Jewish community leaders have warned that an immediate amendment to sections of the Racial Discrimination Act in response to the 2011 conviction of the columnist Andrew Bolt could “give succour to racists”.
The executive director of the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council, Dr Colin Rubenstein, conceded that the government had made clear before the election its concerns that aspects of the law infringed freedom of speech, but said he had understood there would first be consultations and a full review of the act’s effectiveness.
“To pre-empt the outcome of such a review risks giving succour to racists, which is especially undesirable in the wake of a number of recent public incidents highlighting the continued prevalence of acts of racist victimisation in Australia, and returning victims of racism to a situation where they were left without any legal recourse at a national level," including the recent attack in Bondi.
Peter Wertheim, the executive director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, said repealing the relevant section of the act, without any replacement, “would mean Australia was turning back the clock 15 years in complying with the convention against all forms of racial discrimination”.
He said he didn’t see a need to change the existing act at all and urged the government to consult widely on the precise changes it was proposing.
In an interview with the Australian, the attorney general, George Brandis, said he would proceed with the government’s promise to amend section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act so speech that was found to be offensive and insulting was no longer defined as racial vilification.
But he told Guardian Australia that he did want to consult widely before introducing the legislation and this meant it would probably be introduced early next year. He also promised to consult about whether the amendments should “go further”.
The News Corp Australia columnist Andrew Bolt was found guilty of breaching the act in 2011 over two columns he wrote in 2009 which questioned the Aboriginality of light-skinned Indigenous people.
The case was brought against him by nine Aboriginal people, including former Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission chairman Geoff Clark, academics Professor Larissa Behrendt and Wayne Atkinson, activist Pat Eatock, photographer Bindi Cole, author Anita Heiss, health worker Leeanne Enoch, native title expert Graham Atkinson and lawyer Mark McMillan.
“One of the strong points of differentiation between the Abbott government and the previous Labor government is a much stronger commitment to freedom of speech and more broadly to intellectual freedom in general," Brandis said. "One of my key priorities as attorney general is to rebalance the human rights debate in Australia.”
But the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus QC, said section 18C “embodies Australia’s condemnation of racial vilification and protects our society from the poisonous effects of hate speech”.
“When Senator Brandis says that repealing these laws is in the interests of freedom of speech, what he really means is freedom to engage in public hate speech,” Dreyfus said.
“Australia’s prohibitions on hate speech are not, as Senator Brandis claims, prohibitions on ‘hurting people’s feelings’ or ‘thought crimes’. They are not about stopping debate, or enforcing ‘political correctness’ and the extensive protections of free speech already contained in section 18D of the act make this clear. These provisions are aimed at stopping extreme cases of hate speech.”
The Greens senator Richard Di Natale his party would vote against any attempts to weaken laws that protect people from "vile acts of hate speech", meaning Brandis will have to wait until the new Senate sits in July to attempt to pass his amendments.
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