The latest turn in the section 18 C debate has come from the leak that the Labor Party is keen to pursue a unified discrimination package, as was tried under Gillard. You may recall that this proposal, which explicitly involved reversal of the onus of proof, was attacked solidly by even establishment legal figures. Gillard backed down, but her champions remained in the party, ever keen to push this proposal.
The attempt to consolidate the five anti-discrimination packages will result in section 18 C style challenges on disability, gender, and who knows how many other politically correct attributes. The Gillard laws had a whole shopping list of 18 qualities, such as pregnancy, breastfeeding, sexual orientation, political opinion, nationality, citizenship, religion, gender identity, immigrant status, family responsibilities, and I cannot remember the rest. What a list! Imagine the lawsuits!
Big money for the law class indeed, who have an infinite degree of greed. Wait, should I have said that about my colleagues: are they to be protected from all criticism as well? In any case, the low threshold “offends” condition, which has been so profitable for those pursuing race cases, will be widened and anything you might want to say at all will certainly be illegal.
Now how can the ruling elites get away with this? They do because the ordinary person, the 100 IQ pointer, does nothing. In the case of the US elections, the punters did act, at the eleventh hour, but here in Australia, they are letting things go mighty close to the abyss. My guess is that we won’t make it.
As a footnote to my previous article on the Liberal’s reform of section 18 C, I said that it is purely cosmetic, designed to keep the critics quite, but changing nothing. On the HRC website, one finds that “harassment” is defined, circularly, as any behaviour that makes a person feel offended, humiliated or intimidated: https://www.humanrights.gov.au/our-work/sex-discrimination/guides/sexual-harassment; There is no indication that “harassment’ is to be defined narrowly in terms of a reasonable fear of imminent physical harm. Thus, the proposed reforms will leave everything exactly as it is, which is no doubt their design.
For a taste of what free speech is like, here is intellectual Ann Coulter writing on the topic, why aren’t Americans (substitute “Australians”) allowed to determine their own immigration policy: https://www.amren.com/commentary/2017/03/donald-trump-immigration-ann-coulter/:
“Liberals are ecstatic that a judge in Hawaii is writing immigration policy for the entire country, and that policy is: We have no right to tell anyone that he can’t live in America. (Unless they’re Christians—those guys we can keep out.)
As subtly alluded to in the subtitle of Adios, America: The Left’s Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole, the goal of liberals is for the poor of the world to have a constitutional right to come here whenever they want.
I can’t help but notice that the Third Worlders aren’t moving to liberals’ neighborhoods.
After nearly 1 million Rwandans were murdered by other Rwandans in 1994, our government asked itself: Why not bring more of this fascinating Rwandan culture to America? Ten thousand of them poured in. So far, nearly 400 have been convicted in the United States of lying on visa applications about their role in the genocide.
And that’s why we have to tighten our belt, America! Massive international investigations don’t come cheap.
Almost every immigration case is a con, something we find out every time there’s a San Bernardino shooting and half the family turns out to have scammed our immigration officials. One hundred percent of the “humanitarian” cases are frauds.
Earlier this month, Rwanda’s Gervais Ngombwa was convicted for lying on his immigration application by claiming to have been a victim of the 1994 genocide. In fact, he was a well-known perpetrator—even featured in Rwandan newspaper articles as a leader of the genocide.
For most of the last two decades, Ngombwa has been living in Iowa with his wife and eight children in a house built by Habitat for Humanity—because no Americans need houses. He came to the authorities’ attention a couple years ago by setting that house on fire after a domestic dispute, then filing a fraudulent $75,000 insurance claim.
Another Rwandan genocidalist living in America was featured in Adios, America: Beatrice Munyenyezi, granted refugee status as an alleged victim of the genocide, even though she, too, had helped orchestrate it.
Munyenyezi was safely living in Kenya when she applied for a refugee visa to America. The welfare is way better here. And, luckily for us, she had a “chronic medical condition” that required constant attention from a New Hampshire hospital.
Hesham Mohamed Hadayet arrived in the U.S. on a tourist visa, then immediately applied for “asylum” on the grounds that he was persecuted in Egypt—for being a member of an Islamic terrorist group.
Being a member of a noted terrorist group cannot be used to block you from coming to America, thanks to Barney Frank’s 1989 amendment to the Immigration and Naturalization Act, because liberals love this country so very, very much. Being a talented neurosurgeon from Switzerland, however, is disqualifying.”
Coulter goes on to point out that:
“In 1960, 75 percent of the foreign-born in America were from Europe. Today only about 10 percent are. More than a third of all post-Teddy Kennedy act immigrants—not just the wretched humanitarian cases—don’t even have a high school diploma.”
It cannot end well.
Talking about this may or may not do anything, but it is certain that a ban on free speech will allow the sorts of problems discussed above, to spiral out of control.