Mr HAMILTON (Groom) (16:51): Given the special significance of this piece of legislation and the feelings of anger it excites in me, I have done something I have not done before. I have engaged the services of a speechwriter I’m happy to admit. Members opposite and on my side, having heard my previous contributions, might think that a very good idea. You’ll find the language perhaps somewhat dated, but I’ve got to admit that it’s so rare that I have found and come across someone who has been able to speak from my heart with their own lips. So bear with me.
The time, it is to be hoped, is gone by, when any defence would be necessary of the “liberty of the press” as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government. No argument, we may suppose, can now be needed, against permitting a legislature or an executive, not identified in interest with the people, to prescribe opinions to them, and determine what doctrines or what arguments they shall be allowed to hear.
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If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind. Were an opinion a personal possession of no value except to the owner; if to be obstructed in the enjoyment of it were simply a private injury, it would make some difference whether the injury was inflicted only on a few persons or on many. But the peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error.
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In the present age—which has been described as “destitute of faith, but terrified at scepticism”—in which people feel sure, not so much that their opinions are true, as that they should not know what to do without them—the claims of an opinion to be protected from public attack are rested not so much on its truth, as on its importance to society.
It’s a decision made not by the people but by those who lead them.
Mankind can hardly be too often reminded, that there was once a man named Socrates, between whom and the legal authorities and public opinion of his time, there took place a memorable collision.
He says Socrates:
… was put to death by his countrymen, after a judicial conviction, for impiety and immorality. Impiety, in denying the gods recognised by the State; indeed his accuser asserted (see the “Apologia”) that he believed in no gods at all. Immorality, in being, by his doctrines and instructions, a “corruptor of youth.” Of these charges the tribunal, there is every ground for believing, honestly found him guilty, and condemned the man who probably of all then born had deserved best of mankind, to be put to death as a criminal.
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In politics, again, it is almost a commonplace, that a party of order or stability, and a party of progress or reform, are both necessary elements of a healthy state of political life; until the one or the other shall have so enlarged its mental grasp as to be a party equally of order and of progress, knowing and distinguishing what is fit to be preserved from what ought to be swept away.
Each of these modes of thinking derives its utility from the deficiencies of the other; but it is in a great measure the opposition of the other that keeps each within the limits of reason and sanity. Unless opinions favourable to democracy and to aristocracy, to property and to equality, to co-operation and to competition, to luxury and to abstinence, to sociality and individuality, to liberty and discipline, and all other standing antagonisms of practical life, are expressed with equal freedom, and enforced and defended with equal talent and energy, there is no chance of both elements obtaining their due; one scale is sure to go up, and the other down. Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, that very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial to make the adjustment with an approach to correctness, and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners. Of any of the great open questions just enumerated, if either of the two opinions has a better claim than the other, not merely to be tolerated, but to be encouraged and countenanced, it is the one which happens at that particular time and place to be in a minority. That is the opinion which, for the time being, represents the neglected interests, the side of human well-being which is in danger of obtaining less than its share. I am aware that there is not, in this country, any intolerance of differences of opinion on most of these topics. They are adduced to show, by admitted and multiplied examples, the universality of the fact, that only through diversity of opinion is there, in the existing state of human intellect, a chance of fair play to all sides of the truth. When there are persons to be found, who form an exception to the apparent unanimity of the world on any subject, even if the world is in the right, it is always probable that dissentients have something worth hearing to say for themselves, and that truth would lose something by their silence.
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I do not pretend that the most unlimited use of the freedom of enunciating all possible opinions would put an end to the evils of religious or philosophical sectarianism. Every truth which men of narrow capacity are in earnest about, is sure to be asserted, inculcated, and in many ways even acted on, as if no other truth existed in the world, or at all events none that could limit or qualify the first. I acknowledge that the tendency of all opinions to become sectarian is not cured by the freest discussion, but is often heightened and exacerbated thereby; the truth which ought to have been, but was not, seen, being rejected all the more violently because proclaimed by persons regarded as opponents. But it is not on the impassioned partisan, it is on the calmer and more disinterested bystander, that this collision of opinions works its salutary effect. Not the violent conflict between parts of the truth, but the quiet suppression of half of it, is the formidable evil: there is always hope when people are forced to listen to both sides; it is when they attend only to one that errors harden into prejudices, and truth itself ceases to have the effect of truth, by being exaggerated into falsehood. And since there are few mental attributes more rare than that judicial faculty which can sit in intelligent judgement between two sides of a question, of which only one is represented by an advocate before it, truth has no chance but in proportion as every side of it, every opinion which embodies any fraction of the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated as to be listened to.
Deputy Speaker, as you will have worked out quite quickly, my speechwriter gifted me this some time ago. It was in 1859, when it was written by John Stuart Mill. It comes from the second chapter of his book On Liberty. It torments me no end that we are back there, finding ourselves in that same age-old debate between the voice of the many that struggles to be heard and the might of the few that would suppress it. We are back there, and I am happy to stand against the government on this bill. I am happy to find myself standing with Mill.
Among all of the words that rang true in 1859 and that we find ourselves dealing with today is the idea that, not just in this place but in the world around us, amongst the voices of those that we represent here, there is not a uniformity of opinion—quite the opposite. There is the constant competition of ideas playing out right across Australia and across the Western world. We are a reflection of that, and it’s important that that plays out. I would argue that that competition of ideas is what has bent the arc of Western civilisation towards freedom, towards the better world that we live in now, towards equality and towards just laws. Competition plays its part. We must always be wary of governments, corporations or anybody who would use their power to stifle or reduce the voice of the many. This is an age-old problem. There is nothing new in what is being presented in this bill or in the government’s intent. This is an age-old fight, and we must stand by the freedom to say what we would say. It must belong to us. It cannot be taken from us. We cannot stand by and let this fall away.
My message to Australians who will hear this debate played out, as the first attempt quite frankly played out and failed across Australia, is: Australians, say your piece and say it now. The intent of the government is clear. It seeks to stifle debate. It seeks not only to determine what is truth but to stop words being spoken that are against that chosen truth. One of the clearest denouncements we can make of this bill and its intent is that what that truth is can change not only from government to government but from minister to minister. The ridiculous idea that our conversations will now be judged on a single axiom that comes straight out of the executive carpet is absolutely ridiculous and will be fought against. This is a battle that has lost the public debate once in Australia and will lose it again. I have absolutely no doubt. The member for New England was quite right: Australians will not tolerate this. Australians will not tolerate being told by a government what they can and cannot say, what is right and what is wrong.
There’s an ongoing debate in Western society about what it is that ails us and why it is that we seem to have reached a peak in the last decade where we’ve stifled and stalled, where our growth is no longer there, where cultures that do not contribute as much to the world as ours seem somehow to be overtaking us and moving faster than us. I would point to this very bill as an example of what is wrong with Western civilisation at the moment—that it would seek to strangle its own voice, that it would no longer value the contributions of its own members and turn towards a totalitarian view of how we are governed and how we allow ourselves to be governed.
I am against this with everything in my body. I never imagined, when becoming a politician, that I would be standing up and speaking against a bill that would give the government the power to determine what is right or wrong and to shut down those who oppose its view. It is beyond my comprehension that in this day and age that idea could have made its way all the way here. It belongs in some undergraduate, left-wing, university campus, Greens party debate. It’s ridiculous. It is beneath us. We went through this centuries ago. We must stand up and fight it. There is nothing more important to Australia right now than this. On all of the decisions that government makes, be they right or wrong, we have formed a system of government, the Westminster system, where we can scrutinise openly and publicly those decisions. We can challenge them in debate. We have that right here on the floor of parliament. We cannot allow a world where that right stops once we walk outside these walls. That is not an Australia that is deserving of the sacrifices of all those who fought and died for this great nation. It is an absolute betrayal of all those who worked hard and came here under different waves and made this great nation.
This bill is almost an exact replica of what went before it that was rejected so forcefully by the Australian people. This government should hang its head in shame for bringing it back again during the closing down sale of this government. It’s a last desperate attempt to save a failing government. The member for Riverina was quite right in his comments. We must maintain the dignity in our debate, and I acknowledge that this issue brings out feelings of great anger in me. It is important that we can debate this and debate it in a way that is based on values, based on policy and is not an attack on each other.
I do think it is important to point out the intention behind this bill. I think it is beneath this government to seek to silence Australians who choose not to accept their version of the truth. I think it is beneath this government. That is not the Labor that I remember from my youth. That is not the Labor government that, in previous years, has served this nation well; it is not. It is certainly not a bill becoming of the Australia I grew up in and it is not a bill that is becoming of the Australia that I am raising my children in. We must fight against this. We will continue to and we will win.
