Is there more to say about proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act than that they’ve been instigated by the hurt feelings of an all-powerful media commentator?
Not really. That central idea severs our ability to approach this thing from any kind of honest place.
Conservative commentator Andrew Bolt wrote a series of articles questioning people who identify as aboriginal despite their light skin, implying they did so for personal gain. The pieces were called “It’s so hip to be black” and “White fellas in the black”.
The Federal Court found Bolt had breached the act because the articles were not written in good faith and contained factual errors, adding up to a product that would offend a reasonable member of the Aboriginal community.
Bolt’s team argued the pieces represented genuinely held views, were a matter of public interest and within the laws of free speech.
In the court’s finding, it was pointed out that the breach did not stem from the subject matter, but “the matter in which the subject matter was dealt with”.
So the issue isn’t discussion of race, racism and the existence of different people but with, well, bad faith. Inaccuracy. Is that finding so abhorrent that our society needs to be legally inoculated against its menace?
The government has transparently named that finding as the motivating factor in its desire to alter the Racial Discrimination Act. They seek to repeal the bit that outlaws acting in a manner that may “offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate’ someone because of their race or ethnicity and replace it with just ‘intimidate or vilify’.
More importantly, they’re adding a clause that exempts all that from any words or images “in public discussion of any political, social, cultural, religious, artistic or scientific matter”. Try to imagine any discussion of race, in any forum, that doesn’t fall into those categories. Even those creepy dudes who stand on literal soapboxes in the streets warning against the islamic apocalypse could argue it’s a religious matter. Noxious dinner party guests drunkenly banging on about brown people who ‘just don’t want to work’while paradoxically ‘stealing our jobs’ could probably shoot for exemption due to ‘publicly discussing a social matter’.
Someone who could definitely qualify for exemption is Andrew Bolt, due to the speaking being done from his privileged, influential position of newspaper columnist and television host.
So that’s the heart of it, isn’t it? Do you believe Bolt's articles, found in court to be innacurate and in bad faith, should be free to be published without accountability?
It’s important to point out that, for breaching the act, Bolt and his employers were just asked to not reprint the articles and print an apology: to say sorry to the people they’d hurt.
This is the punishment the government now seeks to eradicate - the need for the media to apologise for inaccurate articles that unfairly portray people in a negative light based on race.
A glib, tweety interpretation: The government wants to revoke people’s ability to sue because they’ve been offended or insulted to appease a man who was offended or insulted.
The Racial Discrimination Act cannot eradicate racism, as racism lives in people’s brains. These changes could enable some horrid commentary, but will likely achieve little in the grander scheme. What the act can do is provide protection to the marginalised who have no other way to have their voices heard, or at least signal to the community that such a thing exists and that, dammit, we care about this stuff. This is how we establishia cultural norm.
It’s for this reason the government’s proposed changes are so befuddling. Andrew Bolt needs no assistance in getting his point across. In this instance his power is so absolute that the Prime Minister of the country has personally intervened to alter the law to his whim. Against someone of such privilege, of course people need an external mechanism to level the playing field.
Another troubling change to the act: the “reasonable person” who will act as the cosmic yardstick on whether intimidation or vilification has transpired will be removed from the attacked community (in the above case, “light-skinned Aborigines”), to the community at large. It’s another of those indicators of the underlying philosophy at hand. On the face of it, leaving the decision to the community at large seems reasonable, but it ignores the reality of our society in which white dudes have all the power - another little marginalisation in a long line of them. Feel discriminated against? Prove it to the community at large again through the complaints process - the one currently being shaped in defence of a white media dude who argues against any recognition of racial difference.
This goes to the heart of Bolt’s philosophy here - one espoused in the fallout of this case - that protections such as these enshrine racial difference in law and inevitably divide society across racial lines. It’s a valid point if you assume we’re living in a world where racism has already been eradicated and equality is already sorted. The reality is these divisions persist and we still need to descend into the muck of sorting it all out. It’s the same fallacy underlying the debate about female representation in cabinet or companies. Proclaiming that appointments should be on merit ignores that this clearly isn’t happening. If it was, you’d have to admit there’s only one woman in the land capable of serving in cabinet, which clearly isn’t the case.
Read the comments of any of Bolt’s column and you’ll see the end result of this idea. People decry that they didn’t steal any generations, we’re all one Australia and Aboriginal people need to stop blaming white men for their failures, especially because they’ve reaped such rich rewards from white settlement. These ideas ignore that white people - and I am certainly a white person - can empathise and recognise others’ problems without turning it into a question of direct, personal fault. To ignore these issues entrenches the problem. It’s not my personal fault that I won the lottery of white privilege, but it’s my responsibility to stop ignoring it.
I feel this way just because my mum taught me to treat people well, I’ve met people who are different and Spiderman comics said “with great power comes great responsibility”.
George Brandis’ proclamation that “people have the right to be bigots” is factually correct but betrays his position - white people need protection from being prevented from offending people. That may be the case but it does not exist in a vacuum. It’s hard to believe his stance as one of equality and freedom given the DNA of his decision as outlined above. Pinning the changes to the Racial Discrimination Act to some lofty ideal of enshrining free speech is false, as this isn’t doing that and the instigating finding against Bolt was not about that at all.
As a final aside which will entirely betray my status as a left-wing loony (admittedly already on full display here), we’re constantly told that gay marriage, the welfare of possums and abortion are minor, fringe issues that we either don’t have time for or are not a priority when there are important money things to sort out. The people saying this are now fiddling with the Racial Discrimination Act, restoring Knights and Dames and wringing their hands over bias at a public broadcaster the majority of people are proven to support. There’s no such thing as a fringe issue, there’s just a big list of everything that everyone orders a bit differently. That's why we need to protect people from being discriminated against by people whose list is in a different order but never realised a different viewpoint exists, but it’s also evidence that, if we really want, we can fix, change and break anything we damn well please with enough motivation. That’s pretty cool.
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