I don’t even want to comment on this today. It’s so self-evidently pathetic for anyone with an IQ above 60 that it’s demeaning to bother. But, as a monitor of the political economy, I have no choice, so here we go.
The Australian is in raptures as 18c is altered:
Malcolm Turnbull has vowed to “defend our freedom” by amending racial-hatred laws to protect free speech, unveiling a bold reform that has won acclaim from the Coalition partyroom but faces a severe test in the Senate.
The Prime Minister is fighting for the changes on the grounds they will produce a stronger, clearer law against racial vilification, halting the threat to free expression and seeking to establish a wider community standard to test complaints in the courts.
The move was yesterday backed by an overwhelming majority of the Liberal partyroom, putting paid to suggestions of deep divisions within the government over the issue. Senate powerbroker Nick Xenophon, however, set up an immediate barrier to the reform plan, signalling he could accept changes to how complaints are handled by the Australian Human Rights Commission but would oppose the most sweeping alterations to the race-hate laws.
Andrew Bolt loves it:
Labor leader Bill Shorten attacks Malcolm Turnbull’s free speech reforms with a question: “What insult do they want people to be able to say that they cannot say now?”
As defamation lawyer Justin Quill and I tried to explain last night without getting sued, the law now makes it dangerous to question the racism and identity politics of the Left.
The law is twenty years old, Andrew. If it hasn’t stopped you so far, it wasn’t going to now. Paul Kelly joins with his nemesis:
Australia now faces a bitter, destructive and emotive conflict over racism and free speech, with the Turnbull government pledged to reform the infamous section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act and the progressive legions openly declaring this means a licence for racists.
Malcolm Turnbull has decided to fight the battle from which Tony Abbott as prime minister walked away. This is classic Liberal Party philosophy — belief in liberty and personal freedom. The evolution of Turnbull into a conviction Prime Minister has taken another decisive stage, with Turnbull realising he must unite his Coalition base and prove his beliefs.
Turnbull has crossed the Rubicon. There is no going back. This is a core change in Liberal Party policy — it will endure until the next election, whether passed or rejected by the Senate. The stakes for both Turnbull and Bill Shorten are high. For Turnbull, the struggle will be dangerous and the electoral consequences decisive because this has the potential to destroy his government at the next election in the ethnic seats of Sydney and Melbourne.
This is Labor’s objective. Yet the aggressive, almost hysterical Labor Party reaction yesterday has been a mistake. Labor believes the statutory changes proposed by Turnbull are a huge negative for the government — but this is a premature view.
No, it isn’t. Domainfax tacks straight into it as well:
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has called ethnic and community leaders to try to contain a growing backlash against sweeping changes to Australia’s race-hate laws, while terrorism experts have warned they could play into the hands of violent extremists.
…According to people familiar with the phone calls, Mr Turnbull explained why his government had proposed the changes, its commitment to multiculturalism in Australia, its support for strong laws prohibiting vilification and the need to strengthen freedom of speech protections.
But a broad array of ethnic groups, united under the banner of the Coalition to Advance Multiculturalism, released a letter condemning the changes as “utterly shameful and at odds with the principles of multicultural Australia”.
And more:
“Here in Australia we have no tolerance for anti-Semitism, no tolerance for racism, no tolerance for anybody who seeks to demean or de-legitimise or dehumanise somebody because of their race or their religion or their culture.”
That was Malcolm Turnbull, speaking to Holocaust survivors in Sydney on Sunday, before his government released a statement reaffirming its commitment to a multicultural Australia “in which racism and discrimination have no place”.
But now, suddenly, it is okay to “offend, insult and humiliate” someone on the basis of their race, so long as this does not amount to “harassment and intimidation”.
Why? The Prime Minister justifies changing section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act by citing the lawsuit against three Queensland University of Technology students that should have been nipped in the bud, and a complaint against one of this country’s pre-eminent cartoonists, the late Bill Leak, that was never going to succeed.
And more:
The hard right derides it in the liberal-left as “virtue signalling” – pious flag-waving by the elites around such causes as refugees, multiculturalism, climate change, and entrenched sexism – designed to show its members exist on a higher moral plane.
So what is to be made of the Turnbull government’s fanatical tinkering with the nation’s racial offence laws? The expression of electoral urgency, of public clamour?
That’s basically right. The reform is meaningless in policy terms. What does it do politically?
It may help at the margin to recapture a few One Nation votes but not many. The more important question is does it change the landscape in terms of the coming cut to immigration? For the government, it will make it both easier and harder. For its supporters, a shift from altering 18c to altering the immigration intake will have internal logic ala the US alt-Right. For those against – which will include large swathes of centrist Coalition voters – it will confirm that this is a morally repugnant government and make supporting a cut more difficult.
For the Opposition, it will wedge them further from any immigration cut though it can still be done via a focus on labour market reform. They need to get started.
For the senate it will obviously bake-in The Greens resistance to any mention of immigration, ensuring a push ever further away from environmental principles, retarding its growth.
The bottom line, though, is this. Although the government would like to make it easier to abuse a poof or abo, the entire issue is nothing but a buzzing distraction in the ears of a polity driven to anger by some other rather simple and daily-lived truths:
- nobody can get a pay rise;
- nobody can buy a house;
- nobody can pay the gas bill;
- and nobody can board a crush-loaded bus or train.
These are the issues that are driving the fragmentation of the Right and every moment of concentration elsewhere only shows the government to be ever more out of touch. It is the very definition of fiddling while Rome burns.
