Stan Grant's racial villification

Aspiring to the Australian Dream can be exhausting, juggling work and kids. But I have it easy. Imagine the parents caring for a disabled child with little English and few supports while trying to make ends meet, dreaming to build a better life for their family.

Indeed, there are 24 million individual stories of hope and seeming hopelessness, stress and joy from people from of all ethnic backgrounds dreaming of a better life for their children while contributing to making our society more advanced, enlightened and compassionate.

The very essence of a liberal democracy and the Australian dream itself is that we appreciate the worth and the circumstance of every individual and we do not cast all people within a collective with stereotypes.

And that is why we have to speak out against the ill-informed hate-speech of activists such as Stan Grant. Too often we see Aboriginal activists making broad accusations that non-Aboriginal Australians are racist.

Butthat sort of hate-speech is not okayin Australia, at least according to Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. And taking action this way would be a radical new approach for those opposed to section 18C; to see how the other side likes the spit-hood of censorship and State-sponsored intimidation being used as a tool to shut down debate.

To be sure, this is a very different concept to, for example, David Leyonhjelm complaining that he was called an angry white male. I'm arguing that it's not OK for activists to label wide groups of people with an offensive stereotype (racist) without any cause.

In this regard, it is particularly relevant to scrutinize Stan Grant's speech on Australia Day last year. How would the debate shift on 18C if an addressthat was celebrated as a defining speech against racism, was itself, in breach of hate-speech laws?

Grant's speech was, in effect, a feebly constructedand hate-filled rant that "The Australian dream is rooted in racism. It is the very foundation of the dream". And that "Of course racism is killing the Australian dream. It is self-evident that it's killing the Australian dream."

Section 18C states that it is unlawful to do an act 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.

Part (a) seems reasonably satisfied. Calling someone a racist is obviously offensive. Maybe Grant should tell the young parent diagnosed with cancer whose Australian dream is to help other cancer sufferers as well as surviving to see her children finish school that she's actually a racist who has conspired to stop Grant succeeding in life; as Grant self-aggrandises that "I have succeeded in spite of the Australian dream".

Is part (b) of Section 18(c) satisfied? Along with multiple references to "my people" it is clear throughout his speech that Grant is not labelling Aborigines as racists. It's obvious that the overarching theme is that "you lot are racists".

Part (b) specifically says "because of the race...." Not because of "a race...". Grant clearly then defines non-Aboriginal Australians on the basis of race. According to the Human Rights commission, "Courts have generally taken the view that 'race' as described in anti-discrimination legislation is a broad term".

Specifically an Aboriginal Corporation was found to have unlawfully discriminated against an employee by dismissing her because of her "non-Aboriginality". It has been well established that not all persons within a particular race need to be offended. Section 18C precedent has included very narrow sub-groupings within a race based on hazy ill-defined constructs such as "youth, inexperience or psychological vulnerability" and the changeable and consensual notion "self-identification".

As written, part (b) could reasonably be interpreted as encompassing an exclusive definition (ie anyone not of a particular race) as well as an inclusive definition (anyone of a particular race). Indeed a bouncer at a nightclub was found in breach of 18(c) by yelling at MrH "that he should go back to his own country, that Australia is a white peoples' country, and that he is not white." (ie an exclusive definition).

Furthermore, would anyone for an instant not believe that 18C was breached if a white nationalist said that "non-white people are …." fill in the derogatory stereotype?

Interestingly, despite the bouncer being found to have breached 18C for his comments to a punter who was abusing him in return, in another case, Federal Magistrate Brown, using gymnastic-esquelogical contortions, found that 18C had not been breached when an agitated white woman screamed to an Aboriginal corrections officer: "'You f****** black piece of s***' and 'f*** you blacks, you're all fucking s***'."  Actually it was the other way around and it was an Aboriginal woman who yelled to a white corrections officer and Brown seemingly "made stuff up" to find the woman not in breach of 18C.

Whether this case is truly seen as legal precedent or an embarrassing lack of quality assurance within the judiciary is irrelevant to Grant's divisive rhetoric. This is not about Aboriginal versus white. It's about all non-Aboriginal Australians who have an Australian dream. When I consider my Vietnamese, Chinese, Sri Lankan, Indian, Greek, Polish, Iranian, Filipino, Somalian, and Zimbabwean friends and colleagues (many of whom have come to Australia with nothing, fleeing persecution) and how we all aspire to help individuals and society, I find Grant's vulgar remarks far from being visionary. Indeed, I believe they are the epitome of racially-divisive "hate speech".

Specifically,Grant de-legitimizes the dreams and the achievements of Australians from all ethnic backgrounds.

Jurisprudence regarding 18C is all over the shop; everything or nothing could be found in breach. Anyone with any understanding of law, evidence-based medicine, political polling, fact-checking, psychological, biological and other basic science research understands that around the contested margin, there is no objective truth; there is solely the ideology of the decision maker. That's why it's pure intimidation that speech can be adjudicated through the ideological fantasies of any particular Judge.

However since this absurd law is with us Dilan Thampapillai, a legal academic argues that the focus "should be on the outcome of racist speech." Section 18C "should be aimed at preventing the exclusion and sense of division fostered by racist speech." The immense racial division that Stan Grant fosters should be at the front of the queue for reprimand under 18C. We should instead foster tolerance and understanding and judge people on the content of their character and their individual circumstance, not whether they are "my people" (as Grant says) or not.