In most public libraries you can get to read the most controversial things ... and no one bats an eyelid. In fact you don't even have to visit a library to access the most evil of tracts, such as Mein Kampf or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion -- just jump on to Google and you'll be able to download the entire texts.
You can wander into many bookshops to get some weirdo ideas from the Moonies, to the Mormons, or the early novels of L. Ron Hubbard. Or listen to preachers of hate like the Reverend Fred Nile who tells us that homosexuals will burn a billion years in hell.
Or take in the words of Danny Nalliah of the Catch the Fire Ministries and his ravings and ranting about Muslims and Atheists.
So you can say a lot of things in our democracy, and you can watch a lot of things -- violence, pornography, cattle being clumsily slaughtered, and you can read ... Well almost anything.
Increasingly it seem the ''well almost anything'' may involve two names -- ''Andrew'' and ''Bolt''.
Now as you might suspect I actually disagree with many, if not most, things Andrew Bolt says ... and writes.
But I am concerned that people in some of the circles I mix, on my side of politics, increasingly seem to think that they should write, or invoke, or resurrect, laws that will shut Andrew Bolt up.
A democracy is -- at the very least -- a free marketplace of ideas, and a free marketplace of arguments against those ideas. But it is never, never, a stifling or a suffocation of ideas.
Ideas will out, they cannot be contained. They are our better, or our worse, angels -- and they will be heard. Now I do vehemently disagree with what Andrew says, and often says, about certain people being insufficiently black.
There really is a silly idea here, of how black or white applicants should be for certain prizes and scholarships.
Andrew grabs an idea and often follows his logic to wherever it may lead him -- God help those who stand in his way!
Now while I really can't accept some of this stuff I will -- unsurprisingly -- defend to the death his right to run a hot-headed, half-cocked argument ... where he says he is now putting into his cross-hairs all sorts of political, academic and media grandees.
It is the Voltaire in me that says I don't like what you're saying -- or about to say -- but sure as hell I reckon you have the right, in our democracy, to run that argument.
Sometimes I hear about Andrew Bolt's latest outrageous challenge to orthodoxy, and groan, and wonder if he truly believes the words he has written. Or whether he merely loves the controversy and the headlines it creates.
But despite all the bombs he regularly throws over the parapet at some of my mates in Canberra I have to own up to liking Andrew Bolt. I have done media battle with him plenty of times and I know that there is a real decency there, which I would be proud to attest to in any court.
So I am sorry to see him now dragged through the courts for possibly breaching -- if he did -- a law that, probably, should not be there; stretching out its fingers into the realm of what Orwell might have called a Thought Crime; because he impertinently asked the wrong questions, when all the right answers have been handed down from above -- in tablets of stone -- long ago.
This is not a cast of mine that I applaud.
It smacks of the 16th century when Tyndale was strangled to death while tied at a stake and then his body burned, all for translating the Bible into English.
Or the 17th century when Galileo was put in danger of the same fate for saying the Earth moved around The Sun.
And the 20th century when books were burned in the public square for being not quite the way a dictator preferred a book to be.
In each case a Thought Crime is said to have been Committed, it comes from an elite, keen to assert its casting vote on what was reality, and who should decide what ideas were allowed, and in what circumstances they can be promoted.
So we need to be very, very careful when we define vilification and what, by contrast, dissent is or what can or cannot be accepted as a contrarian view.
I sometimes feel we are getting a bit too vigilant over words and ideas when many really vile deeds go unpunished.
I suspect I will always disagree with Andrew. On most things.
I will always fear his persuasive powers as an advocate of ideas that I will never agree with; But I will always be ready to meet him in vigorous debate over things that shape our country's future.
And I will always defend his democratic right, as a member of a free society, to say what he will, to exercise that privilege of dissent which has defined, since Federation, the Australia we all belong to, and all, with varying shades of caveat, believe in, and remain proud of, a free Australia.
Our freedom of speech should remain unmitigated by this new quavering cowardice that some would impose.
I thank you.
Distinguished guests, one and all. President Ronald Reagan once said of the American Conservative William F Buckley Jr., that ''Bill Buckley is perhaps the most influential journalist and intellectual in our era. He changed our country, indeed, our century.'' Buckley of course founded the National Review in 1955 and then served as its editor in chief for 35 years.
In Andrew's case, he is just a few years into a critically influential role in the Australian media. Andrew Bolt recovered from an early career set-back when he worked for the Hawke Labor Government. Imagine how bad it would have been Andrew if your CV had read, ''previously worked for the Rudd Labor Government'', to establish himself as someone with an unparalleled position of influence within the Australian media.
I must say that I am as I am sure we all are deeply inspired by Andrew Bolt's courage and his passion, his purpose and his honour. A man with an authentic intellect, a fine uncluttered mind, a man of relentless energy, a proud Australian with much to be proud about. It was Hemmingway who described guts as being ''grace under pressure.'' Andrew Bolt has guts. It was Andrew Bolt who exposed Lowitja O'Donoghue's fraudulent claims to be a member of the Stolen Generation and it was Andrew Bolt who exposed kooky Tim Flannery's mad claims about the Australian environment, particularly our dams and our rivers. It was Andrew Bolt who challenged Robert Manne to name just 10 members of the Stolen Generation, something Manne has still been unable to achieve.
The Greens, Lowitja, Tim Flannery, Robert Manne and others appear rather paranoid about Andrew Bolt, but as Henry Kissinger once said, ''even paranoid's do have enemies.'' We should remember that Andrew is a man with an outstanding understanding of how the modern media works, which is critical to his influence in Australia today.
From 1926, Robert Menzies made his first political speech at the Prahran Town Hall as a member of the group fighting Stanley Bruce's attempts to centralise more arbitration powers in Canberra at the expense of the states. After his speech Menzies asked his uncle who had attended the rally what he thought of the address. Sidney Sampson, who was Menzies uncle, said ''My dear boy, as an argument to the High Court of Australia it was admirable, but as an address to the electors, it was hopeless. The art of political advocacy is the art of judicious and varied repetition, until you learn to repeat yourself with skill, you will never make a politician.'' Andrew Bolt has an understanding of the power of repetition that few other possess. He understands the power of reminding us all, on a regular basis of the failing of the policy positions of Manne, Flannery, O'Donoghue, Gillard, Rudd, the Greens and dozens of others. It is a simple, but devastating tactic which has been used by the left for generations, but by the right with scarcity.
In Andrew's writing you also see elements of a belief in Maslow's theory of Human Motivation. In 1943, Maslow said, ''It is quite true that man lives by bread alone, where there is no bread, but what happens to a man's desires when there is plenty of bread and his belly is chronically filled?'' As we move up Maslow's pyramid and satisfy our psychological needs, our need for safety and security, of love, of belonging, of self-respect and then social status we reach the top of his pyramid. What happens then according to Maslow is that man expects to find a new discontent and restlessness. This explains the drug-like addiction, therefore, of the upper-middle classes to issues like global warming, calls for Western nations to wipe out third-world debt, demanding that orderly refugee programs be subverted and ultimately demanding that we live in a society where people are not entitled to be offended, insulted or humiliated, that is to say, a place where freedom is strangled and corrupted by the parliament.
The Sydney Writers' Festival is a perfect example of why forums of thought and ideas, free speech must roam in a democracy. Where else could there be a place where John Howard, four times elected by the Australian people as its Prime Minister, was booed and jeered by the same crowd that gave a standing ovation to convicted terrorism supporter, David Hicks. I've often wondered who attends Sydney Writers' Festivals, but thanks to Paul Keating we now know -- sandal wearing, muesli chewing, bike riding pedestrians.
In a free society Larissa Brent should be allowed to tweet that watching bestiality on television was less offensive than watching Bess Price, a prominent Aboriginal leader who has done so much to campaign against violence against Aboriginal women and children. People like Guy Rundle should be allowed, as he did in 2007, to demand that The Australian newspaper dismiss some of its conservative commentators on the basis that they are out of step with the thinking of the newly elected Rudd government. To his shame the ABC's John Faine also joined this chorus.
In 2007, Robert Manne said, ''Twenty years ago Australia didn't have journalists like this in the mainstream press.'' He was referring to writers such as Ackerman, Albrechtsen, Bohme, Blair, Bolt, Devine, Duffy, Henderson, McCran, McGuinnes, Pearson, Roskam, Sheehan, Tom Switzer and others. Robert Manne in 2007 was lamenting the end of the left's long running summer party of marijuana and cask wine, where they didn't have to put up and tolerate alternative opinions, god forbid.
In a speech to the Republican National Convention in New Orleans in 1989, whilst accepting the Republican nomination for the US presidency, George Bush Senior said that he was often criticised for being a quiet person. In reply, Bush said it allowed him to hear the quiet people that others didn't. In so many ways Andrew Bolt speaks for those that have no voice. He speaks for the quiet people who think, but that also work.
Let us hope that Andrew Bolt continues his campaigns on so many issues of interest to ordinary Australians, so that in the decades ahead we can look back and say of his glorious career, that he changed Australia and changed the way Australians viewed their country. Thank you.
Thank you John, it's a great honour to be speaking here this evening. I regard Andrew Bolt as one of the very greatest journalists that Australia has produced for many, many years and I have no doubt that he is going to go down in Australian history as one of our greatest journalists. I want to particularly draw attention tonight to one of the strongest advocates of the ideas which everyone on this platform is going to dissent from tonight.
On the 9th of April, only a few weeks ago, an article appeared in The Australian newspaper in defence of the legislation, which has brought Andrew Bolt before the Federal Court. The article was written by none other than the Honourable Michael Lavarch, the person who was attorney general in 1995, had had the racial vilification clauses inserted into the Racial Vilification Act. Mr Lavarch tells us that after sixteen years of the Act, and I quote his words, ''it is entirely clear that the law does not stifle free speech,'' these are his words, and it's important that we try to understand his frame of mind.
The political correctness on the Labor side of politics tries to stifle free speech and is intolerant of different views. But here we have a Labor Party attorney general defending the law as being entirely compatible with free speech. My own conclusion is the opposite, in my view it is entirely clear that the law does stifle free speech and it does so because it prohibits people from saying thing they ought to be able to say in perfect freedom without the authority of the state being triggered or aroused in this was. Freedom of speech has clearly been breached when a person may be hauled before a tribunal of public servants or a court because of things that have been said or written in the media and when orders may be issued which prevent them from repeating these things or continuing with their publication and even requiring them to apologise for what they've said.
In the short time I have tonight I propose to look at Mr Lavarch's defence or his legislation and to argue that he has advanced no sound argument to justify it, but in fact that his case is foolish and even dangerous. Now Mr Lavarch starts out by reminding us that freedom of speech isn't absolute and in that of course he is correct. The law, as it stands, apart from his Act does not permit perfect freedom to say anything, to say something which causes a riot, or which libels or defames a person, or which is misleading or deceptive in a commercial sense is not permitted and I don't think anyone on this platform would disagree with that.
The Lavarch Act however, is clearly an attempt to extend the prohibitions of the law, to new kinds of speech and the real policy question is whether this is done with good reason. The Act prescribes unlawful acts which are, quoting the law ''unreasonably unlikely in all the circumstances to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate another person or group of people.'' The Act also initiates a new process for dealing with prohibited statements involving tribunals, staffed by public servants as well as courts and the question arises whether this process is an acceptable substitute for freedom of speech. What can possibly be the justification for such a law? Mr Lavarch says the following and his words bear close attention he says, ''The value of the law is to require those engaged in contentious debates to reflect on the accuracy of their arguments and the supporting facts before they are used.'' Apparently in Mr Lavarch's view of the world, the well-established processes of public discussion and debate and the sanctions of public opinion what we have hitherto known as freedom of speech is no longer good enough to test contentious views in contentious debates.
Such debates really need to be tested before tribunals of public servants so that parties can be persuaded to reflect on their arguments and their facts. To enable a person who claims to be insulted by what someone else has said to enlist the full panoply of state power against one who has offended them is truly grotesque and it is this grotesqueness that places me on this platform tonight. It is a principle which could not be generally applied without bringing the while system of justice to a halt. To suggest that we need public servants or courts to invite us to reflect on what we say and even to recant and apologise is a reversion to the techniques of the medieval church with all the threat that that implies. To a person used to freedom it's hard to imagine a process more insulting and demeaning, and to claim that it is in the public interest can be mounted in defence as Michael Lavarch does is to ignore the obvious fact that the intimidatory process to which a person can still be subject before such a determination is made cannot be but chilling to the whole process of free speech.
In his famous essay on liberty, John Stewart Mill, the strongest opponent of political correctness in his day considered the argument put by some at the time that, and I quote Mill, ''the free expression of all opinions should be permitted on condition that the manner be temperate and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion.'' Now that's the view Mill's criticising. Mill pointed out the impossibility of fixing where the supposed bounds are to be placed and then he said in words that apply exactly to the present legislation, ''If the test be offence to those whose opinions are attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever an attack is telling and powerful and that every opponent who pushes them hard and whom they find difficult to answer appears to them if he shows any strong feeling on the subject to be intemperate.'' To make the test is to undermine, to offence the test is to undermine the very freedom which exposes error.
Despite all this, however, Mr Lavarch is confident that free speech has not been damaged by his law because he says, and I quote his words, ''No shock jock has been taken off the air or newspaper columnist closed down.'' Think of those words, does that mean, does Mr Lavarch mean that free speech remains untouched and untrammelled so long as no radio host or newspaper columnist has been prevented from speaking or writing at all? Closed down, to use his phrase. If this is his standard for the survival of free speech, many more obnoxious laws I'm sure could be legislated that would still leave the former attorney general fully satisfied.
Mr Lavarch also informs us that allegations under his act have been dealt with in secret, he says confidentially, by the Human Rights Commission with, quote, ''Scores of determinations made initially by the Commission and now by Federal magistrates.'' Since it all happens behind closed doors, how can Mr Lavarch, or we, know what the effect of the thousands of instances and scores of determinations have been? The law of secrecy replaces the law of free speech.
If the actions of state are justified in such cases, however, why does it not then apply to offensive, insulting or humiliating remarks that are religious in nature? Or relate to a person's class, or gender, or political views or even to their opinions on industrial relations. The federal law depends on the nation that there is something special about a racial insult, but is there? Why is a special law needed for racial insults? Mr Lavarch in his April article gives us his answer and this is all he has to say about it, ''history tells us'', he says, ''that overblown rhetoric on race fosters damaging racial stereotyping and this in turn can contribute to societal harm well beyond any deeply felt personal offence.'' Let us substitute the word class for race in the statement, or the word religious, or the word gender, or the word national or even the word politics or political, or, as I said before, even the words industrial relations. Mr Lavarch's statement is true for each; overblown rhetoric on any of these topics can create stereotypes, can cause offence and if made the basis for action, may lead on to damaging consequences.
It wasn't racial hatred, but class hatred that set the guillotine going in the French Revolution. Scores of millions were starved and slaughtered in Stalin's attack on the wealthy peasants, or in Mao's collectivisation and in his vicious cultural revolution or the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, but in democracies we have long known that it is not words that produce such horrors, it is the failure to expose prejudice, control violence and ultimately, the absence of democracy that leads to these catastrophes. Violence and incitement of violence are proper domains of the law, but this is not what this law is about. Because history tells us that overblown rhetoric in countries which are not democracies can precede damage to individuals, do we need a tribunal to control our overblown rhetoric?
Australia is a nation, I would have said, with a well established reputation amongst the democracies for both its overblown rhetoric and its peaceful society. Perhaps the two even go together, but not if Mr Lavarch's law is allowed to prevail. I am conscious of a distant echo, a historical echo in this debate. It is the voice of Robert Menzies opposing Chifley's nationalisation of the private banks. Chifley claimed his measure was needed, in an argument worthy of Michael Lavarch on the basis that, quote, ''Since the influence of money is so great, the entire monetary and banking system should be controlled by public authorities responsible through the government and parliament.'' Menzies ridiculed this argument as absurd by asking the leader to substitute primary production, transport and even opinion instead of money. Menzies said, ''There we have the entire totalitarian concept, totalitarians in Europe preceded by exactly the same logic they said, 'Here is something which has great influence on the community life, therefore the government must control it' and they went step by step so that in the long run, the government controlled everything.''
Mr Lavarch and his ilk tell us that what people say is potentially too dangerous to be left to the uncertain processes of freedom of speech and the sanctions of public opinion. ''What is needed,'' he says, ''is a government tribunal to counsel and warn and secure retractions,'' like the medieval church. If his view is accepted then liberal democracy becomes a historical interlude between the ruling classes that preceded it and the bureaucracies and tribunals that Mr Lavarch would apparently, like to see replace it.
The numbers here tonight are a clear message, but there are many Australians will not accept that Australia is on the road to such serfdom. The processes of this law I find obscene in the full meaning of the word: offensive, loathsome, ill-omened, disgusting. That is why we are here tonight, the law which has made this event possible, must be abolished without delay.
The gist of my remarks were that the fight for free speech and the liberty to speak up on public issues -- issues not excluding who we want to receive affirmative action or group rights-type benefits that attach only to a special few in society -- is a fight that will never go away. As former US president Andrew Jackson put it, ''eternal vigilance is the price of liberty''.
And those who attended were not just supporting Bolt but freedom of speech and of liberty more generally. Because let me blunt. In my view this Racial Discrimination Act, the part amended by the Racial Vilification Act that gives us section 18C and in some circumstances makes hurting someone else's feelings, is awful.
Think about it. Someone's subjective sense of being offended or humiliated has been made determinative of whether an unlawful act has been committed, subject to a few exemptions in section 18D.
That's a terrible statutory provision. It ought to be repealed. Now. Yes, a judge may, perhaps, find the exemptions apply. Yes, there is some wiggle room. But even forcing someone to have to litigate constitutes a massive chilling effect on free speech. Let's face it. Not everyone has Bolt's cojones (and I know that may not have been the most felicitous way of putting the point). And not everyone has the resources of a big employer to back this sort of egregious litigation. These provisions create a sort of half-baked right not to be offended, a big mistake in my view.
So the fault lies with the legislature for passing these statutory provisions, not with the judges who have to interpret them. This is politically correct, pandering, group rights-inspired legislation.
The only sort of free speech that matters is the sort that offends some people somewhere. In a situation where all is agreement and harmony and people sitting in circles, holding hands, and singing Kumbaya, the concept of liberty and free speech does nothing. You will never have to fight for it meaning a freedom only to act or speak within the bounds of agreed opinion, good taste and proper decorum just isn't valuable. It doesn't carry with it any obvious good consequences.
The threat to our freedom of speech in the West today does not come from some Soviet-style secret police. No, it comes from turf-protecting bureaucrats who find themselves all of a sudden in the human rights game; it comes from people who want to create a right not to be offended.
Or at least not to be offended about the things that matter to them, because almost all the sorts of people who like the legislation being deployed against Bolt would be horrified to think that those in the US who are offended by the burning of the American flag ought to be able to prosecute the burners for their offended sensibilities. So what they really want is a right not to be offended, as long as it's the sort of things a good chardonnay-sipping member of the progressive elite ought to be offended about, nothing else.
But plain and simple that's a mistake. The only kind of free speech worth anything is the kind that leads to speech that offends people. And I say that knowing full well that none of us can be absolutists and there will always have to be some limits on speech, against counselling murder, say, or detailing how to make biological weapons.
But we ought to want as much scope as possible for people in a democracy to speak their minds. And precluding people from having and expressing an opinion on the problems with self-identifying as an indigenous person, or on who ought to be able to benefit from positive discrimination laws, well that's ridiculously inhibiting of free speech in my view.
I think that in any well-functioning democracy it is incumbent on all citizens to grow a thick skin. If you're offended, tell us why the speaker is wrong. Tell us why he or she is misguided or has defective moral antennae. Don't go to court and seek a court-ordered apology, or orders prohibiting publication of views you find offensive, or some two-bit judicial declaration.
And as a legislator under no circumstances pass statutes that allow for the creation of this mutant, half-baked right not to be offended. The very fact that people can be dragged through the courts -- whatever the ultimate outcome -- has a massive chilling effect on free speech. I know it. You know it. And our legislators ought to know it too, and do something about repealing this terrible piece of legislation.
At the end of the day those of us who want a considerable amount of scope for people to speak their minds are the optimists. We're the ones who are in the tradition of John Stuart Mill.
Recall the main ground that Mill gave for preferring very few limits indeed on what people can say. It was a consequentialist ground or justification. Leave people almost always free to speak as they like and in the ensuing battle of ideas truth will out, or in less hopeful terms, it is more likely to emerge than if people are silenced and issues are resolved by self-styled human rights experts or government appointees.
So for the benefit of getting at truth and true assertions we override hurt feelings, we ignore offended sensibilities, we discount the possibility of outright lies being spread, and we choose not to have our legislation accord with the world view of grievance industry mongers. Short of obvious, concrete, unavoidable harm to others, we let speech alone.
And underlying that rationale for lots of scope to speak our minds is a clear optimism about truth emerging in the tussle of ideas and ultimately an optimism about the views of the ordinary voter in a democracy.
In my opinion too many of the people who push these speech-limiting laws have simply lost faith in the views and beliefs of their fellow citizens. They have even lost a bit of faith in democracy itself.
Theirs is not the optimistic position. Ours is.
We are the citizens of one of the world's oldest and greatest democracies; we are not a collection of victims too offended to muster up the resources to reply on our own behalf when we disagree with others.
It is a badge of honour to live in a society that protects differences of opinion, including ones with which we vehemently disagree.
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