What you are about to read could send me to jail under Anthony Albanese’s new hate speech laws. Brace yourself because if, like me, you grew up in Bob Hawke’s Australia, you may have said a few of these things yourself.
Asian drivers are bad. The Irish drink too much. Wogs love Monaros. English food is bland. Japanese take too many photos. Americans are too loud. Germans have no sense of humour. Australians are all convicts.
There are any number of stereotypes that float around in jokes, conversations, TV shows and movies. It does not make them true, and in the Australian spirit, it doesn’t make them malicious.
But amazingly, because the threshold for what constitutes “hate speech” will be set so low under Labor’s proposed new laws, almost any of the above statements can land you in jail for up to five years.
Section 80.2bf says a person is committing an offence if they disseminate ideas of superiority over a target group because of national origin and a person in that target group feels intimidated.
Let’s test it with “English food is bland”. By saying it, even on private premises, I am disseminating it. Tick. By stating the food is bland, I am clearly making a comparison with the implication food other than English food, including my own, is superior. Tick. By identifying the food as “English”, I have created a target group based on national origin. Tick. All it would take now for me to be prosecuted under the Prime Minister’s new laws is for a reasonable person from that target group to feel intimidated. What if I said it in the context of a cooking competition? Tick, tick, tick, tick.
Now clearly I’m mocking the legislation, but this situation could not be more serious. Australia is about to head down a dangerous path where the feelings of a small but litigious group of people can shape the ideas we can discuss publicly and in private.
This is a perversion of the principles of democracy and will pit people of different beliefs, culture, colour, religion and origin against one another. I am proud of our long history of bringing minorities into our society. We all should be. But this Bill does not offer minorities more protection – it simply weaponises division. The “will of the people” will no longer exist, replaced instead with the “will of the activist”.
We will no longer come together over our love for what we share but rather keep our distance for fear of what divides us. NSW Premier Chris Minns recently said “hate speech is hate speech”. This is incorrect. Hate speech has just been redefined.
Everyday speech is now hate speech. From sharing a copy of Fat Pizza to reposting a story about Somalian childcare centres. Groundskeeper Willie on The Simpsons can call the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”, but you can’t.
Don’t laugh, this is serious.
Garth Hamilton is LNP member for Groom