Wednesday, 29 May 2024

Anti-vilification legislation

David LIMBRICK (South-Eastern Metropolitan) (09:46): About 140 years ago Frederick Douglass, a former slave and staunch abolitionist, delivered a speech in Boston centred around the theme ‘How can slavery be abolished?’ It is worth quoting from that speech at length:

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence. Slavery cannot tolerate free speech. Five years of its exercise would banish the auction block and break every chain in the South.

Now we have the Greens, Labor and the Liberal Party in a downward spiral competing over which speech they want to outlaw and criminalise first. The federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus is apparently working on laws that will extend current laws to criminalise a range of speech. The federal opposition and Greens in principle support this. Let me repeat the words of Frederick Douglass: of all rights, it is free speech that is the dread of tyrants. I am sure everyone supporting these laws thinks they are the good guys, but let me state clearly here they are not. History tells us that the censors are never the good guys. Hate speech laws are a sword without a hilt. They cannot be wielded safely, and they will hurt everyone.