Oppressive vilification laws in the Australian State of Victoria

Below is an excerpt from a parliamentary speech delivered 7 September 2006 by Senator Mitch Fifield. He was speaking about Mr Bruce Smith (1851-1937), a committed libertarian. The section in which Senator Fifield criticises Victoria’s Racial and Religious Tolerance Act (2001) has been extracted

What disturbs me even more is the restriction of freedom of speech in Victoria as a result of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001. No-one should ever condone racial vilification. It is completely unacceptable in Australian society to vilify anyone on the basis of their racial background. It was a desire to protect members of our community that prompted the bill. Anti-Semitism was particularly in the minds of the proponents and the authors of the bill, but the act has gone too far. It limits freedom of religious expression, freedom of speech and freedom of conscience in a way that is totally unacceptable in a liberal, pluralistic democracy. Religious vilification should be condemned, but the difficulties of legislating against religious vilification have become evident.

Two Christian pastors have been found guilty by the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal of making fun of Muslim beliefs and practices. The crime was to quote the Koran and evoke laughter from the audience. No-one suggested that the pastors were quoting the Koran incorrectly, just that the response to quoting passages from the Koran was laughter. In Victoria today, laughter amounts to religious vilification. The core business of clerics is to advocate why they believe-to advocate their world view and why their truth is the right one. Of necessity, this means saying why you believe that another’s belief system is flawed. The battle of ideas, the battle of world views and the battle of beliefs is at the heart of what makes us a pluralistic society. Pluralism is not the housing of beliefs in silos; it is the interaction of those ideas and the tolerance of those ideas. But tolerance does not mean a denial of contestability. All ideas in our society should be contestable.

But there is worse to come. A convicted Wiccan paedophile serving time in jail has used the religious vilification provisions of the legislation to pursue the Salvation Army for allegedly vilifying his Wiccan religious beliefs. The paedophile voluntarily enrolled in an alpha course-a church-run course to explain Christianity. The crime? Those conducting the course did not speak well of witches, astrologers and occultists. TheWiccan was unsuccessful in his action, but the fact that this matter could even go to a directions hearing means that the laws are fundamentally flawed. I again turn to Bob Carr for assistance. He had this to say about such laws:

As they are used in practice, religious vilification laws can undermine the very freedom they seek to protect-freedom of thought, conscience and belief.

This is yet another example of meddling legislation. The solution to the articulation of poor ideas, stupid ideas, offensive ideas, is not to gag those articulating them. The solution is to rebut them with good ideas- the sort of legitimate exchange of ideas that people like Bruce Smith spent their lives engaging in. I fear that I am giving Bob Carr too much credit, but I will give him the final word on this particular piece of legislation. He said, `Leave these matters to the commonsense of the Australian people.’

I congratulate the state Liberal leader, Ted Baillieu, and the shadow Attorney-General, Andrew Macintosh, for their stands on these issues of freedom. The Victorian opposition is committed to repealing the bill of rights and to reviewing the religious vilification provisions of the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act. Bruce Smith would be proud. We need to be vigilant and resolute and reject being told how to live our lives. It is always time to stand up for individual freedoms, liberty and equal opportunity. It is time to stand against these new nanny states. It is time to revive the spirit of Bruce Smith.

Source

Posted by jonjayray on Friday, September 8, 2006 at 10:43 PM in
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Comments:

1

Posted by Mark Richardson on September 09, 2006, 12:06 AM | #

JJR, a good post. However, I disagree with the final line about reviving the spirit of Bruce Smith. Smith was a classical, free market liberal who was a prominent advocate of open borders in 1901.

The last thing we need are more small-souled businessmen who put the free movement of labour ahead of a larger loyalty to their own people.

2

Posted by Daedalus on September 09, 2006, 07:08 AM | #

No-one should ever condone racial vilification. It is completely unacceptable in Australian society to vilify anyone on the basis of their racial background.

Why is White Australia completely unacceptable?

3

Posted by Al Ross on September 09, 2006, 07:47 AM | #

In a sane White society we would be able to speak freely about non-Whites whilst enjoying legal protection (with deportation penalties) from the pests who engage in anti-White vilification. There, that wasnt so hard.

4

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 09, 2006, 10:41 AM | #

No-one should ever condone racial vilification. It is completely unacceptable in Australian society to vilify anyone on the basis of their racial background.

Vilification of individuals on account of their race (or their species), color, religion, or nationality is of course wrong, which no one here would dispute:  we favor basic politeness, hospitality, and humaneness, as gentlemen the world over do and always did.  Explicit opposition to forced race-replacement immigration and stealth genocide is, however, another matter entirely, having strictly naught whatsoever to do with any conceivable violation of the rules of politeness, hospitality, or humaneness.  It’s perfectly polite and humane to oppose the outright annihilation of longstanding nation-states, races and ethnocultures or their unwanted, irreversible alteration in ways not desired but forced on populations by governments under the manipulation of uncaring and/or actively hostile special interests who not only refuse to consult the people in honest ways but actively slander, criminalize, and suppress those objections that get voiced spontaneously.  Opposing that has naught whatsoever to do with being impolite or vilifying anyone on account of his race.

5

Posted by Alex Zeka on September 10, 2006, 06:20 AM | #

Fred, you could have just said: it isn’t impolite to tell a robber to stay out of your home.

6

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 10, 2006, 09:06 AM | #

Alex, thanks for hitting the nail squarely on the head in few words!  You’ve summed it up exactly.

7

Posted by Fred Scrooby on September 10, 2006, 09:48 AM | #

Incidentally, one reason (presumably just one among many) John Ray is unalarmed at what I and some others see as creeping race-replacement of Oz whites with yellows and Hindus might be Australia’s size:  it’s easier to ignore race and nation (nation in the racial/ethnocultural sense) when other races and nations aren’t right on your doorstep the way they are in, say, the Balkans.  When your country is too big you can start to feel bored by it, by its race, and by its ethnoculture and may sort of get the feeling the supply of all that is inexhaustible, to the point where you see no threat whatsoever in the importation of “variety” or at least see not enough wrong with it to actively oppose it.  The countries suffering from excessive bigness include the British North-American ones of the United States and Canada, the old Soviet Union, the new Russia that has emerged therefrom, and Oz of course.  I wonder if growing beyond a certain physical size doesn’t weaken certain racial/ethnocultural centripetal forces holding traditional nation-states together.  My suspicion is that it does indeed, which is a reason I don’t know that I agree with PatrickZ so much when he says he wants to see the recuperation of the whole U.S. from the non-white invaders, not just some fraction with another fraction ceded to Mexicans or whomever.  A racially European and physically smaller U.S.A. (or whatever name the new North-American Anglo nation gives itself after waking up and extricating itself from the present mess) might be less likely to repeat the same race-replacement mistake in future.  I can see a physically smaller country as being “leaner, meaner, and stronger” than the big, unwieldy, far-flung, flabby, uncaring, distracted U.S.A. that complacently allowed what were mainly Jewish activists together with a group of their allies to maneuver the 1965 bill into law behind the back of the people.

There may be an optimal maximum physical size for nation-states which the U.S., Canada, and Australia exceed—optimal in the sense that beyond that size centripetal racial/ethnocultural forces weaken and centrifugal forces pulling the country apart are felt more.

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