What the “hate speech” debate misses

[Contributed article]

The Abbott Government had taken a break from breaking election promises cheating the elderly of their pensions and pimping our country to Asia to announce, via Senator George Brandis, a couple of tweaks to the anti-free speech provisions within the Racial Discrimination Act.

Currently, as Andrew Bolt famously discovered in 2011, it is illegal to offend non-white interest groups in Australia (even if they are, chromatically speaking, white). The government wants to change the law so that, while it could be used against young girls who taunt Aboriginal footballers (if they have not already been detained by state police, as the case may be), Andrew Bolt will be free to question the motives of aboriginal-identifying grievance mongers.

We should applaud the Government for its principled stand; that is, insofar as it goes, and assuming it actually does what it promises, and does not cave in to the demands of groups with vested interests.

Predictably, Waleed Aly, a grievance monger on behalf of the Muslim-Arab-generic non-white community, doesn’t agree. What he objects to is the provision that what counts as “vilification” is “to be determined by the standards of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community” rather than by the standards of any particular ethnic group. No, it’s not that the wording still gives judges the right to arbitrarily penalise politically incorrect opinion, such as that of a white person concerned about anti-white policies and ideologies like multiculturalism; it’s that “it’s just so . . . well, white.”[1]

Apparently Aly thinks minority racial groups should decide what constitutes illegal racism, giving them, to quote the words of Enoch Powell’s far-sighted speech, “the whip hand over the white man”. Ironically, white people have been responsible for formulating the basis of almost every decent functioning legal code in the world. If Aly doesn’t like the white man’s law, perhaps he should go and live under Sharia.

What he argues, in case you couldn’t guess, is that a racially-neutral law is actually a codification of “white privilege”, so it’s necessary to have a law that privileges non-whites to balance things out.

Aly doesn’t like the “fact” as he reads it, that under the new Act “an ordinary reasonable white person is being asked to tell, say, black people whether or not they are ‘reasonably likely’ to be fearful of physical harm”. Australia’s police forces don’t collect data on crimes by race, but I dare to speculate that if they did, Aly’s concerns would seem a little topsy-turvy. Has he forgotten the disclosure made by Victoria Police Deputy Commissioner Tim Cartwright in 2012, that Sudanese and Somalian immigrants in Victoria are committing assault and robbery at around five times the rate of the general population?[2]

Bureaucrat and alleged political philosopher Tim Soutphommasane took the time to defend the prestige of his job as Race Discrimination Commissioner in a bubble-and-squeak article thrown together for the occasion. In a passage that demonstrates how to really take the fight to ordinary, reasonable Australians, he reassures us:

“The current section 18D is also one of the few provisions in Australian law that explicitly protects freedom of speech. It protects anything that is done in the course of fair reporting or fair comment of a matter of public interest, provided it is done reasonably and in good faith.”[3]

Divest the language of the Act of its reassuring connotations and all you have is the assurance that we are allowed to say anything we want to as long as it accords with elite opinion and isn’t done for rabble-rousing purposes.

Of course, even if Sections 18C and D of the Federal Act are repealed, state governments have their own equally stifling laws. Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act (2001), for example makes it a crime in that state to “incite hatred […] serious contempt […] revulsion or severe ridicule.” This legislation has been used, for example, by Muslims to sue those who criticise their religion. Repealing the federal law would set a positive precedent for the states.[4]

Andrew Bolt, who has felt the brunt of Section 18C, has naturally written a column in support of the proposed changes. He cites the absurd case of Paul Weston, recently arrested under a similar law in the UK for the crime of quoting Winston Churchill in public. (He might have gone further and denounced the treatment of two BNP candidates whose home was raided at the behest of their Labour opponents.)

In these overseas incidents, we get a peek at the kind of society our multiculturalist elites are planning for us all.

Bolt’s criticism only goes so far, however. In his view “ending arguments with cops is obscene”; fair enough, but the title of his article “people power on racism trumps police action” sounds like an invitation to a lynching.[5]

These overseas incidents and many more, along with domestic ones like the one that centred around Adam Goodes last year, show another consequence of admitting the concept of “hate speech” into public discourse, which is of course an effect of having laws like this on the books. Police intimidation, even in the absence of prosecution, is given an aura of legitimacy and is evidently more likely to occur.

There have not been many high profile cases under the Act, it is true. As is frequently pointed out by its defenders, it more frequently results in conciliation than legal action. But how many people have ultimately lost their jobs and reputations because of a phone call to HREOC? How much important debate has the Act stifled because of the fear generated by the Bolt and Toben cases? This is its insidious effect. And the law is young.

The Left is working hard to create a cultural climate of totalitarian ideological conformity; the Act provides the open-ended legal infrastructure to move with the times and mop up any survivors on the wrong side of the culture war.

In 2002 the Toben case proved it was illegal to “deny the Holocaust”; in 2011 the Bolt case proved you couldn’t criticise the race politics of self-appointed aboriginal spokespeople in receipt of our tax money. Irrespective of one’s personal position on these issues, it makes you wonder what the next landmark case will be.

And signs are that unless the legislation is effectively curtailed, we won’t have to wait long to find out. According to the President of the Australian Human Rights (sic) commission, “Last year, the commission received a 59% increase in complaints about racial abuse in the workplace, on radio, on public transport and at football matches.”[6]

In 2002 the Toben case showed it was illegal to “deny the Holocaust”; in 2011 the Bolt case proved you couldn’t criticise the race politics of self-appointed aboriginal spokespeople in receipt of our tax money. Surely it is only a matter of time before more darts hit the expanding bullseye.

Such laws can be viewed as an arsenal to be used in future against any political movement that may arise to challenge the elite’s genocidal immigration policies.

Those who champion the existing Act don’t really want to fight “racism”; they are fighting any and all opposition to their advanced takeover of our country. Contrary to Bolt and the rest of the mainstream conservative commentariat, it is not a debate about means and ends we need, but about basic values and identity.

People like Waleed Aly (of Muslim Egyptian ethnicity) and Tim Soutphommasane (of Chinese and Laotian ethnicity) wouldn’t be Australian citizens had the Whitlam Government, who passed the original Race Discrimination Act, not at the same time finished the work of dismantling the protections Australians had previously enjoyed against demographic swamping.[7]

These people are activists on behalf of their own people; unlike Brandis and Bolt, they understand that the ideological cloud of anti-racism descended through dishonest and high-handed political machinations, and that it did not arise from the sensibilities of the Australian people. They suspect that we remain “racists” underneath, because on some level they know how they would feel if it was the society their ancestors built that was being colonised.

No people can exist for long without a territory of its own; and when that people is subjected to laws and propaganda constituting forced assimilation, the result is genocide.

If our culture and our race are to have a future at all, we must push for further changes. Not just section C, but the entire Act; not just the Act but every piece of legislation that prevents Australians from discussing what is being done to us as a people, and how we can fight back.

References:
[1] “George Brandis’ Racial Discrimination Act changes create the whitest piece of proposed legislation I’ve encountered”, Sydney Morning Herald, 27 March 2014 (Waleed Aly)
Brandis’ race hate laws are whiter than white”, The Age , 27 March 2014 (Waleed Aly)

[2] “African youth crime concern”, The Age, 20 August 2012 (Dan Oakes)
Sorry for telling us the truth about African crime rates”, Herald Sun, 24 September 2012 (Andrew Bolt)

[3] “No case for changing race laws”, The Drum (ABC), 29 April 2014 (Tim Soutphommasane)
No case for changing race laws”, Australian Human Rights Commission, 29 April 2014 (Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner)

[4] “Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001 – Sect 25”,
Racial and religious vilification”, Victoria Police, 2 November 2009 (updated 25 February 2013)
Historic win in religious hatred case”, The Age, 18 December 2004 (Barney Zwartz)
Catch the Fire Ministries v Islamic Council of Victoria Inc: Free speech wins – just”, Skeptic Lawyer, 14 December 2006
Danny Nalliah”, Wikipedia
Necessary tolerance of religious vilification”, Eureka Street, 3 April 2008 (Peter Hodge)

[5] “People power on racism trumps police action”, Herald Sun, 30 April 2014 (Andrew Bolt)

[6] “Why racial hatred laws are vital to Australian multiculturalism”, Human Rights Commission, 22 November 2013 (Gillian Triggs, HRC President)

[7] “Waleed Aly”, Wikipedia
Tim Soutphommasane ”, Wikipedia

Further reading:
Waleed Aly’s argument: fighting racism is racist. Even Martin Luther King is too white”, Herald Sun, 28 March 2014 (Andrew Bolt)

Comments

  1. Trend prophet says

    These hypocrites still have not charged the hizbut tahrir immigrants for their threats against australian Jews in lakemba at their protest for gaza. I even emailed the Zionist federation and those jelly backs have done nothing at all. I mean what is the point of these federations if they do nothing? We need more activism. We need to form an australian peoples interest group and start using these arguments and laws in favour of our own people. Does anyone remember the australian natives association? Sheikh wahwah etc could be charged under their laws if we organized

  2. It can’t be free speach if you can’t say what you like. It is like free apps on your iphone free for $10.00. I mean it is an oxymoron. Free for minorities but no one else.
    I will give you something free!
    If you don’t like what is here go back to where you came from, you morons.
    Eddy.

  3. The g Factor says

    The last I heard about this was that the Abbott government had squibbed out and was not going ahead with the changes. Apparently he wants to keep the Muslim community on side as part of ‘Team Australia’ – I wonder if this team includes the 150 ‘Australians’ fighting in Syria and Iraq or the looney who was pictured holding two human heads.
    What has been negelected in the debate is that these laws have been – and will continue to be – used in a discriminatory way. Will ethnic Germans no longer be constantly reminded of the crimes under Nazism while the crimes of others (including the far greater killings under Stalin and Mao are largely ignored? Will it stop white Australians being scapegoated for the failings or problems of Aborigines or any other minority that can’t compete?
    Further more the repression of truth could lead to serious – and sometimes deadly – social and criminal problems being ignored by the media and allowed to continue due to the public not knowing what is going on.
    These laws verge on mind control and should not be modified but completely repealed.

  4. With respect to the Aboriginal issue, perhaps if they changed the criteria that one can only claim Aboriginal heritage if one is actually and only a full blood Aborigine, it’s like my great grandparents are all Scottish, I can hardly go to Scotland and claim to be Scottish and therefore claim any entitlements that a native Scot would receive, and the Aboriginal issue is exactly the same..time to get rid of honey pot that lures the false pretenders to receive status and benefits they are not entitled to

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