Think what you like but keep it to yourself

YOU could fill a whole book with complaints from Australian intellectuals in the 1960s, and indeed quite a few of them did.

Donald Horne debated if Australia was a third-rate country or merely second rate; he complained about the Country Party, the Liberal Party, the Labor Party and anti-intellectualism. Robin Boyd complained about anti-intellectualism, plastic flowers, the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Holden FB. Allan Ashbolt's beef was with the Holden HR, motor mowers, capitalism and Charles Moses. Oh, and of course anti-intellectualism. The Sydney Morning Herald's Anglo-Scottish editor John Douglas Pringle found the natives somewhat crass and complained long and hard about "showy houses", later to become McMansions.

Even in the era of the White Australia policy, however, none of them seemed particularly troubled about human rights. Australian governments were "checked and balanced by the most intricate means", wrote Horne. Leave libert aac, aacgalit aac et fraternit aac to the French, he argued; we'll get by with fair go, mate. "If the world outside will allow it, it seems to be there to stay," he wrote.

Naturally the rest of the world wasn't prepared to allow it. Robert Menzies hid the UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in his bottom drawer, but Harold Holt decided to dip his toe in the water, as it were, and in April 1966 Australia signed its first international human rights agreement. Before you could say Portsea Beach, we were drowning in the stuff. Gough Whitlam proclaimed the Racial Discrimination Act in October 1975, putting Al Grassby in charge of the new community relations commission.

Autonomous extra-parliamentary bodies look cute when they're little, but they tend to turn ugly when fully grown. The Human Rights Commission, as it is now known, had a budget of $27.5 million last year, and let's not forget its little cousins: the Anti-Discrimination Board of NSW; the Anti-Discrimination Commission of Queensland; the Equal Opportunities Commission of Western Australia, the NT Anti-Discrimination Commission; the Office of the Anti-Discrimination Commission (Tasmania); the South Australia Equal Opportunity Commission; the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission; and the ACT Human Rights Commission, led by prison reformer Helen Watchirs.

In August 1995, in a second reading speech on the Racial Hatred Bill, Labor's Chris Evans assured parliamentarians "the criminal provisions contained in this bill will rarely be used. They deal only with extreme racist behaviour". Evans elaborated: "The growth of the Australian neo-Nazi movement has seen violent racist demonstrations against Asians and Jewish."

The most celebrated prosecution under the Racial Hatred Act was against Andrew Bolt. It is true that not everybody likes Bolt's columns, but there's been no suggestion that fire-bombing is Bolt's thing, and if the Southern Cross is tattooed on his forearms he is keeping them well covered up.

Many could barely disguise their glee at the Bolt judgment. Others, however, were smart enough to realise the gravity of the judgment, among them Julian Disney, the chairman of the Australian Press Council, the opposition and the redoubtable Institute for Public Affairs. The human righties, drunk on their own sobriety, seemed unaware of the festering resentment that was about to boil over.

In the manner of outgoing Labor governments, the Gillard administration was intending to leave the traditional gift of a human rights stink bomb in the form of the Discrimination Consolidation Bill. Nicola Roxon gave the game away by describing it as "a sensible middle course"; the word "sensible" from Roxon's lips has the same, chilling effect as Ben Kingsley's portrayal of Don the East End gangster: "I'm here for you. I'm a good listener." The bill does not merely consolidate rights, it packs their lunch and sends them off on another breezy adventure who knows where. It sets out 14 grounds for victimhood, as if we needed any more, which it describes as "protected attributes". The ink was barely dry before the do-gooders were clamouring for more; a criminal record for example, or the old chestnut of economic rights.

Incongruously, hidden in the middle of the list, is the protected right of political opinion, which caught the eye of the opinionated George Brandis when the Human Rights Commission's new chairwoman, Gillian Triggs, turned up to help the Senate with its inquiries recently. Did it mean that the Human Rights Commission had woken up at last to the need to defend free speech?

Nope. Not a chance, as Triggs explained to senators: "We would like to make the point that not all political opinion is protected. The right is not absolute; it is subject to certain constraints."

If you can hold that subversive thought in your head, no problem; indeed thinking has the full protection of the law. Try not to blurt it out, however, because Triggs warns that if public order or the maintenance of a civilised workplace is threatened "decision makers will have to put limits".

Uh, oh. Decision makers, limits. Brandis picked her up: "Should the capacity to express unwelcome political opinions - unwelcome to their auditor - be constrained?"

"I believe it can be, and ought to be, constrained, where the behaviour ultimately becomes harassment - if you want to use that word," replied the professor. "We may get it wrong; the courts may get it wrong. But I think the critical point is to accept that nobody is there objecting to the holding of the political view; the objection is to the effect of that political view or the manner in which it is delivered."

There is a danger of speaking too soon, but the Bolt case, and Roxon's doomed bill, sinking under the weight of its own absurdity, may well go down as the catalyst for a revolt that stopped the expansion of the human rightism in its tracks. In 1975, Brandis's predecessor, Ivor Greenwood, saw elements in Whitlam's RDA that were "repugnant to traditional freedoms", yet even with control of the Senate, exercised late that year with devastating results, the Coalition declared itself "in complete accord with the claimed virtue" of the bill.

The Racial Hatred Bill, brought to parliament by Paul Keating's 34-year-old attorney-general Michael Lavarch, was opposed by Peter Walsh, Gary Johns and John Button, to name just a few. Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, regarded by many as the father of multiculturalism in Australia, was on record as saying it was counterproductive, yet nothing apparently could stop it.

The Roxon bill, on the other hand, appears dead in the water; its sponsor is spending more time with her family and the government has other things on its plate. The right to hold a political opinion without the right to express it is worthless, as Brandis patiently explained to the good professor: "The whole point of political freedom is that there is an imperishable conjunction between the right to hold the opinion and the right to express the opinion. That is why political censorship is so evil - not because it prohibits us holding an opinion but because it prohibits us articulating the opinion that we hold."