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Q&A with Mark Gibbons of the Pirate Party

M Gibbons
Image provided by Mark Gibbons

We sat down with Mark Gibbons, the Treasurer of the Pirate Party to get his perspective on 18C, censorship laws and Freedom of Speech.
Q: What is 18C and why is it important?
A: It’s not, really. It’s a rarely used, unremarkable censorship law which has been elevated into a kind of fetish-object by two sides of a culture war. Section 18C not our solitary defence against vast tides of terrible racism –  it actually has negligible effects in practice, since there are less than 100 cases a year. It does nothing to check “casual racism”, since it can only work in narrow situations and includes (for example) a need to know the aggressor’s name.
On the other hand, while 18C is not some pivotal defence against racism, it is also not the vast threat to speech that its more demented critics claim it is. Statistically, the number of people seriously affected by it is nil. The sheer unremarkableness of it tends to mean the arguments against it are arguments against censorship in general – it certainly doesn’t stand out among the various other speech controls we have in Australia.
Q: What is the Pirate Party stance on the 18C debate?
A: There are about 50 Pirate Parties around the world and none has ever supported a censorship law. However, we are much more concerned by other kinds of censorship laws that operate with much greater effect. It’s nice that so people are suddenly concerned about free speech: but where have these speech campaigners been as public journalism has gotten more and more pressed-down under defamation laws whose main effect is to protect power from scrutiny?
Where have our anti-censorship friends been on offensive language provisions – thousands of people are arrested for breaching these every year and police impose them with very wide discretion. Where were these anti-censorship advocates on the internet filter? What about national security laws that give agencies blanket power to ban reporting on their activities? (And so on – the list of speech curbs in Australia is long).
Q: What freedom of speech issues are occurring because of section 18C?
A: Our fundamental critique of censorship laws is that they create significant risks and do not achieve what the censorship lobby claims they do. We need to get over this strange, modern notion that speech is something you have to balance against all sorts of other rights. In truth, speech is how all our other rights are defended, and creating a precedent for reducing speech is dangerous.
For example – the Government has a freer hand to take rights away from asylum seekers in detention centres partly because they have “balanced” away the right of medical staff to speak up on their behalf. Anyone wanting to take rights away from people will nearly always start by removing the right to speak out. Censorship laws have a truly dark history.
Censorship also has a way of expanding over time. 18C is not immune from this: the ALP tried in 2012 to expand its scope to cover all sorts of speech including speech that caused offence on the grounds of religion or political opinion. That would have been chilling, and it almost came to pass. The only way to be safe from that kind of thing is not to have a law in effect in the first place, not to have an architecture for censorship whose use can be expanded at will. Remove the precedent for states to regulate opinions, because states given that power don’t tend to stop at one.
Censorship laws also hurt minorities. When the West pushes against the flogging of atheists in Saudi Arabia or the jailing of dissidents in China, the first response of the tyrants is always to say “you have censorship laws in the West as well” – which is sadly true – and which weakens us fatally when we try to stand for even the most basic freedoms for truly vulnerable groups.
So, censorship laws in general are a bad idea. 18C is not the worst example and there are not really many cases of clear abuse. But it shares in the fundamental problems that all censorship laws have.
Q: What is hate speech and how is it relevant to 18C?
A: The term “hate speech” doesn’t really have a meaningful meaning. The phrase was originally popularised in the 1960s by the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics). They were trying to prevent a right to free speech from being included in the UN’s Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In its original form the Covenant was a binding legal instrument that would have granted genuine enforceable political freedom to the population of the USSR, and the Communist regime needed to avoid agreeing to that. So, the USSR vetoed the agreement repeatedly and insisted that free speech had to be “balanced” against protections from “hate speech”. “Hate speech” of course was a meaningless term by deliberate design, because the gag on speech needed to be as wide as possible. Once the UN rolled over to the USSR’s demands and inserted a speech-restricting article (Article 20) into the ICCPR, the USSR could sign the whole thing without fear. Henceforth, the USSR was never violating anyone’s speech – they were merely “balancing” it against the “threat” of “hate speech”. Hate speech in the 1960s meant criticism of communism, but it has also meant a range of over things in the decades since.
Unfortunately the 18C debate has been a vehicle for resurrecting these crusty, old propaganda terms. The USSR would probably have found it pretty funny to hear their propaganda terms being resurrected now, inside Western countries. The West rejected the propaganda and resisted the Soviet demands fiercely at the time.

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