Speech has been at the heart of the disastrous decline in our civil discourse.  But there seems to be no appetite to rethink what is, or rather should not be, protected speech.

Perhaps we need a somewhat more nuanced understanding of free speech than that evinced by our authorities. A response more attuned to the times?

The times I am referring to are spelled out very clearly by Michael Gawenda in a recent essay published in the Australian:

‘As I listened to Albanese and to Segal, I thought that not so long ago the idea that we would need a national plan to combat anti-Semitism, a plan released by the prime minister, would have been absurd. Thought that the fact such a plan was needed was a sort of admission that something had been unleashed in Australia, something dark, that would not be contained anytime soon.’

‘Australia, the goldene medine (Yiddish for golden land) for the Jews. I grew up in that Australia. My parents came to see it that way. I can remember how astonished they were when they learnt, not long after they arrived from the displaced persons camp in Austria, that the first Australian-born governor-general, Isaac Isaacs, was a Jew and, more astonishingly, Australia’s greatest general, John Monash, was also a Jew. What sort of place was this, my father would often say, where this was possible?’

‘There is, I fear, no going back to this goldene medine for the Jews. Australia’s Jews no longer are sure they live in that Australia. I fear that whatever is done now by the federal government, and by state governments and even police forces, to keep Jews and Jewish institutions safe, what has been unleashed in Australia, a hostility to Jews that sometimes descends into violence and hate, has changed the country.’

‘Changed the country’. Yes, a group of people who have no intention of integrating into Australia (aided by useful idiots in academia and elsewhere) is driving a wedge between a significant portion of our population and a small community that has been integral to Australia for generations.

It is a slavish, or rather unthinking, obeisance to an amorphous concept called ‘free speech’ that has brought us to this place.   Police sanitising chants of ‘Gas the Jews’ started the process and things have gone rapidly downhill since then.

What prompted this essay is the Federal court ruling, under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, against Wassim Haddad for preaching that Jews are descended from pigs and monkeys.

I opined in an earlier article that, in response to a lament by Adam Creighton that conservatives had not, as a matter of principle, condemned this ruling as vociferously as they did the Bolt/Eatock ruling, why should conservatives care that Haddad got hoist by his own petard, for want of a better analogy?  I drew some criticism for that, which suggested that I supported 18C when it suited me.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I merely applauded the fact that Haddad got his comeuppance for an utterance that, had it been levelled against Aborigines, for example, would have caused an uproar across the entire community and rapid official action.  And yet in this case the Jewish community was forced to fill the gap left by official cowardice. 18C was their means to hand.

We have no problem restricting the free speech of Nazis, as witness the banning of the Nazi salute. Why do we hate the Nazis so much? It’s not because they started the second world war. It’s primarily because they instituted the Holocaust. Ban the Nazis but give Islamic imams free rein? Ironic, is it not?

Back to 18C. It is objectionable because it weaponises the taking of offence. As far as I am concerned you can offend me (short of defamation) till you’re blue in the face.  Water off a duck’s back to me. But that does not mean any statement that falls short of direct incitement of violence should be tolerated.

Voltaire is reputed to have said words to the effect of, ‘I may disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it.’ That he said this is disputed, so possibly it was some Harry Flashman-like figure who actually said it and then ducked behind Voltaire to avoid having to put his own cojones on the line.

But if Voltaire did say it, I don’t imagine he would have envisaged himself manning the ramparts in defence of ‘Jews (or anyone for that matter) are descended from pigs and monkeys’.

I’m trying to imagine how his defence of Wassim Haddad to some fair-minded Inquisitor might have played out:

‘To the death, Voltaire? Really?’

‘Well, no… I didn’t mean that literally… it’s just a figure of speech….’

‘Well how about a long prison sentence?’

‘Um … again… let me make clear.…’

‘A stiff fine, then?’

‘How stiff? No… Look, when I made that declaration, I had in mind important stuff like ‘down with the monarchy’ or ‘biological men can’t be women’.  I wish I’d never made that declaration. In fact, I don’t even remember making it….’

‘What about Haddad then?’

‘As far as I’m concerned, he’s on his own.’

Certainly, let’s allow people to mouth the most gross insults without being subject to legal prosecution. But let’s not cloak it in the noble mantle of free speech.

Statements like ‘Jews are descended from pigs and monkeys’ or ‘Death, death to the IDF’ are objectionable by any standard of civilised behaviour, but they should not be proscribed on that basis. They should be proscribed because they are socially corrosive, and they intimidate the Jewish community to the extent detailed so eloquently by Michael Gawenda. That some Jewish Australians feel compelled to consider an alternative country shames us all.

I would like to see 18C abolished. I would like to see laws based on vague concepts such as ‘offence’, ‘hate’ or ‘harm’ abolished. I would like to see genuine free speech restored in this country. But things here have changed fundamentally, and we must adapt.  Thanks to multiculturalism we are no longer an essentially homogeneous people.

I do think we need a regime that allows us to proscribe certain forms of speech such as those I refer to above. And I do accept that this would not be a simple task and that there is a risk of the slippery slope. My idea is that we would have an overarching law that would define a limited number of forms of speech that would be unlawful. One would be ‘speech which unambiguously calls for violence against a group of people’.  Any slogan that includes the phrase ‘death to’ would fall into this category. As would ‘Gas the Jews’. ‘From the river to the sea’ probably would not. Another is ‘speech which gratuitously impugns the humanity of a group of people’, such as ‘descended from pigs and monkeys’. These would need to be phrased as tightly as possible to minimise the risk of judicial overreach. There may be others but, to avoid the slippery slope, they would all be contained within the Act, not in a separate schedule subject to ministerial regulation. And it should incorporate the provision of Section 109 of the constitution by insisting that all speech not proscribed therein is protected throughout the Commonwealth. (I concede that last may not survive a constitutional challenge.)

Pigs might fly, I hear you say, but one can dream.