The Latest Victim of the Race/Cultural War by Ian Wilson LL. B.

Cartoonist Bill Leak of The Australian is facing a section 18 C racial hatred complaint. The matter arises from a cartoon featuring three Aborigines. An Aboriginal policeman is holding a youth and confronts the lad’s father, who has a tin of beer in his hand. The officer says that the father needs to talk to his son about personal responsibility, and the father agrees and asks the officer what the lad’s name is. The cartoon was widely criticised, I think not without some justification, for its portrayal of a crisis in parenting.

The complaint alleges:

“The Australian newspaper has published and endorsed a cartoon depicting racial discrimination, racial profiling, and racially offensive material. A series of cartoons illustrate hateful and derogatory material specifically relating to indigenous Australians, their relationships with their children, alcoholism and domestic violence.”

I can well appreciate that the complainant was offended by the cartoon. The elements “insult” and “humiliate” may also be present, but probably not “intimidate.”
Was the act done because of the race/colour/national/ethnic nature of the people? That would be the first point of argument and there is precedent that the complainant’s case could fail at that point: Walsh v Hanson [2000] HREOCA 8 (March 2, 2000).

A strong section 18 D defence could also be mounted.
Further, the elements that led (I think, wrongly) to the Bolt case failing on section 18 D, namely a series of journalist errors, is missing here. As well, the case involves political art (a cartoon), for the purpose of expressing a viewpoint in the public interest, and that might be justified by the implied right of free expression of a political view.

Andrew Bolt who has been through the wringer of all of this (HeraldSun.com, October 15, 2016) asks: “When will the Turnbull government get the guts to at least try to scrap this wicked law?” The answer is, I believe: never.
Turnbull’s Liberals, the Labor Party and Greens, support 18 C because it has come to be symbolic of the multicult. Any modification, let alone repeal, is seen as an attack on multiculturalism. Hence, freedom of speech, the key part of liberalism, has been abandoned in Australia.

Section 18 C, by its history shows that classical Million liberalism and multicultural law, are incompatible.

No sooner had I finished typing those words, than I picked up The Australian and read Jennifer Oriel’s hard-hitting article on this “There Can be No Reasoning with PC Bigot Rights Advocates” (October 17, 2016, p. 12)
She goes much further than I have, seeing Bill Leak as a victim"

“of prejudice so entrenched in our legal and political system it is sparking anti-establishment revolt across the West. It is the conversion of the human rights movement into a bigot rights industry.”
“The principle victims of bigot rights are heterosexual men of Anglo-European descent whose advocacy of freedom, rationality and reason places them on the Right side of politics in the 21st century. The political repression of free thinkers by the bigot rights movement is calculated. PC bigotry is so comprehensive it engulfs the establishment whose members openly celebrate the structural oppression and public humiliation of those excluded from their state-sanctified system of privilege.”

Oriel is quite correct in saying: “Section 18 C is anti-Enlightenment revolution codified as law.
It effects the erosion of truth, rationality and reason as the foundations of Western law by replacing them with ideology, feelings and a consequent culture of unreason.”