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In the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack, the government has responded in the predictable way.
Restrictions on freedom of speech are often perceived as the magical solution to society’s ills.
The Australian government is now following the same predictable pattern. It has published a draft of its new ‘Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill’ as a response to the antisemitic terror attack at Bondi Beach last month.
[T]he threats to liberty in the new Bill are severe, and all law-abiding Australian citizens should be very concerned. At the centre of the Bill is a new ‘racial vilification offence’ inserted into the Criminal Code. This will mean that a person commits an offence if they engage in public conduct ‘with the intention of promoting or inciting hatred of another person or a group of persons’.
As with all such laws, ‘hatred’ is not satisfactorily defined, leaving it wide open to exploitation.
Laws against inciting violence are justifiable, because violence impinges directly on the human rights of others. But laws against inciting negative human emotions veer directly into the territory of the Thought Police.
This Bill makes clear that nobody actually needs to be harmed for someone to have committed a crime.
Laws against ‘hate speech’ have no place on the statute books. They are an affront to our basic human rights, and a sure sign that a government has turned authoritarian. They have the effect of chilling mainstream views as well as controversial ones, depending on who is in power at any given time and where the Overton Window happens to be situated. The vagueness of the language is particularly troubling in a country like Australia, where even to acknowledge that sex is binary and immutable is often characterised as ‘hatred’ by members of the political and media class.
The Australian government wants to jail people not for their actions, but for how their words might make other people feel. If this strikes you as harmless, you might want to brush up on your history.