Hate speech best defeated in a free exchange of ideas

AUSTRALIA, as John Howard said this week, is not a racist nation but one that respects and cherishes an open, tolerant society. That understanding should be the starting point of the current debate over freedom of speech and the Abbott government’s proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act. In their supercilious opposition to the changes, Fairfax commentators and other critics, including lobbyists who are normally more discerning, argue from the premise that ordinary Australians are ready to unleash a pent up tide of bigoted hate speech if and when Section 18C of the RDA is repealed.

In reality, when extremist parties with racist leanings have emerged spasmodically in the prickle farmer backblocks of Queensland and Western Australia, they have attracted minimal support and failed to retain it from one election to the next.

Well-meaning apologists for censorship, as Harvard law professor and civil libertarian Alan Dershowitz wrote on Wednesday, are on the wrong side of history. Banning anti-black, anti-Islamic, anti-Jewish, anti-gay or anti-feminist ideas or turning their perpetrators into criminals, he argued, was tantamount to providing them with a megaphone.

Like Professor Dershowitz, this newspaper believes the best answer to bigoted speech is not to drive it underground, heightening discontent, but to respond and defeat it in the marketplace of ideas. The irrational rantings of such groups as the League of Rights and Citizens Electoral Council, for example, are abhorrent. And this is precisely why they should be aired publicly, in order to be refuted.

Unlike the armchair critics of Attorney General George Brandis, Sydney resident and Holocaust survivor John Furedy understands the dangers of curbing free speech first hand. As reported on Wednesday’s front page, Professor Furedy confronted the practical realities of censorship as a boy in Soviet-dominated Hungary after World War II. That experience influenced his judgement that Australia should not stray further down the path of creeping “velvet totalitarianism’’ where it would no longer benefit from a genuine contest of ideas. The Nazi and Communist regimes that dominated Eastern Europe for decades did not spring from nowhere, as he said, but “always happen gradually, step by step.’’

That said, there are other opinions. And The Australian has extensively reported the views of those opposed to the reform of the RDA. Such proponents include Warren Mundine, the head of Tony Abbott’s indigenous council and Peter Wertheim, Executive Director of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry. Mr Wertheim has been quoted in five prominent news and feature reports in the past month.

In a thoughtful article, columnist and former Labor Senator Graham Richardson said no ideal of free speech should ever be allowed to make a mockery of the degradation and despair of the millions who died in the Nazi concentration camps. And Jeremy Jones, director of international and community affairs at the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, defended Section 18C of the RDA. It had, he said, proven to be “a means to have recalcitrant racists cease harassing others, of sending a message that bullying by bigots is unacceptable and providing a means for people to have their rights to live their lives free from harassment and intimidation protected.’’

Unfortunately for Jewish Australians who hold a multiplicity of views, the main organisations dedicated to the defence of Israel, the Middle East’s only functioning democracy, have taken a narrow approach. On its website, the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, published a rebuttal to Professor Dershowitz’s Wednesday article. The rebuttal, by Peter Wertheim, said all the peak Jewish national bodies in Australia were united in opposition to plans to alter the RDA. Their stand, paradoxically, is in line with many of Israel’s most trenchant critics from the left of the Australian media.

Some within the Jewish diaspora disagree with the organisations’ official line. Such individuals know that majority or official opinion among any group is not necessarily always right. Many racial and religious groups, including Jews, have learned, that lesson at vast and painful cost through history. Free choice, including opposition to cultural coercion, was one of the 10 founding principles of Israel, which is also a good reason for respecting dissenting views.

Replying to Mr Wertheim on the J-Wire online site, Professor Dershowitz noted that answering rather than censoring is the preferable response to bigoted speech. Words can and do harm. Freedom of speech, as he said, is expensive, but it’s worth the cost.