Soapy on the free speech balustrades ... 100 flowers to bloom ... No Coalition unity ticket on amendments to Racial Discrimination Act ... AG's unique understanding of "public discussion" ... Anti-Muslin groups rally in support ... Is this a bad dream?
From Alan Moir (moir.com.au)
Attorney General George (Bigot) Brandis recently visited the Sydney office of the Human Rights Commission, the organisation he is most keen to defenestrate.
He told the startled commissioners and staff that they should regard the Coalition regime in Canberra as a "Maoist government", dedicated to vigorous debate - in the style of the Chinese Communist Party Chairman's famous exhortation to "let a hundred flowers blossom".
Since his official visit there has been vigorous debate about the attorney's ill-conceived and horribly executed attempt to expose the public's imagination to marvellous new schools of thought without fear of legal reprisals.
It is abundantly clear the species he would like to see blooming is the pungent Ficus Bigotae Boltus, with its dazzling fair-fleshed flower.
For an attorney general to planting the flag of bigotry as a rallying call for the nation is an exciting new challenge.
His endorsement, announced on Lateline, that we should have "the freedom to spread untruths" (but not in trade or commerce) also opens up fresh opportunities.
What Brandis took to the Cabinet room might have been drafted by B.J. Vorster and had to be toned down by more balanced souls like Young Otto Abetz, Mathias Cormann and Dame Chrissy Pyne.
Cabinet colleges have been leaking like salad spinners about how the original version was so over-the-top. We've now ended up with a "consultation draft" - which was not George's intention at all.
One minister told the Sydney Morning Herald:
"George has really drunk the right-wing Kool Aid."
Another said the original Bill was "terrible".
Cabinet leaks are a sure sign that the wheels are starting to fall off.
Nonetheless, the exposure draft is sending shivers down the spines of ethnic groups and cultural organisations.
* * *
Soapy's plan is to replace the current prohibitions of "offend, insult, humiliate and intimate" with "vilify and intimidate" - on the basis of race, colour or ethnicity of a person or a group.
Vilify, he says, means "to incite hatred against a person or group of persons".
Intimidate means to cause fear of physical harm to a person or property.
It's much closer to the model used in most of the state race discrimination laws, which just goes to show how useless it is.
Since 1991 in NSW, when the Act came into force, there has not been one successful race discrimination prosecution.
In Victoria there have been two successful prosecutions in 10 years.
Then, there's Soapy's proposed s.(3) which specifies that whether an act is reasonably likely to vilify or intimidate is to be determined by the standards of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community, not by the standards of any particular group.
In short, racist abuse will not be determined by the standards of those who are subject to racist abuse.
To call Adam Goodes a "black ape" is far less likely to be vilifying or intimidating to a white Australian than it is to a person who has lived with this sort of stuff for most of their life.
As Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane wrote in Saturday's Age (March 29):
"Take the scenario of a spectator racially abusing a person at a football match. Under what is proposed, the only thing that will matter is whether third parties were incited. The effects of the abuse in degrading the target would be irrelevant, no matter how serious or severe the vilification."
But the Big Daddy of the Bigot Bill is s.(4) - the arms-wide-open exemption provision:
Vilification and intimidation are defensible if "communicated in the course of participating in the public discussion of any political, social, cultural, religious, artistic, academic or scientific matter".
There's no requirement for reasonableness or good faith. Just let it rip.
Section 4 obviates everything that precedes it.
The AG has said that he drafted these provisions himself, which explains why they are so appalling.
* * *
Brandis gave an interesting interpretation when he was spruiking his draft to the media on March 25.
In answer to a question whether Holocaust denier Fredrick Toben would be caught by his proposed legislation, he old ABC radio:
"For those who are concerned about Holocaust denial, I can't see how Holocaust denial fails to be racial vilification.
Toben, as I understand it, wasn't engaged in the public discussion of a matter. He just put some racist nonsense on his website."
So, websites containing racist rants and Holocaust denial are exempt because in Brandis' mind they do not constitute "public discussion".
Since the "community consultation draft" was unveiled reptiles from The Daily Rupert have been working overtime to extract quotes from various racial and ethnic minorities to say that the existing law never protected them from racial vilification - so should be scrapped.
It's a weird angle, since the proposed law will protect them even less.
They even found Wesley Aird, a former member of Little Johnnie Howard's indigenous advisory council. He was reported as saying that the current s.18C didn't prevent Aborigines saying beastly racist things to other Aborigines.
Therefore, by implication, Brandis must be on the right track.
The "debate" reached it's acme when retired MP Wilson (Iron Bar) Tuckey entered the fray, with a letter to Friday's Financial Review (March 28), saying that as a "half-cast Irish" he never needed race laws to protect him from criticism, nor should anyone else.
* * *
The community consultations will be interesting and will be more akin to frantic lobbying, than "consultation".
Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson has declared his former employer, the IPA, is now a "community group".
This will be news to its corporate patrons who give millions of dollars in secret donations so that the institute can do undercover axe-grinding on their behalf. It's an elaborate cash-for-comment scheme - hence it's true description, the Institute for Paid Advocacy.
The Human Rights Commission is understood to done an informal tally of who is for and against the repeal of these key provisions of the RDA.
There are about 150 ethnic, religious, charitable and human rights groups who have gone on the record as opposing changes to s.18C.
There are six on the record as supportive of the changes: the IPA, the Australian Defence League, the Australian Projectionist Party, the Q Society and News Corp.
The Australian Defence League is an anti-Muslim outfit, the Protectionist Party is an opponent of multiculturalism, while the Q Society is another anti-Muslim organisation, which sponsored the Australian visit of the Keep-Holland-White politician, Geert Wilders.
* * *
A number of reports and studies formed the basis of the race discrimination legislation - notably, the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, the work of the Australian Law Reform Commission and the National Inquiry into Racial Violence prepared by Irene Moss.
The initial Racial Discrimination Bill was prepared in Lionel Murphy's time as attorney general, and eventually passed by the parliament when Kep Enderby was AG.
However, at that stage there was no s.18C or s.18D.
Those provisions arose as a response in the late 1980s and early 1990s to the firebombing of ethnic restaurants and the desecration of Jewish cemeteries.
Ron Castan played and big hand in formulating s.18C, as did Mark Dreyfus, now shadow attorney general.
Much of the lobbying of key government and opposition members was done by Mark Leibler.
An amending Bill was presented in 1993, but it lapsed. The following year it got through under the guiding hand of Keating's attorney general Michael Lavarch.
However, the Coalition and minor parties combined to remove the criminal sanctions in the Bill.
It would not surprise if Mark Leibler came back into the game in 2014 to remind the government that what it has created is a politically damaging ethnic version of Work Choices.
* * *
On August 14, 2000, freshly installed senator Soapy Brandis rose to make his maiden speech.
Among all his many florid attempts at getting 100 flowers to bloom, there was this lovely orchid:
"But of all the obligations of government, perhaps the most fundamental is this - the obligation to protect the weak from the strong. It is a need as old as government itself ..."
All of this may be a really bad dream, and we'll wake soon to discover that George Brandis never existed.