'Team Australia' dumps free speech promise

The only sure way of maximizing the prospects for repeal of s 18C was to conduct a relentless public campaign from the day of the IPA speech until and beyond the 2013 election.Abbott and Brandis should already have identified the main elements of such a campaign by the time Abbott made his promise.But, for all their high-minded jawing about free speech, neither Abbott nor Brandis appears to have given any consideration to formulating a persuasive public case for the repeal of s 18C. Instead, they sat on their hands.

A well-planned campaign in support of dissent would have forced the pro-s 18C alliance to confront the case against s 18C, namely, that when regard is had to the obscurantism of neo-Puritanical preaching about "hate speech", the confected notions of group psychic harm, the whingeing about the "silencing" effect of free speech, and, worst of all, the stereotyping of vulnerable minorities as being in need of special state protection against diversity of opinion, s 18C is a version of the age-old impulse to muzzle the expression of disagreeable opinions, in this case those about race and ethnicity and, necessarily, religion.

Ironically, the constant public parroting of the patronising pro-s 18C line that it protects entire "marginalised" minorities against "offensive, insulting, humiliating or intimidating" speech was refuted by the fact that auniquely powerful nationwide alliance was swiftly deployed to maintain the fuzzy ideological edifice of content-specific political censorship.

That alliance included the two national broadcasters, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) and state anti-discrimination agencies, State Governments, the Fairfax Media Group, the Australian Labor Party (ALP), The Greens, well-established religious, ethnic, national and local community organizations, leading academic lawyers, the organized legal profession, churches, the main civil liberties groups in the larger states, and many more, including elements within Abbott's own party.

More ironic still is the fact that the ALP had been at the forefront of the long struggle to dismantle Puritan literary and artistic censorship in the 1960s and in promoting the right to engage in divisive political dissent during the Vietnam War. Yet, within two decades, coinciding with the ALP's abandonment of its traditional struggle against the hard reality of economic inequality and exploitation, it had descended into the swamp of "diversity" and "identity" politics wherein it fell, hook line and sinker, for the neo-Puritan dogma of hate speech censorship.

By 1995, the ALP had established itself as the party of censorship in Australia when the Keating government sponsored the enactment of s 18C. The apogee of the flight away from individualdissenting free speech was reached when the State ALP government in Victoriasecured theenactment of legislation with the sanctimonious shorttitle, the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001.

Bigotry here, bigotry there, bigotry bigotry everywhere

Between September 2013 and March 2014, the barrackers for retention of s 18C waged a very loud, co-ordinated campaign which was long on fear, hyperbole and obscurantism and devoid of any attempt to deal directly with the arguments for maximizing individual free speech.

By far the most ludicrous claim was that s 18C stands between the freedom of a "harmonious" and "cohesive" Australia and its destruction by "divisiveness". The most florid and wildly ahistorical articulation of this thesis was the claim by the AHRC Race Discrimination Commissioner that "genocide starts with words".

The prize for the most eccentric example of the claim that s 18C positively protects free speech would have to go to the AHRC for adherence to its view that "Irish jokes" exemplify something characterised as permissible "casual" racism.

Soon after Abbott became Prime Minister, media reports began appearing that an intensive behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign was underway to have the new government renege on its promise. That led to the government promptly caving in and deciding to amend rather than repeal s 18C. Then, instead of introducing the amending Bill in the parliament, on 25 March 2014 Brandis released a draft Bill for public comment. This was the equivalent of the condemned man extending an open invitation to his own public execution.