By Adam Creighton
The proposed additional federal hate law would lower the bar of criminality even further. It’s bound to massively chill political speech and pave the way for vexatious and politicised charges that will drag individuals through the courts even if they ultimately avoid conviction. Comedy and artistic expression will become all the more difficult.
Let’s be frank: this 144-page monstrosity of a bill cobbled together in a few days is one far-left groups would have wanted to pass long before the Bondi tragedy, which is now being used for political purposes.
At a minimum, the government should wait until the findings of the recently announced royal commission before legislating. Laws drafted as an emotional response to a tragedy, out of a desire to “just do something”, are bound to be riven with unintended consequences.
Two legal scholars from the US and Europe, Jacob Mchangama and Samantha Barbas, recently warned that governments tend to rush to expand hate speech laws in a way that does lasting damage to democratic freedoms, without stopping violence. “When governments criminalise speech that is merely offensive and ambiguous – rather than incitement to imminent violence – there are serious second-order consequences,” they wrote in MS Now on January 11.
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Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).