We have a situation where the Federal Attorney General is trying to supress free speech and the Leader of the Greens is endorsing criminal behaviour. What country is this?
--------------- Roxon's Human Rights and Anti-discrimination Bill 2012 will not only extend the range of conduct deemed unlawful from matters of race to matters of religion, social origin, nationality and political opinions. Her bill also removes any notion of objectivity. It is enough that conduct by one person "offends, insults or intimidates" another person. This completes the legal slide from words that incite violence to those that merely insult. Sensible gradations of offence have been lost.
As James Spigelman, the chairman of the ABC and former chief justice of the NSW Supreme Court, said recently, this "significant redrawing of the line between permissible and unlawful speech" goes beyond "any international human rights instrument or national anti-discrimination statute in another liberal democracy."
