George Brandis announces planned changes to Racial Discrimination Act [Australian hate speech law]

[alp227]

Source: ABC News Australia

The Federal Government says its proposed changes to the Racial Discrimination Act will remove key sections it says make it illegal to "hurt the feelings of others", while also boosting protection against racism.

Attorney-General George Brandis, who yesterday defended the amendments by saying people have "a right to be bigots", has described them as the "strongest protections against racism" in Australian law.

The Government wants to repeal four sections of the Act, including 18C, which makes it unlawful for someone to publicly "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" a person or a group of people.

"Those three words - offend, insult and humiliate - describe what has sometimes been called hurt feelings," Senator Brandis said.

Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-03-25/racial-diiscrimination-act-changes-george-brandis/5343464

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If the Duck Dynasty guy were Australian, he would at least have had a case for complaining about his free speech rights being trampled on. But it's just annoying how bigots defend their shoddy POV under the guise of "free speech". If more people understood that "free speech" is a non-argument in debating political issues, people would be less stupid.

It's also annoying how bigots frame hate speech merely as "hurting others' feelings" when it can be strongly argued that hate speech can go way way beyond that.

[Matilda]

1. I think Brandis has graduated from the Joseph Goebbels Institute.

He's a ridiculous man, full of self-importance with nothing to back it up.

[uriel1972]

2. If...

They say what they think, they have "Free speech."
If I say what I think, I'm up before the courts for defamation. /sigh

Australia the Lucky Country (For some.)

[freshwest]

3. Been arguing with these troglodytes for years. Society there is going to go backwards, too. n/t

[Judi Lynn]

4. Speaking of Australian racism, this was published Monday:

Once Again, Australia is Stealing Its Indigenous Children

March 24, 2014
“We live in a state of fear, again”

Once Again, Australia is Stealing Its Indigenous Children

by JOHN PILGER

The tape is searing. There is the voice of an infant screaming as he is wrenched from his mother, who pleads, “There is nothing wrong with my baby. Why are you doing this to us? I would’ve been hung years ago, wouldn’t I? Because you’re guilty before you’re found innocent.” The child’s grandmother demands to know why “the stealing of our kids is happening all over again”. A welfare official says, “I’m gunna take him, mate.”

This happened to an Aboriginal family in outback New South Wales. It is happening across Australia in a scandalous and largely unrecognised abuse of human rights that evokes the infamous Stolen Generation of the last century. Up to the 1970s, thousands of mixed race children were stolen from their mothers by welfare officials. The children were given to institutions as cheap or slave labour; many were abused.

Described by a Chief Protector of Aborigines as “breeding out the colour”, the policy was known as assimilation. It was influenced by the same eugenics movement that inspired the Nazis. In 1997, a landmark report, Bringing Them Home, disclosed that as many 50,000 children and their mothers had endured “the humiliation, the degradation and sheer brutality of the act of forced separation … the product of the deliberate, calculated policies of the state”. The report called this genocide.

Assimilation remains Australian government policy in all but name. Euphemisms such as “reconciliation” and “Stronger Futures” cover similar social engineering and an enduring, insidious racism in the political elite, the bureaucracy and wider Australian society. When in 2008 Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised for the Stolen Generation, he added: “I want to be blunt about this. There will be no compensation.” The Sydney Morning Herald congratulated Rudd on a “shrewd manoeuvre” that “cleared away a piece of political wreckage that responds to some of its supporters’ emotional needs, but changes nothing.”

Today, the theft of Aboriginal children – including babies taken from the birth table – is now more widespread than at any time during the last century. As of June last year, almost 14,000 Aboriginal children had been “removed”. This is five times the number when Bringing Them Home was written. More than a third of all removed children are Aboriginal – from 3% of the population. At the present rate, this mass removal of Aboriginal children will result in a stolen generation of more than 3,300 children in the Northern Territory alone.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/24/once-again-australia-is-stealing-its-indigenous-children/