Craig Kelly (Hughes, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Well, it has come to this. Today we have a government instrumentality coming after the cartoonists of this nation. We have the Human Rights Commissioner out touting for work by attempting to solicit complaints against a cartoon drawn by Bill Leak. The skill of a political cartoonist is to take a controversial political issue and exaggerate it to absurdity by using their artistic skill to provoke thought. In our society we can prosecute that under the current settings of 18C. If we have cartoonists in this country being prosecuted under that law, I put it to members of the opposition that there is something fundamentally wrong with this law. Free speech, the contest of ideas—they are the things that have created the great Western civilisation and everything that we benefit from today. As Bill Leak said in his own words:

… 18C is an outrageous piece of law which leads to completely farcical situations like this.

I call on members of the opposition to please work with us. Let's fix this anti-freedom-of-speech law.

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