Now that the Parliamentary Joint Committee Inquiry into Freedom of Speech has handed down its findings, it’s time to put the idea of making changes to Sections 18C or 18D of the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA) to bed.
The committee found no consensus for making any changes to the wording of either clauses 18C or 18D, which have worked effectively for more than 20 years, and merely noted some differing ideas that had been raised.
Changing either section is not just unnecessary but would be potentially damaging, despite the ideologically driven campaign on the part of some to demand these clauses be abolished or diluted in the name of “freedom of speech”.
Maintaining Australia as a successful liberal democratic and multicultural society requires both preserving robust freedom of expression and providing legal recourse to those victimised by racist harassment, intimidation and abuse. Clause 18C of the RDA has provided that recourse for those who have been the victims of acts that offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate on the grounds of race, while freedom of speech has always been strongly protected by the wide ranging exemptions under section 18D.
There is little reason to believe that free speech in Australia is not robust and well-protected nor that the balance provided by this legislation has become skewed.
Indeed, despite a tiny number of cases attracting controversy over the process of administering the complaints, 18C and 18D have worked effectively and as intended for more than 20 years in thousands of cases. In fact, with the one exception of the 2011 case Eatock v Bolt, which saw prominent columnist Andrew Bolt ordered to withdraw two columns, no other finding under 18C has proven at all controversial. The two other examples generally offered by the “free speech warriors” – the QUT case and Leak case – in fact led to no finding that anyone had breached 18C, despite admitted problems with the process by which both these complaints were handled.
Read the full article by Colin Rubenstein at The Sydney Morning Herald.