talking about housing affordability? Are they talking about fixing the deficit? Are they talking about doing something about reducing the national debt or doing something about the penalty rate cuts that are being inflicted on 700,000 Australian workers? No. They are fixated on making it easier to be a racist in Australia. Their priorities are completely backwards, and they will be punished by the electorate for it.

Make no mistake: any change to section 18C is a weakening of laws against racist hate speech, and it sends a terrible message to multicultural Australia. Replacing the words 'offend, insult and humiliate' with a single word—'harass'—is not a harmless change. It destroys the clarity that has been achieved through 20 years of court decisions which have set the bar high for successful complaints under section 18C. These four terms—'offend', 'insult', 'humiliate' and 'intimidate'—are taken together as a whole. They are a composite phrase and have been interpreted by the courts as setting a high bar for successful complaints. In the words of the now Chief Justice of the High Court, Susan Kiefel, in a judgement on an 18C case in 2001—'To offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate are profound and serious effects, not to be likened to mere slights.' There you have it—the existing law is clear, the existing law works and the existing law does not enable vexatious complaints without merit to be upheld in the courts.

Has the Prime Minister and his right wing ever bothered to read the facts about section 18C? Are they aware that, in the 21-year history of 18C, only 96 cases have actually reached court? That is under five a year. Changing the wording of this law will introduce a new destructive ambiguity and a new uncertainty into section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act which may, in fact, lead to an increase in the number of court cases. Prime Minister Turnbull and his right-wing cronies are yet to explain what it will mean to be 'harassed'—that is the new term—by racial hate speech. Will victims of racial abuse have to have proof of repeated attacks in order to make a successful complaint? Is it going to be enough to be shouted at in public? What if someone shouts racial abuse from a car and then drives past—does that count as harassment? Why is the change necessary and what practical difference will it make?

They do not have practical answers to these practical questions, because they have not even considered the implications of what they are proposing. This push to change section 18C is being driven by blind ideology and nothing else. If this government thinks it can get away with presenting this change as 'nothing to see here', it is deeply, deeply wrong. Labor will fight. Labor will mobilise in the same way that we did in 2014. Liberal MPs that are clinging onto slim margins in their electorates will feel it. The Prime Minister himself will feel it and he will regret his decision to ever give in to the right wing of his party. Labor made our choice long ago. We stand with multicultural Australia and we stand against bigotry. We will fight these changes to section 18C and we will not give up until section 18C is safe once more.

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