Section 18C: What's all the fuss and why does it matter?

By Stan Grant

18C? Never heard of it? Means nothing to you? You’re not alone.

Deputy Prime Minister and National Party leader Barnaby Joyce says people aren’t stopping him in the street about it.

A couple of weeks ago filming for the ABC TV program, The Link, we asked people: what was important to them?

There was lots of talk about health, education, housing; no-one mentioned 18C.

I asked one man — articulate and informed on issues like cutting penalty rates and immigration law — directly about changes to the Racial Discrimination Act, and he said he had no idea what it was about.

So, why all the fuss?

You could ask: why am I even writing about this? I am chewing up more column inches on something that is far from a first order issue in people’s daily lives.

But, I’d argue, this isn’t really about changes to an obscure piece of law. It is about something more fundamental; it is about how we live together. It is the test of pluralism in a globalised world.

‘The return of history’

We are witnessing waves of migration; borders are flimsy if not often obsolete. We are rubbing up against each other — religions, races, cultures.

International Relations professor Jennifer Welsh has dubbed this “the return of history” — a rejoinder to political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that the end of the Cold War was the final victory of Western liberal democracy and “the end of history” — a resurgence of tribalism, nationalism and sectarianism.

All of this at a time of information revolution. It can be an incendiary mix.

Philosopher Timothy Garton Ash calls this the “Cosmopolis”: a mixed-up, connected, world-city.

It is the 21st century version of media guru Marshall McLuhan’s “global-village”.

In this Cosmopolis there are more phones than human beings and half of humankind is connected to the internet. Mr Garton Ash says this has unleashed the, “evils of unlimited free expression … across frontiers”.

There have been celebrated — frightening — cases. In 1989, Salman Rushdie was forced into hiding as the Iranian Ayatollah issued a fatwa — a death warrant — against the author for his work The Satanic Verses, deemed blasphemous to Islam.

In 2005, there was the Danish cartoon furore. Depictions of the prophet Muhammad in a Danish newspaper sparked global protests. I recall being in a remote town in Pakistan reporting for CNN and seeing people marching and chanting down the main street.

In 2015, the world was stunned by the attack on French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo; terrorists opened fire killing 12 people and injuring 11 others.

Mr Garton Ash says we live in a world where, “a man publishes something in one country and a man dies in another … In this disturbing way, too, we are all neighbours now”.

The ultimate check on government

Mr Garton Ash says this is an enormous challenge to the idea of free speech. His 2016 book, Free Speech, set out what he called 10 principles for a connected world.

It is a book well worth reading as the debate about 18C ramps up. The Government is moving to amend the law — remove the current words “offend, insult and humiliate” and insert instead “harass and intimidate”.

The Government argues this will make it “fairer”, believing the law is out of step with the standards of a “reasonable member of the community”.

The conservative wing of the Liberal Party — albeit not alone — has led the push for change. Supporters point to recent cases here — notably the action against late cartoonist Bill Leak, who was accused of racism for his illustration depicting an Aboriginal derelict dad.

They argue the bar for offence had been set too low, leading to frivolous or vexatious cases dragged before the Human Rights Commission.

It is a contemporary twist on an old argument. Speech is central to humanity, as Mr Garton Ash says: “It separates us from other animals and, thus far, from computers.”

Free speech can be the ultimate check on government. I have worked in countries where the government silences the people. As a reporter I have been arrested and seen other people go to jail for daring to challenge this authority.

The free trade of ideas

But what is good speech and what is bad speech? Who decides?

We all remember that lesson from childhood: sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. In the grown-up world, of course, names can indeed hurt.

Mr Garton Ash says most of contemporary Western debates about free speech pivot on the issues of harm and offence.

Of course free speech does not mean unlimited speech. There should be laws against inciting violence.

The right to offend, in a civil society, should also mean the exercise of good taste and judgment.

But libertarians say no-one should be free from offence and that government has no place regulating it.

Mr Garton Ash points out that in countries where there is heavy regulation of hate speech, hatred remains undiminished.

He argues ultimately for people to develop thicker skins. He says in our connected Cosmopolis we need more free speech, not less.

He calls for a mixture of openness and robust civility. This means tolerating beliefs, values, lifestyles; and opinions that we might find profoundly disturbing.

By guaranteeing one person’s freedom of speech, we protect the speech of all.

In this way, argument can be met with counter-argument.

This is the tradition of legendary US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, that the ultimate good is reached by the free trade of ideas.

This post originally appeared on ABC News.