Our Freedoms Are Too Important To Be Left To Politicians

On Tuesday lunchtime I was watching the livestream of Scott Morrison’s farewell speech to the federal parliament. One section got my particular attention.

We stand on the values that build a successful, free society, like individual liberty,  the rule of law, equality of opportunity, responsible citizenship, morality and liberty of speech, thought, religion and association.  All of these stem from the core principle of respect for individual human dignity.

Fine words. Very true. But that’s not what he said a few years ago. Here’s the headline and the first lines of a news report in The Sydney Morning Herald from 1 March 2017.

Scott Morrison warns against internal fight over free speech laws:  ‘It doesn’t create one job’

Senior government ministers are resisting renewed debate over section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, as a fresh backbench push threatens to once again divide the Coalition over free speech.

Treasurer, Scott Morrison, preparing for the release of key national accounts figures on Wednesday, warned that changing the 18C racial hate laws would not help reduce unemployment or improve any other economic metric.  [In fact section 18C says nothing about ‘race hate’.  It makes it unlawful to do something that is ‘reasonably likely’ to ‘offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate’ any person or group of people because of their ‘race, colour or national or ethnic origin’.]

‘I know there are a lot of people who are interested in this issue,’ he said.  ‘As a senior figure in this government…I know this issue doesn’t create one job, doesn’t open one business, doesn’t give one extra hour.  It doesn’t make housing more affordable or energy more affordable.

‘I don’t see any intersection between that issue and those priorities.’

I mention this not to talk about the hypocrisy of politicians. The point to make is that we’re losing our ‘liberty of speech, thought, religion and association’ because we’ve relied on politicians and the political process to protect those freedoms. The problem, though, as Bismarck identified, is that politics as the art of the possible is inevitably about compromise – and there are some things, for example, freedom of speech, on which you can’t compromise. You either have it or you don’t.

Politicians must manage dozens of conflicting and urgent priorities. That news story from 2017 accurately reveals what politicians spend their time doing. Morrison was more worried about what he was going to say at a press conference on the GDP figures than engaging in a debate about a foundation principle of liberal democracy.

Other politicians were no different to Morrison. The story in The Sydney Morning Herald continued:

On Tuesday, before the release of the report, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce also played down the importance of reforming section 18C, acknowledging ‘not many’ people in his regional NSW electorate had raised concerns about the issue.

‘We talk about a whole range of things but we don’t generally sit down and talk about racial discrimination,’ he said.  ‘I went up to north Queensland the other day…I’ll be frank, they do not invite me into their shed to look around their packing shed and then say ‘Barney, sit down in this chair, I want to talk to you about the Racial Discrimination Act.’

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said on the Wednesday the issue was ‘rarely raised’ in her Perth electorate, and her focus was on foreign affairs.  With regard to colleagues who were agitated about the issue, she said: ‘What their priorities are is a matter for them.’

Bishop said that in 2017. She might have forgotten what she’d said two years earlier when she visited the offices of Charlie Hebdo.

The world came together in revulsion and horror, but also united behind this magazine and the values that French people hold so dear, particularly freedom of expression, freedom of speech.  The rallying cry, ‘je suis Charlie’ reverberated around the world and we watched as four million people marched in France and million people here in Paris.

‘Je suis Charlie’ lasted all of five minutes.

The streets of Australia’s capital cities are filled on weekends with protesters yelling anti-Semitic chants and worse. Yet, as Chris Merritt, the vice-president of the Rule of Law Institute Australia, wrote in The Australian last week, ‘Nobody has been brought before the courts. Nobody has been shamed from public life… Public statements inciting violence against Jews are supposed to attract criminal penalties regardless of whether they are intentional or reckless…  Yet such statements have been made in public by identifiable persons and nothing has happened.’ Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act (to our knowledge) hasn’t been used either. But the section has been used against a conservative commentator (Andrew Bolt), was threatened to be used against one of Australia’s greatest cartoonists (Bill Leak), and was employed against students at the Queensland University of Technology after they wrote on social media that white students are asked to leave a computer laboratory designated for the exclusive use of indigenous students. One of the students posted, ‘QUT stopping segregation with segregation?’

On Tuesday, Morrison spoke about the liberty of religion, but in 2019, when Rugby Australia sacked Israel Folau, and then GoFundMe stopped Folau from using the site to raise funds for his legal challenge, Morrison’s attitude was that of a politician. He was the prime minister at the time, and he told the ABC, ‘I think that the issue has had enough oxygen.’

The Albanese government’s ‘misinformation’ laws are the most serious attack on freedom of speech in Australia in decades. They’re the same laws first proposed by Morrison, but he lost office before they could be implemented. In a speech last week in Brussels, the minister for communications, Michelle Rowland defended the proposed laws on the basis that they originated under the Liberals. She also admitted that ‘this is a novel piece of legislation’. It certainly is. What the Albanese government wants to do (and what the Morrison government wanted to do) would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. That his cabinet and his MPs agreed to Morrison’s proposals is forever to the Coalition’s shame.

With Morrison gone, the Coalition has finally realised what’s happening. David Coleman, the Coalition’s shadow minister for communications, wrote about the issue last week in The Daily Telegraph. It’s worth quoting at length.

Last year, the Government released its shocking Misinformation Bill to regulate the free speech of Australians.  It was one of the worst pieces of legislation every published by the Australian Government.

The Bill gave the Government the power to impose massive fines on digital companies if it decided they weren’t doing enough to regulate misinformation.  But misinformation was defined so broadly that it could meant just about anything the Government wanted it to.

Incredibly, the law exempted the Albanese Government.  So anything the Albanese Government said could not be misinformation but criticism of the Albanese Government by ordinary Australians could be misinformation.  The law also gave the Government regulator ACMA the power to require any Australian to appear before it to answer questions about misinformation.  And if you didn’t attend, you could be fined $9000 a day.

All of this in one of the world’s great democracies.

We found out recently, though, that the law is even worse than we understood and that Anthony Albanese personally signed off on its single worst feature.  Previously secret letters between Rowland and the Prime Minister show that the Minister would have the power to personally order investigations under the Misinformation Bill.  Rowland wrote to Albanese asking him to give her approval for this power.  She wanted to be able to specific who was to be investigated, the terms of reference of the investigation, its timeframe and basically anything else she liked.  She would be able to order investigations at any time.

Any Prime Minister with a belief in the importance of free speech would have reacted with horror to this idea.  Given an elected politician the power to order ‘misinformation’ investigations is a recipe for disaster.  [It’s much, much worse than that – it’s totalitarian.]

We saw during the Voice debate that almost every day, the Albanese Government described views it did not like as ‘misinformation’.  If this law had existed then, the Minister could have used it to order investigations.  We have never let politicians order investigations into allegations of misinformation and we should not start now.  It’s incredible that the Minister asked for the power.  But what’s even worse is that the Prime Minister agreed to it.

This Bill belongs in the bin and we will continue the fight to put it there.

That’s good! Especially since the whole thing was the Morrison government’s idea in the first place. Less than two years ago (on 21 March 2022 to be exact), Paul Fletcher, as the then communications minister, issued a press release announcing ‘The Morrison government will introduce legislation to combat harmful disinformation and misinformation online.’ It shows you. Sometimes, getting a political party to reverse a policy takes decades. Sometimes, it takes less than twenty-four months.

Politicians usually follow public opinion. They don’t lead it. If politics is downstream of culture, it is up to the people, not politicians, to make the culture and create the circumstances to ensure that politicians do more than just say nice-sounding things about freedom.

Recommended Reading

• If you’d like to know what I think about Scott Morrison and in particular what he did during COVID (you can probably guess!) the link to my review of Simon Benson’s and Geoff Chambers’ outstanding book ‘Plagued – Australia’s two years of hell – the inside story’ is here.
• It hasn’t yet got a lot of attention in the mainstream media here in Australia, but the story of Google’s ‘Gemini’ artificial intelligence application has been huge news overseas for the last few weeks. It’s so ‘woke’ it’s funny – although it’s not actually funny at all. It’s hard to know where to begin talking about an AI-generated image of a black soldier in the German army in 1943. These are two of the best pieces on it. This from Glenn Harlan Reynolds and this from Nate Silver.
• Finally, Jordan Peterson had this piece in The National Post in Canada on Thursday last week, ‘The awe-inspiring conservative counter-offensive against woke nonsense’. It’s outstanding. It’s long – but you’ll enjoy it. Here’s a sample:

Conservatives, who  tend to be conscientious, orderly, dutiful and industrious by temperament are also in consequence of that proclivity easily led to feel guilty.  The woke narcissists who on the other hand make up the progressive left are characterised by an absolute lack of such conscience, but are expert at exploiting its presence in others.

What are the allegations typically levelled at conservatives – and even, increasingly. at classical liberals?  ‘You’re racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic, ageist, ableist, privileged, colonialist, exploitative.’  For the bloody-minded left, life is a search for a victimiser, to serve as a target, and a victim, to ‘identify with’ – and for almost entirely self-serving purposes…

How do conservatives respond to allegations of X-phobia, privilege and oppression?  Well, such conscientious types are extremely susceptible to and even often defenceless against manipulation of the guilt to which their temperament makes them pone.  So, they’re immediately back on their heels, mumbled shamefaced apology:  ‘We’ve probably made some mistakes.  We’re probably more sexist, racist, ageist, etc, etc, than we could be if we were perfect and we’ll try harder in the future.  Are we good?’

This is a response pattern that can even be admirable when your accusers are people who have been genuinely hurt by what has been truly abusive – and it’s no easy matter to separate the wheat from the chaff concerning such matters. However, it’s a seriously losing game when the psychopaths and the narcissists come out to play…