Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

As a servant of the people of Queensland and Australia, I am very pleased to support this long-overdue amendment to the Racial Discrimination Act. After numerous broken promises by the government, policy flip-flops and resistance to just plain common sense, I am delighted to see that reason has finally taken the day and the government has accepted One Nation's argument that the Racial Discrimination Act needs to be changed. This government-sponsored Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill 2017 seeks to remove the words 'insult', 'humiliate' and 'offend' from section 18C of the act as grounds for the charge of racial vilification and replace them with the word 'harass'. It also seeks to help filter out frivolous or vexatious complaints and require the Human Rights Commission to advise those who are the subject of complaints as soon as they are received.

Pauline Hanson's One Nation welcomes these changes as long overdue and, whilst we would like to see far greater changes, such as the removal altogether of part IIA of the Racial Discrimination Act, which contains these provisions, the government has at least taken a significant step in the right direction. At least limiting complaints to harassment imposes a requirement for an objectively measurable event as a trigger, rather than the current ridiculous situation in which complaints are derived from a subjective emotional state and therefore can be based on a whim. As most people in Australia are aware, to their cost, the now infamous Racial Discrimination Act 1975 purports to prohibit 'offensive behaviour based on racial hatred', but in reality it is simply a blatant attack on free speech. This draconian law has been used to silence individuals such as reporter Andrew Bolt and the late, great and respected cartoonist Bill Leak, who had the temerity to make comments not in accordance with the politically correct half-baked opinions of the left-wing controlling elites.

If the Senate will indulge me, I would like to recount a little history of this truly reprehensible piece of extreme leftist legislation. The Racial Discrimination Act was first enacted by the failed Whitlam government in 1975. This act purported to make so-called racial discrimination unlawful in Australia and overrode inconsistent state and territory legislation using the 'external affairs' power contained in section 51 of our Australian Constitution. As my Senate colleagues will be aware, the external affairs power has been regularly abused by both Labor and coalition governments since then in order to override the rights of the states to make laws, contrary to the intent of the founders of our Constitution.

In the case of the Racial Discrimination Act, the basis for use of the external affairs power was the signing of the so-called United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in the dying days of the Whitlam government, which was in turn adopted by the UN based on an original proposal by the Soviet Union in 1948 which sought to align democratic Western governments with Soviet policy. In 1948, following the Nuremberg trials, world leaders gathered to construct a lofty-sounding Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the Soviet representatives argued that, to prevent a resurgence of Nazism, free speech should be qualified by banning so-called hate speech. The Soviets advocated making it a crime to advocate 'national, racial or religious hostility' but not of course 'class hostility'—in other words, to say anything with which they self-righteously disagreed.

Such efforts to supposedly combat hate, by denying freedom of speech, were vehemently opposed by Western delegates, including even the left-leaning Eleanor Roosevelt, who wisely said that a hate speech qualification would be 'extremely dangerous' since 'any criticism of public or religious authorities might all too easily be described as incitement to hatred'. Mrs Roosevelt and other delegates knew well that similar laws in the prewar Weimar Republic had not only failed to prevent the rise of the Nazis but had been successfully used by the Nazis to silence their critics, much as radical Muslim groups and their apologists do now.

The Soviets lost on their 'hate speech' gambit in 1948 but were finally successful in 1965 with the creation of the UN's lofty-sounding International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which contained a section calling for the criminalisation of 'ideas based on racial superiority or hatred'. This belated victory, and its subsequent adoption in 1975 by the Whitlam Labor government here in our country, represented the triumph of the Soviet view of free speech as bad and censorship as good.

Of course, not ready to be outdone in the repression-of-liberty stakes, in 1995 the Keating Labor government went one better and added section 18C. Keating's amendment states, inter alia:

(1) It is unlawful for a person to do an act, otherwise than in private, if:

(a) the act is reasonably likely, in all the circumstances, to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people; and

(b) the act is done because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group.

While some may believe that this act reflects some high-minded principle of fairness and justice, in fact nothing could be further from the truth. The hallmark of the Soviet Union was the corruption, the hijacking, of language, to become an instrument of oppression—calling war 'peace' and slavery 'freedom', for example—and this was no different. The pretence of protecting people from injustice was in fact a Trojan Horse to silence those who dared to dissent from the Communist Party line. Those of us in this parliament who believe passionately in the right to free speech are implacably opposed to this Soviet legal landmine and strongly support this amendment.

Unfortunately, the Liberal Party appears to have had a chequered history on this issue, as it has with several other key principles of classical liberalism, such as low taxes and responsible government spending. Like identical poles of a magnet, the Liberal Party and freedom of speech appear to have repeatedly approached one another only to be repelled by some invisible yet irresistible force. When the Hon. Tony Abbott was Leader of the Opposition, with square jaw and steely gaze, he publicly committed his future government to repealing section 18C following the Bolt case. However, once elected Prime Minister Mr Abbott's gaze seemed to drift out of focus and his jaw seemed to slacken. The member for Warringah suddenly decided that the promised change was a 'complication' to his 'planned overhaul of terror laws'. Perhaps it was the squeak of ministerial leather. Perhaps it was the raised voices and clenched fists of the enemies of liberty who opposed the change. Either way, Mr Abbott folded like a cheap umbrella.

However, this pesky, free speech idea just would not die, would it? In March last year the Australian Law Reform Commission called for a review of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Following a laborious two-year inquiry into Commonwealth laws that encroach on traditional rights and freedoms and an examination of whether those laws are probably justified, in a 592-page report tabled by Senator Brandis, the Australian Law Reform Commission questioned whether the Racial Discrimination Act 'unjustifiably interferes with freedom of speech'. The report further questioned whether section 18C was even constitutional, pointing out that its validity had never been tested before the High Court. Very promisingly, Senator Brandis was quoted at the time as saying that the government was 'committed to preserving and maintaining the freedoms which underpin the principles of democracy'. Senator Brandis said:

To this end, I have written to my Ministerial colleagues asking them to carefully consider what action might be taken in relation to the laws which the Commission has identified as warranting further consideration.

It is regrettable that we then had to wait another 12 months for this to bear fruit.

Happily, it seems that the member for Warringah's successor, the current Prime Minister, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, may well be undergoing a journey in the opposite direction to Mr Abbott. Having initially stated that free speech was 'not a priority for his government', I am heartened to see that under pressure from One Nation there are encouraging signs of a damascene conversion. Whether or not the centrist flip-floppers on the crossbench torpedo the current amendment, I very much hope that the Prime Minister's conversion will prove to be the case. It is a scientific fact that, given sufficient time, the jellyfish did eventually evolve into the vertebrate.

Although it seems hard to believe today, with neo-Stalinists like the member for Sydney lurking one heartbeat from the Labor leadership, in fact historically the Labor Party was not hostile to the principle of freedom of speech at all. Enlightened former Labor leadership figures such as John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Peter Baldwin and Barry Cohen certainly seemed to have had a strong appreciation of the importance of this issue. However, very sadly, today Labor is marching determinedly to a different drum. As the anaconda-like grip of the Socialist Left progressively tightens around the Labor Party tolerance for opinions dissenting from left-wing orthodoxy is on its last gasp.

As for the Greens, all I can say is that repression of freedom of speech could have no more eloquent a champion. The smug, elitist sense of superiority that infuses these koala-hugging commos appears to leave them without the slightest awareness of the terrible repression which they champion in their pursuit of ideological conformity with their own, frankly, antihuman world view. Even the possibility that someone else might hold a legitimate and well-reasoned opinion that differs from theirs appears to simply be beyond their comprehension.

Of course the absurdity of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act is that in truth government can legislate to regulate behaviour but it cannot regulate feelings. Whether or not someone insults and offends is an entirely subjective matter in the mind of the beholder. Section 18C actually weakens and disempowers people. It turns people into victims. As my crossbench colleague Senator David Leyonhjelm said, the truth is that offence may only be taken, not given. The idea that the world is otherwise is simply a rose-tinted left-wing fantasy. But then a colourful lunar landscape seems to be a pretty accurate description of the Green vision of society. Transgender pixies riding their solar-powered unicorns over oh-so-sustainable rainbows seems to be a more accurate representation.

Throughout this debate a common rhetorical question asked by senators, like the former speaker Senator Bilyk, and members, like Mr Bill Shorten, on the control side of politics is: what is it that you think people want to say but cannot say under the current legislation? The answer to this fatuous question is obviously just 'the truth'—'All we want to hear is just the truth.' When Bill Leak called out Aboriginal mistreatment of their own children, the enemies of free speech swooped and charged him but, as demonstrated by the Northern Territory intervention, rampant child sexual abuse, neglect and drug taking in Northern Territory Aboriginal communities is simply fact.

Because of laws like the Racial Discrimination Act ordinary decent people are simply afraid to speak the truth because the truth can get you arrested, fined or even jailed. If your Muslim Sudanese neighbour is engaging in female genital mutilation, your Syrian Muslim cafe owner is a terrorist building a bomb or the Afghan Muslims in the public housing flat next to you are molesting small children, chances are that you are afraid to speak out.

Similar laws overseas have led to exactly this. In the UK, where similar anti-liberal restrictions on freedom of speech exist, 1,400 children were raped by Pakistani Muslim gangs in Rotherham. But, in the words of the inquiry into this mass crime, 'Staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist.' In San Bernadino in the US, where a Muslim terrorist killed 14 innocent—