These Jokers, Always With The Gags

LET’S JUST recap what the past few days have told us about the state of free speech in Australia.

A much-published author with a life coach, personal trainer and busy travel itinerary receives $90,000 in public money to publish a memoir of her success in having a court affirm that a relatively small drop of Aboriginal blood affords legal protection from hurt feelings.

Her book is titled Am I Black Enough For You?, and when the topic is opened for discussion by the ABC, the answer is made so rapidly and abundantly clear that the thread is allowed to remain open for less than two hours. The following day the national broadcaster makes those comments vanish altogether, while the audio link for the interview that started it all acquires an extra digit in its URL and becomes unplayable.

At her publisher’s website a similar stream of comments suffers an identical fate. None are rude, vulgar or racist, but they are most definitely scathing. As many commenters note, one of just two possible answers to the question posed by the title of the author’s book can be given only at risk of prosecution. This makes the title not a query but a sneering taunt.

Her publisher neglects to close all website pages devoted to the author, and commenters find another avenue to answer the big question. This, too, will vanish very soon, not because the sentiments are contemptible, but because the opinions that are frank, blunt and true. This cannot be allowed.

Meanwhile, the columnist the author took to court cannot respond to her provocations, his employer is too craven to appeal the ruling and a large piece of the broadsheet media will find nothing about the curtailment of its own liberty that is worth the trouble of reporting, If that is not enough, a squad of would-be censors awaits the power to impose contempt penalties, up to and including jail, on writers who fail to report events in the light they prefer. Most worrying of all, the same censors cite the author's legal triumph as a positive development in defining the limits of acceptable discourse.

This is where free speech stands in Australia: under frontal attack by a government frantic to silence its critics and eroded on the flank by a national broadcaster’s insistence on silencing opinions it actually has a charter obligation to echo. Free speech has been betrayed by two publishers, and its full set of shackles is even now being forged by people who believe recalcitrant editors need to be stamping number plates.

And yet, despite all these threats and attempts to intimidate and gag, hundreds of average Australians   immediately spoke up for the right to be heard when given just the briefest chance to do so. The New Establishment will squash and ignore this little eruption, but the last few days proves its grip on debate is nowhere near as secure as it has imagined.

Free speech is in trouble, but only if we do not continue to speak up for it.

Silence Gives Consent

A MODEST, QUIET LIFE with lots of golf and time to terrorise the trout, that’s not much to ask is it? And it is not as if it’s a one-way street, because the intent at the Billabong has always been to give a little back. Those hard-pressed professional reporters, they just don’t have the time to be looking into every interesting and curious angle arising from the stories they purport to cover, so little blogs like this one, we do our best to help.

When News Ltd cans a columnist or Fairfax a radio host, each axed for the indiscretion of bringing up our PM’s light-fingered former swain, it seems a public good to make mention every so often of the scandal. When a prime ministerial aide promotes a race riot, same thing.  Like the dead, affairs of that sort live on in memory only if their names are uttered every now and then, even if by small voices barely heard. Those Big Media outfits have their reasons for wishing not to give offence to politicians who might, by way of retribution, institute an inquiry into their industry. Who can blame them? There are shareholders to consider and government advertising contracts to retain, so it is easy to understand why they elevate self-interest to a virtue.

This is the where and why of the Professor’s downbeat mood. According to Finko & Rickety, sites like this one need regulating, as they would benefit from the oversight of bureaucrats equipped to determine which opinions and views are fit for public airing, not to mention which interpretation of available fact represents the authorised truth.

How will they attempt to execute their plan? Well that is a mystery. Fifteen thousand pageviews per year make a website big enough to warrant official scrutiny, according to the Media Review’s authors. It is a threshold that would mark this blog a target before its landlord recovers from New Year Eve's excess.

Will Stephen Conroy and his heirs ban Google from their NBN if its Blogger unit declines to hand over traffic figures or disclose IP addresses? Will it ban proxy servers and the smartypants software that protects a modest blogger’s low profile? How big will the fines and jail terms need to be in order to encourage widespread compliance?

And the imponderables?  What if, just say, an Australian blogger who happens to reside in Washington publishes something deemed objectionable in his homeland and does so via, say, a Polish host? Don’t laugh, Washington-based Tim Dunlop was in almost that position with his Road To Surfdom site, back when blogging was young and he was studying to become, as he would put it, a public intellectual. It is a safe bet that Finko would not have a clue about any of those practicalities. Would he send an Australian gunboat up the Potomac to obtain the information by force of arms? Wreathed in the residual majesty of a retired judge, Finko has perhaps grown so accustomed to deference that he imagines the wider world operates on the same authoritian principles of his former courtroom.

As for Rickety, let us note that he boasts of shuttling between newsrooms and academia throughout his career, so he has no excuse for failing to acknowledge the practical issues involved in monitoring and policing an entire nation’s chatter. Either he doesn’t care that his proposals are unworkable or, more likely, he deems their actual implementation beside the point. The key to control is acquiescence. If his desired re-working of free speech is revealed as impractical in specific and isolated incidences, it would be a minor deficiency. The key will be to nudge and bully the bulk of the publishing industry’s players over the line, position them where the threat of investigation and action is enough in itself to advance docility.

Where does that leave bloggers and small, independent publishers without the wherewithal to pay the lawyers who will be needed to fend off speech regulators? The answer is simple as it is obvious: poised constantly at the brink of silence and financial ruin.

The Media Review is a smug, arrogant manifesto which crystallises all the noxious attitudes that have ruined Fairfax, sullied the ABC and replaced debate with an absurd insistence that the views of the tight, hooked-in, self-referential coterie of worshippers at authority’s altar represent more, much more, than a mere body of opinion. As the Litijus Mordys demonstrated in the action brought against Andrew Bolt, opinions – the wrong opinions, that is – are now subject to adjudication on the basis of nothing more substantial than plaintiffs’ hurt feelings. The courts have already imposed themselves as one wing of a pincer movement that aims to enclose free speech. The public service speech police Finko & Rickety  advocate would snap closed that trap with a loud and inescapable finality.

In the Media section of today’s Australian, various heavyweights weigh in on the inquiry with balanced and nuanced appreciations of its worth, the general view being that the report is worthy of further discussion and refinement. Perhaps they cannot think beyond the report's endorsement of taxpayer subsidies because they are already bending over, assuming the position. They do not object to being stuffed, apparently, just as so long as they retain the feeble right to negotiate how deep that violation will go.

The circumstances under which Finko & Rickety were set to work, the unquestioned assumption that there is both a right and need to regulate speech, the expectation that genuflections before authority are right and proper – they are the inquiry’s original sins and they pollute the published whole as thoroughly and dangerously as botulism poisons the most lavish banquet.

What Finko & Rickety have produced is an obscenity. Their recommendations need to be scuttled before they can be launched. There will be no sinking them after that.

And then, maybe, there will be a bit more time for golf and fishing.                

Jews Suffer Most

IT IS NOT the Professor’s privilege to be Jewish, which would have required the mohel to come armed with a chainsaw, for such is the robust nature of Bunyip physiology. Still, while there is much appreciation for the sons of Abraham at the Billabong (and a readier affection for his more comely daughters), there are times when the utterances of prominent Jews cause great dismay. One such moment came this morning, courtesy of the National Times, which provides Vic Alhadeff, chief exec of NSW’s Board of Deputies, with an opportunity to mount the case for censorship. He doesn’t quite call it that, of course, preferring to write of the need for “responsibility”, but the thought of gagging objectionable commentary and comments is most definitely what lights his menorah.

And to be fair, you do have to be at least a little sympathetic. As Alhadeff explains, an entirely reasonable column he wrote for The Drum became a magnet for moronic anti-semitism. It can be found here and the comments, starting with the very top one, are genuinely shocking. Now Alhadeff might have complained that Jonathan Green, who presides over the ABC’s non-profit version of Crikey!, exercised no discretion in deciding what thoughts were aired on the taxpayer-funded site. And Green, for his part, might have countered that his site was fair and even-handed because the same thread also published many almost-as-noxious assaults on Catholics and Pope Benedict. That is, of course, the way the Drum works, habitually debasing even worthy articles with its core audience’s idiocy. One day, if the Drum survives the coming change of government, its funding should be moved from the public broadcaster’s ledger to that of the Health Department, as the best argument for its existence is that it provides a private diversion for snot-pickers, manic hair tuggers and mumbling ranters who might otherwise be out and about, much to the alarm of sane citizens.

But suppose Alhadeff’s notion of “responsibility” proved inadequate to the task of deep-sixing your more appalling examples of ratbaggery? And suppose, after that, the next logical and inevitable step was legislation to keep things nice. It would be introduced with the best of intentions, as most bad ideas always are, but what might we then expect?  Why Canada, of course, where gagging laws championed by Alhadeff’s Canuck counterparts have given Mark Steyn and others so much grief.

Could we count on journalists to defend the right to be offensive, stupid or both? Again, not if Canada is the model. Indoctrinated when not merely co-opted, journalists’ notions of truth, and their subjective appreciation of worthy truths, are for the moment on display daily in the Age, which is so committed to purity of thought it will not permit even a single conservative to sully its pages. That this preachy intolerance for opinions seldom heard in Fitzroy is a major factor in the newspaper’s decline worries those in charge not at all. They appear quite happy to cut their own throats so long as the newspaper's fade to black is set to the louder soundtrack of their enemies’ throttled gurgling.

Could we look to the courts for a champion of the right to be offensive? Why not refer that question to party-line hacks like Judge Mordy, who may well find you guilty of vilification and intolerance for daring even to put it.

That is what happens when we surrender to our self-proclaimed betters the power to determine good speech from bad: travesties built upon arrogance and the treachery of good intentions. It is why Alhadeff needs to read these thoughts and re-think what to him must seem as innocent as obligatory good manners. 

Or he could just consult Steyn, who several months ago noted the unintended consequences of a similar campaign to eradicate “ugly anonymity online”. Here is the nub: “It is bizarre that the [Canadian Jewish Congress] has found itself on the side of those who wish to silence the most effective defenders of Israel in Canada, but it is shameful that it has so little to say about these matters itself.” By “these matters” he means jihadist incitements to teach those sly Jews a real lesson. Draw attention to it, however, and various panels of speech nannies will be all over you with charges of incitement to hatred etc.

Alhadeff finds the Drum offensive. Perhaps he should demonstrate his disdain by declining to write for it – after, that is, penning a farewell column on the site’s deplorable editorial standards and supervision. See if you can get that published, Mr Alhadeff, and then think again about the ultimate victims of censorship.