Malcolm Turnbull today still refused to argue for changes to the Racial Discrimination Act. He said only that he wants others to agree to changes to restore free speech, but he did not argue for them himself. And that is weak.
But he did at least slap the Human Rights Commission of Gillian Triggs, saying her commission should "reflect" whether it should have backed the now-failed cases against seven Queensland of Technology students who complained that having Aborigines-only computers was racist:
I think the Human Rights Commission has done a great deal of harm to its credibility by bringing the case against the Queensland students…
What it shows is that the Human Rights Commission must urgently review the way in which it manages these cases. To have a case like that which will have involved the expenditure of considerable Commonwealth money, taxpayers’ money, considerable money on behalf of the students, imposed enormous stress on them, and have it chucked out, struck out as having no reasonable prospects of success, what the court was saying, what the judge was saying to the Human Rights Commission is, ‘You’ve been wasting the court’s time. You’ve been wasting government money’….
[The commission should] soberly and carefully reflect on whether, in their conduct of the administration of the Act, they have been undermining respect for it.
But he falsely accuses the commission of having brought this court action against the students. In fact, it was the complainant, Cindy Prior, and her lawyer who did that.
Turnbull also suggested changes to 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act could see removing "insult and offend" and putting in "vilify".
But where is the leadership?
For a Prime Minister to simply say – about one of our key freedoms – that he’ll just go along with the consensus is not just weak but depressing.
Does he really not care, either way? Is he a leader or a calculator?
Jennifer Oriel has a simple and obvious solution, until the Liberals who think "reform" just means tinkering with the precise words that will still invite activists to censor debate:
At a minimum, section 18C should be repealed and replaced by a general provision against incitement to violence that would apply to all equally. Such reform does not require the parliamentary inquiry proposed by Liberal senator Dean Smith.
But Oriel is surely right to also call for a broader assault on the enemies of free speech and their taxpayer-funded shock troops:
The Australian Human Rights Commission embodies the elitism that is spurring a global renaissance of populism. It is an activist organisation funded by the taxpayer that acts against the interests of the people by advocating porous borders, manufactured minority politics and the suppression of dissent. Its elitism is expressed in the vast waste of taxpayers’ money on overseas junkets, the reversal of formal equality and the prosecution of freethinkers under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act…
The AHRC is an activist organisation, the purpose of which has expired. It should have been retired after formal equality was introduced across Australian jurisdictions…
To justify their appalling waste of taxpayers’ money, activists curate a culture of complaint in which citizens are grouped by state-designated “attributes” such as race or sex and encouraged to complain about perceived offence. Section 18C is the perfect tool to sow endless division and the culture of complaint that sustains the human rights industry…
But under 18C, discrimination means feeling averse to the truth and having a state-sanctioned, taxpayer-funded right to punish those who reveal it. That’s not anti-discrimination. It’s a licence to silence dissidents…
The AHRC is redundant, so too state discrimination and equal opportunity commissions. Their members can fund their own activism on their own time… The AHRC has become a force for social discord and division. Let it go.
