A Couple Of Headlines

[enf]

Opinion...what do YOU think?

There are a couple of disturbing articles (at least to me) today that I thought deserve mentioning...

The Age...an interesting article which raises some good questions about softly softly Victorian law..



The Australian...proposed ALP additions to 18C. I for one have always found that 18C is an affront to democracy, and has no place in one. Turnbuckles proposed changes do not go far enough but they are a step in the right direction even if doomed to fail because of the stupidity of those who oppose true freedom of speech. Turnbull is a coward for going back on the original coalition election committment to scrap it in my view.

Paywalled....text supplied at my request by a friend.

The Australian
12:00AM March 24, 2017

Rosie Lewis
Reporter
Canberra

Senate powerbroker Nick Xenophon has warned that politicians need to “tread very carefully” over Labor’s plan to apply a section# 18C-style discrimination standard for all vilifying speech.

Opposition legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus was attacked# by Liberal MPs after The Australian revealed he had rekindled a push for a federal law that prohibits discriminatory speech against someone “on the basis of their disability or gender or a range of other attributes”.

Speaking alongside Liberal MP Tim Wilson at a Jewish Communi#ty Council of Victoria event last week, Mr Dreyfus said: “Tim has reminded me painfully of the failed project which I hope to return to, consolidating the five anti-discrimination statutes when we are next in government.

“One of the things we’ll be looking at is this very point of whether or not we should set a standard about speech generally.”

An exposure draft of Labor’s 2012 Human Rights Anti-Discrimination Bill shows the Gillard government considered making it unlawful to discriminate or treat someone unfavourably based on 18 grounds, including pregnancy, breastfeeding, sexual orientation, political opinion, nationality or citizenship, religion, gender identity, family responsibilities and immigrant status.

The draft’s definition for “unfavourable treatment” includes “harassing the other person” and “other conduct that offends, insults# or intimidates”.

The Turnbull government will seek next week to overhaul the Australian Human Rights Commission’s procedures and change section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act by replacing the words “offend, insult and humil#iate” with “harass”.

It also wants to insert a “reasonable person” test to determine if the law has been breached.

But with Labor, the Greens and key crossbench senators against definitional changes to the race-hate law, the bill in its current form is facing defeat.

Senator Xenophon said Mr Dreyfus’s comments introduced a “whole new debate” that he had not considered: “We need to tread very carefully on this and the implication#s of that.”

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton told radio 2GB Mr Dreyfus’s idea of extending the reach of litigation based on section 18C showed that Bill Shorten was “completely and utterly captured” by the Greens, unions and “politically correct brigade”.

Liberal MP Angus Taylor also blasted Mr Dreyfus for “seriously considering” applying section 18C “to other areas of activity”.

“The Labor Party and Mark Dreyfus won’t be happy until we have a police state, where the thought police are telling Australians what they can and can’t say.”

But Mr Dreyfus’s spokeswoman said the discussion of the five-year-old bill at a public forum was “in purely hypothetical terms and should be taken as such”.

“It would be speculative in the extreme to consider what might be contained in a future bill, put forward by a future Labor government, should this project be once again pursued,” she said.