Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

In San Bernadino in the US, where a Muslim terrorist killed 14 innocent people, neighbours of the killers subsequently admitted that they did not report suspicious activity because they didn't want to 'racially profile' these people. So let's be clear: political correctness ruins lives. It kills people. State censorship by provisions like section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act actually gets people killed.

To the Leader of the Opposition, his Labor colleagues, weak-kneed crossbenchers and the cultural Marxists in the Greens: that is what we want to be able to say. We want to be able to call a spade a spade. We want to be able to call out Muslim drug dealers, child mutilators, hate preachers, terrorists and perverts.

Much has been made of the effect of the amendment of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act on ethnic minorities, such as the Jewish community. Extreme left-wing organisations, such as GetUp!, have tried to fan concerns that somehow free speech equals hate speech. This line has been enthusiastically run by left-wing secular Jewish pressure groups, such as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry and the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. However, it is utterly untrue to claim that the Australian Jewish community is opposed to the government's proposed amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act.

In fact, as Jewish One Nation staff members have been keen to point out, the Rabbinical Council of New South Wales has publicly made statements expressing concern that the existing wording of 18C prevents rabbis speaking out on matters of faith. Going further, in the online journal J-Wire, leading Jewish barrister Geoffrey Bloch has strongly argued for repeal of section 18C. As Professor Michael Berenbaum, founder of the Washington Holocaust Memorial Museum, has pointed out, discrediting anti-Semitism is much to be preferred to gagging anti-Semites and so infuriating and driving them underground. This is, of course, the reason I am happy for the Greens to continue to stand up on their hind legs and give vent to their anti-Semitic spleen in this place.

This issue was taken further by the Australian Jewish News in December last year when it argued:

When Jews act to restrict freedom of speech they undermine their argument against people like Jake Lynch and his cohort who prevented supporters from Israel from presenting their point of view at Sydney University.

And my Jewish friend David Adler strongly supports the removal of 18C.

In truth, the real beneficiaries of section 18C are, of course, Australia's Islamists. Australia's Muslim community is bulging with hate preachers and terrorist apologists, none of whom have ever been brought up before the Human Rights Commission for insulting, humiliating or offending their Jewish, Christian or secular Australian communities.

So, apparently, the current section 18C only applies to non-Muslims. No wonder the Greens and Labor want to keep it as it stands. The fact is, once you suppress free speech, all forms of other political ills are possible. Civilization as a whole may pass unremarked and unchallenged from an open society into one of systemic oppression, without the ability of the victims of such tyranny to even speak out against their oppressors.

Perhaps the real problem here with those who oppose amending 18C is a lack of understanding of what free speech actually means. Free speech is not the ability to say things that conform to the politically correct consensus that increasingly is dominating our lives. Free speech is the ability to say things that those in power disagree with. It needs to be remembered that even in Stalin's Russia people were still free to politically agree with Comrade Stalin! But that was no freedom at all.

What the thoughtful apologists for section 18C are really about is silencing criticism of their own actions and ideas, because they see this as the beginning of opposition that may thwart their plans for control of us all. What the Spanish Inquisition, Stalin's Russia, ISIS and the Greens who screech their support for 18C have in common is their belief that they—and they alone—are right and that those who disagree with them are not just wrong but immoral. What they fail to grasp is that this hubris is the common fountainhead of all tyranny.

It is no consolation if the goons who knock on your door in the middle of the night to drag you away are wearing socks and sandals instead of jackboots. In the words of Salman Rushdie, 'The moment you declare a set of ideas to be immune from criticism, satire, derision or contempt, freedom of thought becomes impossible.'