Right-Wing Parties Must Stop Indulging the Proponents of Censorship

The writer is in Australia.

Anthony Albanese’s malignant tumour of a proposed law, his mooted hate speech law bill, has been withdrawn by the Prime Minister. Well, the racial vilification part of the bill has been abandoned, the part that would have criminalised all sorts of speech and in theory delivered more prison time for words (and potentially just for saying in blunt terms that you are opposed to mass immigration from this Islamic country or from that) than for common assault. In a way that disfigures any supposed liberal democracy, it would have much extended the already awful section 18C hate speech laws regime – which at least does not bring to bear the criminal law – by threatening grotesque levels of criminal punishments simply for voicing dissenting views. This, dear readers, is what happens when the bad effects of multiculturalism can no longer be hidden from view. Politicians like Albo are then sorely tempted to blame those who point out the woeful effects of mass immigration rather than tackling, you know, Islamic extremism and hate-preaching imams that have been imported into our shores – i.e., the actual cause behind the two men who butchered so many Jewish Australians on Bondi Beach. By the way, this proposed Bill would have done nada, nothing, zero to get at that problem. It was designed instead to attack any person who deigned to narrow in on and speak about this actual problem.

So why did Albanese don the gymnast’s attire and do this Olympic calibre backflip? After all, and rather incredibly, a few ‘moderate’ Liberal MPs (from Australia’s centre-Right party) had pushed for the opposition to support this anti-free speech bill (more on that in a moment). To her credit, opposition leader Sussan Ley came out against it. Personally, I think the strong, quick steps by One Nation to oppose the Albo bill in its entirety, plus all the civil society groups who adamantly opposed it, together with recent polling showing a substantial increase in the One Nation vote at the expense of the Libs, left Ley with little choice. Still, she made a pretty good fist of articulating her opposition to it. But as Labour has a huge majority in the House and can pass whatever it wants there, the real action was always in the Senate. Labour only needed the Greens to ram this bill through. Yet even the Greens balked and said ‘no’. Now it’s not totally clear, of course, precisely why the Greens really balked. For anyone like me with a strong commitment to free speech and open debate (which, like it or not, only matters when people are voicing unpopular views) there is a fair chance that the Greens in part, and ironically, wanted more inroads and more thuggishness than this seemingly ready-to-go, monstrously long Labour bill gave them. (Serious query: Has Labour had a version of this bill sitting around waiting to be put in front of the public at the first emergency? Because it’s one heck of a long bill. And somehow it never once mentions Islamic extremism or Islamic terrorism.)

Anyway, there are too many objections to the Bill to list them all in a short column. Suffice it to say that Albo attempted to ram his ‘let’s attack free speech’ bill down our throats with a brutally short public consultation time; that it would have censored robust political debate on mass immigration under the guise of not hurting feelings and preventing offense; that the mooted criminal punishments were laughably harsh for expressing dissenting (from Labour’s worldview) opinions about racial issues tied to migration; and that the bill would have done nothing – zero – to stop a future Bondi-type attack. All of the speech most damningly complained about by Jewish groups – most definitely including the incendiary speech of some Islamic imams – would be exempt or could already be seen as inciting violence. And we already have laws to deal with that. It’s just that the police and government have chosen to look the other way. And worst of all, perhaps, it was plain to anyone that this Albo bill was going to lead to a two-tier, ‘Keir Starmer in Britain’ type enforcement problem. It would have criminalised so much speech that it could only ever have been enforced selectively. My guess? Team Albo were never going to enforce it potently against a core voting block nor against the sorts of groups that caused the Bondi massacre, namely the Islamic hate preachers and Jew-hating zealots. Nope. My bet is that regular citizens, especially those who think our immigration intake has gone haywire, would have been the most targeted. Certainly Albo’s twin Labour Government in the UK, that of Keir Starmer, has been indulging in massive two-tier policing and enforcement of speech-related laws. Last irony of all, when the speech blanket had descended on us all more than a few would have blamed Jewish groups for this Albanese attack on any semblance of free speech in this country.

So bad, bad and worse. All Australians have dodged something of a bullet on this one. But notice a couple of things. Firstly, more than a few Liberal MPs are making noises about drafting their own alternative package of speech-limiting laws. Are they completely daft? (Please, please, don’t answer that as we all know the answer.) Secondly, a few Liberal MPs, including shadow Cabinet Minister Julian Leeser actually wanted the Liberals to vote for this Albo disfigurement of a bill. Leeser is reported as claiming that not to do so would “cede the moral high ground” to Labour. Well, I don’t know what moral high ground Leeser is talking about but it’s certainly not any ground that I think is remotely morally worth climbing. (Remember, Australia’s Jewish groups split on this bill, but I think most readers will agree with Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price. She came out in support of the Australian Jewish Association’s opinion that this Albo hate speech bill was “grossly flawed”.)

Look, I’ll be what I always am which is blunt. I knew Julian back before he went into politics. I liked him. I think he’s a nice man. But his politics is patently not mine. Nor do I think it is remotely those of most Liberal party members. Julian was a die-hard supporter of the Voice. He opposed Tony Abbott’s attempts to repeal section 18C. Now here he is supporting one of the most speech-inhibiting laws in the democratic world. On all these sort of cultural issues Leeser positions himself as more woke than your average Guardian reader. Any political party needs a certain amount of breadth of viewpoint. It needs to be a broad church. But it is trite, incoherent idiocy to think that a big tent party can welcome in every view going. I would never have given a strong ‘yes to the Voice’ supporter MP a place in my shadow Cabinet. Sussan Ley did. Now she’s including someone who supported one of the worst anti-free speech bills I have ever read.

I liked Julian as a person but this guy has got to go from the shadow Cabinet. Or maybe Ley just waits as One Nation goes up and up in the polls and the Black Hand Gang takeover of the Liberal Party ends, predictably, in the ruin of what had been one of the democratic world’s most successful parties.

Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.