"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".
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18C: an Indigenous MP speaks out
People who have not experienced racism can't stand in the shoes of those who have, says Labor MP Linda Burney.
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.
But there are two problems here. The first is that, if the section lost its credibility "a long time ago", as Turnbull asserted in Parliament, why did he repeatedly insist before last year's election that he had no plans to change it?
The second is that the two examples of abuse of the section would have been speedily thrown out under the comprehensive reforms to procedures for handling complaints that emerged from a national inquiry and will now become law. They solved the problem.
Rather than seize this opportunity and draw a line under debate that has bubbled along for six years since News columnist Andrew Bolt was found to have breached the section, Turnbull has bowed to pressure from the ideologues and gone further.
Not only has he supported replacing the words "offend, insult and humiliate" with "harass", he has backed a change in the objective standard against which harass and intimidate are judged – from a 'reasonable member of the relevant group' to 'the reasonable member of the Australian community'.
The Prime Minister defends the new wording by saying it more clearly describes "the type of conduct that should be prohibited, not mere slights or the taking of offence or hurt feelings".
Yet Susan Kiefel, now chief justice of the High Court, has held there is no contravention of section 18C unless the offence, insult, humiliation or intimidation is found to have "profound and serious effects, not to be likened to mere slights".
As for the higher threshold, it doesn't cut it. How can a middle-class white person possibly know how an Aborigine feels when he or she is abused on a bus on a regular basis? As Indigenous MP Linda Burney told Parliament: "People that have never experienced racism cannot possibly stand in the shoes of those who have."
Turnbull's clear intention is to take the issue off the agenda by embracing a change he believes he can defend as striking a better balance between protecting people from racial vilification and advancing the cause of free speech.
His achievement is that he has a position his party room strongly supports. His problem is that the case doesn't stack up and that the changes send a message that, in the words of George Brandis, people do have a right to be bigots.
The danger for Turnbull is that he loses both ways, with the Senate blocking the changes and those in racial minorities, who now feel more vulnerable to hate-speech, intent on punishing him at the next election.
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