Australia’s Biggest Wanker
New South Wales Premier Chris Minns this week, defending Australia’s tough new hate speech law:
We don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States. And the reason for that is that we wanna hold together our multicultural community and have people live in peace free from the kind of vilification and hatred that we do see around the world.
This isn’t the first time that Minns derided our First Amendment as incompatible with “multiculturalism.” The Gavin Newsom-esque Labor pol with the sculpted hair-whoosh also said he doesn’t apologize for endorsing tougher laws than America’s, because he means to protect the “fragile multicultural community we’ve built here in Australia.” Unlike America, he added another time, Australia won’t allow a system that rests “on the worst actor, the baddest faith actor in our community, acting up and all of us turning a blind eye.” Why? Because “multiculturalism won’t survive like that”:
Like many Americans, I have a natural affinity for Australians. Our people are united by having both been prison colonies, places British aristocrats once considered human shit-heaps. Of course we long ago turned our jailers into house pets, while Australia’s Fourth of July was in 1986. Still, we share traits: an Australian is a better bet to break a chair over someone’s head than, say, a Canadian. Also I love the show Rake (theirs, not ours). For all that, I have a message for Chris Minns.
Fuck you. If you think free speech is a barrier to “multiculturalism,” you don’t understand your own country, let alone ours:
Background: Australia has been gripped by speech controversy since October 7th, 2023. As in the United States, pro-Palestinian campus protests became common, and were tarnished by a series of seemingly related antisemitic incidents, including arson attacks. Then on January 19th, a van filled with explosives and “antisemitic material” was found in a Sydney suburb, a “Jewish terror attack plot” that inspired such a panic that Minns said circumstances now required “changes to the law.” Sure enough, Australia passed a national “Inciting Racial Hatred” bill in February that included prison sentences of up to two years for “incitement of hatred.”
From there the story unraveled. On March 10th, federal police Commissioner Krissy Barrett concluded the “caravan” incident was a “fabricated terrorism plot” and a “criminal con job.” It also came out that police believed none of the 12 people they’d previously arrested in connection with other apparent antisemitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne (including a firebombing of a synagogue) were motivated by hatred, and were instead the work of for-hire crooks trying to divert police resources. The acts were committed by “a very small group, and potentially one individual,” as Deputy New South Wales police commissioner David Hudson put it.
Amid demands to repeal the laws, Minns dug in. He rolled out every excuse. Suddenly the new laws, which included prison sentences for displaying “Nazi symbols,” were not narrowly crafted for one constituency. “While these laws were drafted in response to horrifying antisemitism,” he said, “we have always made clear they would apply to anyone.” In a Groucho-esque follow up, he then explained the only thing worse than making a mistake is admitting one:
In response to calls for the laws to be scrapped, doing so would be a toxic message to our community that this kind of hate speech is acceptable when it’s not. These laws are very important to maintaining social cohesion.
Minns was challenged on all this in the New South Wales Parliament “bear pit,” a nickname the combative legislature earned in the 1800s, but is now sometimes derided as an emblem of toxic masculinity (bears are all male?). Accused of not facing the fact that the hate speech law would have to be undone, Minns fumed. “We will not repeal these laws, they’re too important!”
In the pantheon of not-smart politics, this is all choice stuff. Even George W. Bush never said, “We’ve discovered there are no WMDs, but not invading now would send the wrong message!” Minns apparently has a foot-in-mouth history. Last year, when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced he was marrying banker Jodie Haydon, Minns texted congratulations. Albanese reportedly texted back, “We’re both punching above our weight.” Minns had to be told by his wife that the Prime Minister meant himself and Minns. “You idiot, he means you and him are punching,” she said.
When I heard Minns’s comments, my first instinct was to send a video letter reading out the First Amendment at half speed, or slower, in Old School Will-Ferrell-with-tranquilizer-dart-in-neck voice maybe. Then I realized it’s insulting to have to argue at all that a nation of immigrants is pluralistic. It’s like having to prove there are sheep in New Zealand. Unfortunately, civil liberties have been defamed to the point where ideas like freedom=racism are orthodoxy across most of the West.
The First Amendment exists to protect the minority from the majority. Our problem in America hasn’t been too much freedom but failure to properly extend the franchise. That’s why Martin Luther King said, “All we say to America is, ‘Be true to what you said on paper.’” Without freedom to be different, you can’t have “multiculturalism,” which is why civil rights leaders like King revered these laws. But Minns when he talks about a “fragile multicultural community” obviously doesn’t mean real pluralism. He means a platitudinous neoliberal vision of “social cohesion,” forced conformity, earth as mandatory Benetton ad. It’s more Orwell: monoculture=diversity.
Minns reportedly wasn’t terrible on Covid-19, but it was during the pandemic that the Australia Americans loved to imagine as a wild critter-infested home of free spirits like Steve Irwin and Paul “Crocodile Dundee” Hogan turned into bureaucratic hell. Authorities imposed severe lockdowns with absurd rules (you could go outside two hours a day for exercise!) as well as lunatic movement restrictions that included bans on foreign travel (leaving “tens of thousands” stranded overseas) and a rigid regime of hotel quarantines that fed inmates three times a day with “just enough food to sustain an adult.” This parody of safetyism was rightly mocked by American conservatives, who tossed mental images of Mad Max and reimagined Australia as a giant Haverford College with snakes.
What happened in Australia is what’s happened in most of the developed world. The American definition of freedom is being phased out. Instead of freedom to, we get freedom from: freedom from harm, which trumps freedom to speak, freedom from disease trumps freedom of movement, freedom from want trumps the pursuit of happiness. To wit: “Real liberty can exist only where… there is no oppression of some by others.” (I won’t bore you with the author, but I was in school in Leningrad when I learned it.) In Australia this was expressed by learning to love restrictions and despise the American idea of freedom as “do whatever you want; put yourself first.” In America it came out as hatred for the unvaccinated, as in the case of Jimmy Kimmel’s “Antivax Barbie” or the current Fool House Rock of the New York Times.
The ending no one wants to hear is that the laws Minns and Albanese stumped for are conceptually similar to our own proposed Antisemitism Awareness Act, this year’s Executive Order by Donald Trump, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism,” and the recent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. These are 100% in the safetyism/harm/freedom from tradition and have a lot of the qualities people hate about woke speech codes. The big difference is the Trump measures are aimed at foreigners, but it’s a thin distinction, as they absolutely affect Americans: what school officials choose to teach, how they enforce Title VI (especially since the Trump definition of “antisemitism” encompasses legal speech), what incidents they report, etc. It’s also not exactly comforting that we’re only using part of the Alien and Sedition Acts.
As I wrote this week I’m not terribly sympathetic to schools like Columbia that lose federal funding, but I do care what life on American campuses is like. If foreigners are coming here and not going to marches or raising their hands in classroom discussions because they’re afraid of being deported, and (worse) going home and telling people that’s what America is like, that’s embarrassing. Israel/Palestine gives me a headache, so I’m not going to go on about it, but I don’t get it. Trump should stand for freedom, openness, and not giving a fuck. Why do anything that makes it hard to laugh at a grasping wankocrat like Minns?