George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

The quote continues:

… to ensure that in rational and reasoned discourse, error would be vanquished. It was analogous to the free market theories of Adam Smith … However, Libertarian theory was to prove inadequate in the face of the new forces created by the industrialisation of the press and by the realities of 19th and 20th century media economics … On top of these economic and technological challenges to Libertarian theory, the intellectual climate of the 20th century was radically different from that of the 17th and 18th centuries, when Libertarian ideals flourished. The new intellectual climate placed higher store in collectivist, societal values and less on individualistic values.

There you have it, Mr Acting Deputy President, the rationale—the argument of the Finkelstein report is an anti-libertarian philosophy, a view that consigns the commitment to freedom of the press to the days of the Enlightenment. Mr Acting Deputy President, may I tell you I am something of a fan of the Enlightenment. I think that, after the experience of the 20th century, which saw the sacrifice of more human lives to the power of the state and on the pyre of ideology than in the entire course of history beforehand, the Enlightenment has a lot more useful things to teach us than the so-called new intellectual climate of which Mr Ray Finkelstein is so enamoured. I unashamedly assert that Adam Smith has more useful things to teach us than Marx, Mao or Marcuse, or any of the other avatars of the new intellectual climate.

Let me conclude with the words of John Stuart Mill. Writing in 1859, he said:

The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by when any defence would be necessary of the 'liberty of the press' as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed against permitting a legislature or an executive … to prescribe opinions to [the people] and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear.

Astonishingly, four decades after Milton's Areopagitica, two decades after the newly born American republic adopted the First Amendment, we have to fight a fight in Australia today for a freedom which was so taken for granted in mid-Victorian England that Mill thought no argument was necessary to defend it.