Page 821 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 9 April 2014
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On this issue I think Waleed Aly makes an interesting point when he says that the Brandis proposals are the “whitest piece of proposed legislation” he has ever seen. He says it trades on all the assumptions about race that you are likely to hold if, in your experience, racism is just something that other people complain about.
Waleed Aly points to the Brandis proposal that sets a new standard for judging racial vilification—that is, whether it is reasonably likely to vilify someone based on the standards of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community, not by the standards of any particular group within the Australian community. What is an “ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community” when it comes to race? Waleed Aly says that the wording is just a mask for whiteness; in our society it is only whiteness that is ordinary and invisible.
I can only imagine how offensive it must be to the rich diversity of ethnically diverse people in Australia to see George Brandis and his privileged, white male colleagues telling them they should not be offended and that racism will be judged on the standard of an ordinary reasonable member of the Australian community.
It is important to emphasise in this debate that the right to free speech, like other rights, is not absolute. Australians also have a right to freedom from racial discrimination and racial hatred. That is why the United Nations adopted the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination in 1969 and why Australia signed up to the convention. Rights have to be balanced.
On this note, I need to point out the astonishing irony of the Abbott government’s attack on race protections at the same time as they want to stifle the ability of Australian public servants to engage in political discourse, as we have seen reported in the media recently. Are they really so delicate and afraid that they cannot put up with a critical tweet from a public servant? It seems clearer every day that the Abbott government has no shame in implementing an agenda that serves its own interests with no regard for principles or consistency or the impact it might have on broader society.
Senator Brandis’s public retreat from the obligations under this international treaty is an international embarrassment. It is a very sad fact—international travellers have probably encountered this—that Australia’s reputation for racial tolerance is not the best at the moment. That is the reality—we are becoming known as a country that is not as welcoming as it should be to people of different races, that is abusive and uncaring towards asylum seekers and that needs to do more to respect our first peoples.
No doubt the international community has caught wind that our elected government wants to repeal racial hatred provisions and that it wants to make sure people have a right to be bigots. This is part of the bigger context of the Brandis proposals. It is not just a technical change to legislation; it is a message about the type of country the government thinks we should have. The Racial Discrimination Act, of which the racial hatred provisions are an important part, is a statement about our shared values, and it says that racism and discrimination have no place in our community.
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