"Whether or not we should (have) protect(ed) the group-identity categories of race and religion in the first place, with the 2001 law, is not something I was trying to offer an opinion on. I was merely commenting about the danger of extending the law, versus retaining it as it was, which as I understand is the decision being faced. I felt it was important to explore some of the philosophy/sociology that may underlie the existing law in order to understand why those two categories were included, which is what I tried to do in the post.
"One would need a whole separate discussion to weigh the pros and cons of having hate speech laws at all, and if so, about what!"
This statement also applies to myself, "The group I identify with far more strongly than any other is not a race or a religion or even a nation but humanity in all it's wondrous and diverse glory." Imagine if humanity towards our fellow humans was our guiding light? But wait, isn't that the underlying teaching of every religion, although not applied and often violated? Let your religion be love and kindness, can't remember who said this first but that's what we need. I look at govts around the world and I see very little love and kindness. So I guess that means it's up to us. As Birdy's song says, 'People help the people'. Thank you for giving space to Gigi Foster Rebekah, very much appreciated.🙏💜
Sadly, humanity is too large a group for people to relate to.
Your prescription is noble, though.
My mind turns to Cassius Clay objecting to his conscription, saying that he thought it was silly that he, as a black man, should be forced by white men to travel halfway round the world to kill yellow people with whom he had no issue.
Twas a classic, methinks.
As a counter thought, there are conservatives who will argue that more progress can be achieved when a large group is chopped into smaller groups set into competition with each other.
As a result of the massive mis/disinformation spread by politicians, bureaucrats, ‘regulators’, the medical and scientific establishment, academia, the legal system, the churches, and the mainstream media, along with the medical ‘profession’ treacherously collaborating with coercive and mandatory vaccination, we now have no valid consent for Covid vaccination.
I’ll repeat that - we now have NO VALID CONSENT for Covid vaccination.
I wonder what this will mean when the penny drops?
Same old same old divide and conquer, wrapping a faux left polyester wrap around itself, calling itself "progressive".
I agree, thinking in the broadest terms of the "us" of humanity, of true diversity, is the best and safest way for us to think. And the most powerful way. Which is why they have to divide and conquer.
I'd love to know what goes on in these government spaces when they're drafting this dystopia. How many politicians in Victoria's parliament truly understand what they're doing? Endless questions about this end of town :)
I heard someone suggest that every time governments want to bring in a new piece of legislation, they must choose an old one to repeal. In principle, I like the idea.
Wonderfully thoughtful piece, brilliant insights from Gigi who is clearly an intellectual gem.
I disagree that hate speech laws should ever have protected group identities, however. It should have been tightly limited to physical characteristics over which you have no control such as race, gender, age, physical disability and sexual orientation. This 2001 law should never have included religion because religion is a set of ideas and people can change their minds.
The freedom to mock, vilify and hate religion is the foundation of free speech. And religions are often chock full of terrible ideas that deserve to be hated (depending on where your perspective views it from).
Children don't always want the same religion as their parents, or want to incorporate it into their identity. Ex-Muslims get killed, bullied and ostracised - they do not need to have their intellectual freedom crushed by laws that side with their oppressors. These Victorian laws were blasphemy laws by stealth.
People's character, ideas and behaviour are the standards on which they should be judged, because you can change these things, they are in your power. Your physical package is irrelevant. This was the original concept from the civil rights movement and we should return to it promptly. I recall 2001 very well. That hate speech law was controversial then for this exact reason.
I would argue it was the silly inclusion of religion that left the door open to the concept that these laws can now be expanded to everything and the kitchen sink (except unvaxxed people - because the state likes that public hate).
Lastly: you can't legislate against a human emotion. It's not always wrong to hate a bad idea. The concept of "hate" is subjective and can be gamed for lawfare. Hate speech is free speech and therefore its legal limit should always have been restricted only to physical characteristics over which you have no control and should not be judged.
So the obvious counter to your points is that a conservative Christian or Muslim, for example, might counter that sexual orientation is in fact not a physical/genetic characteristic, but is a choice.
On the flipside, trans activists may argue that trans identity is not a choice, but is innate.
So if you change the criteria from 'characteristics that define a people over time' to 'characteristics that are innate' there'll be a whole lot of argy bargy over what is and is not innate, and I can't see agreement being reached on that question in a multi-cultural/faith society, can you?
I thought it was interesting that Gigi expressed support for hate speech laws regarding race and religion while some free speech purists would do away with all of it. What do you think of that proposition? (ie: doing away with all of it)
It’s certainly a minefield when things go crazy…eg men with penises being put in prisons where they can rape women, and going along with the idea of ‘menstruating/pregnant people’ and ‘chest feeders’.
Honestly, common sense has gone right out the window, and it seems most people are too scared to speak up. Similarly doctors and nurses who inject people under coercion and mandates, because they’re told to? What is constraining people from speaking out and challenging obviously wrong things?
To show another example of where things are going to control us, what we say etc, consider this article in the UK Telegraph: Pub landlords to be turned into ‘banter police’ under reforms to workers’ rights. Fears free speech could come under attack, not just in bars but also universities, as Government plans to extend employment laws: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/10/12/pub-landlords-turned-into-banter-police-labour-law-changes/
It's likely behind the paywall, so I'll copy and paste some of it:
QUOTE
Pub landlords will be turned into ‘banter cops’ under reforms to workers’ rights, business leaders have warned.
Provisions in the Employment Rights Bill mean equality laws will be updated to make employers liable for staff being offended by “third parties”, such as customers or members of the public.
The laws would introduce a legal requirement for companies and public bodies to take “all reasonable steps” to prevent harassment by third parties relating to a “protected characteristic” such as sex, gender reassignment or age.
Free speech campaigners have warned that this measure is the government’s “latest salvo in its ongoing war against free speech” and will lead to pub staff having to act as the “banter cops” who ban customers for telling “inappropriate” jokes.
Scholars also fear the legislation will also have a “chilling effect” on academic freedom as it will mean university authorities are more likely to give into calls to “no-platform” contentious guest speakers for fear of being sued.
Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality, said that staff in restaurants, bars, pubs and hotels are working in a “social environment” where “there are jokes and people are boisterous”.
She said while everyone wants to make sure their staff are protected “we don’t want to be policing our customers’ behaviour”, adding that she is keen to work with ministers to ensure “undue restrictions” are not imposed on customers.
Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow business secretary, said: “Running a business is hard enough as it is – even defending yourself in an employment tribunal can cost tens of thousands of pounds. We all know this agenda is being driven by wokeness and the unions.
“Ronald Regan once said if fascism ever returns it will be in the name of liberalism. The people who are supposedly the greatest defenders of basic liberties and quite happy to jettison basic rights – be it over property, the rule of law and free speech – if it doesn’t accord with their own views.”
There should always be room for respectful, thoughtful debate/discussion. Sadly, that is not the human way, though. People play the man and not the ball and resort to personal attacks. Ego is a big obstacle.
I agree. There is nothing special about race and religion. Thus Gigi has probably made an error of logic ... of inconsistency.
Tis hard to know exactly where our sexuality (ie what we are turned on by) comes from. I do believe genetic make up is a strong determinant, however. Indeed, much of our personality is innate. Perhaps our CORE personality is entirely innate. Anyone who has had multiple children ought to appreciate the wisdom of this.
Gigi added a comment on this, see pinned at top of the comments section. She clarified that her comments were constrained to the issue of expanding the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, not whether there should be such an Act at all.
But her piece seemed to have a tone of acceptance of the act, insofar as it pertains to race and religion, but not as it pertaining to other groupings ...that, whilst there is good reason for the initial act, there is not good reason for its extension.
Yes as she (and then I) said, this is due to the way I posed the question , which was about whether the existing laws should be expanded, not whether the existing laws should be repealed.
Yes, a conservative religious person might posit that sexual orientation is a choice, however there is evidence that it is not. It's not as easy to pinpoint as gender which is ingrained in every chromosome and is not a choice. But yet there is evidence that the spectrum from gay through bi to hetero is biological. Biologists will point to homosexual behaviour in other species for example. Psychologists will point to the suffering of gay people who never wanted to be different and who even try conversion therapy only to find that nothing works. Gene candidates have been found that are linked to homosexuality and a brain region called the diencephalon differs in size between homosexual and heterosexual people, showing at least one physical difference in brain structure.
The trans activists yes they may argue it's not a choice. But they're right about that - they've got no choice they are simply the gender their chromosomes are. But their brain is telling them they are another gender, also without a choice on their behalf. So the problem is physical but it can't be fixed (sadly people are now glorifying it and pretending it can). It's hard to find ways to help I guess. Life is difficult.
I still think it is the best course of action to strictly limit "hate speech" laws to physical characteristics over which you have no control and should never be judged because any argy bargy over that is far more limited and reasonable than what you get when you expand it to ideas with fuzzy boundaries, over time.
Characteristics that define a people over time is far more complicated and open to far more argy bargy than ones that can be physically measured and defined.
Yes, the religious must firmly be told that a belief system is not a sacred cow that can't be mocked, the best societies are ones in which they can be mocked and mocked equally. You will notice that law came in 2001 and religion was included because of the Islamist attacks on 9/11. It is not right that say Christianity can be pilloried within an inch of its life, but Islam cannot. All must be equally able to be mocked.
Interesting point re: the doing away with all of it. I am tempted to say yes. We should simply have thick skin and not care if someone insults your race, as long as you can insult theirs back, it's a level playing field. The problem arises I think from mob pile-ons where it's not a level playing field and there is a need to protect the minority, which is no doubt why the left thinks anti-white racism is fine. I suspect this is why they think white people are fair game for racism, because they are the majority and therefore not in need of protection.
I think this may be necessary from a purely practical perspective - however it has gone absolutely too far with children playing dress-ups having their lives ruined as "racists" by click-bait media just because they wanted to pretend to be Mr T for example.
I dislike saying that there is even a respectable toe-hold for hate speech laws however. Perhaps the existing anti-discrimination laws were adequate and we didn't need any revision at all in 2001. After all, the 1990s were way more racially relaxed than the 2020s have been. We had no BLM in 1995. Nobody cared about race back then. We loved Eddie Murphy because he was funny not because he was black. Perhaps the 2001 hate speech laws in fact made it worse by making everyone paranoid and weaponising it. Or maybe that was just a cultural impetus pushed on us like the trans issue has been. IDK.
Thanks for the food for thought. I’m just about to start reading Jacob Mchamangama’s book on the history of Free Speech. I feel pretty certain that expanding hate speech laws and making it a criminal offence is a bad idea, but I feel like I’ll be better placed to have a more fully formed opinion on whether there should be any hate speech laws at all (and if so, what sort) after a bit more research and thinking.
Before we were hit by the great plague I was on social media and would frequently hear commentators talking about the impropriety of discriminating against people on the basis of "immutable characteristics".:)
I would chuckle to myself at their naivety ...at the apparent narrowness of their perception of the term 'immutable'.
Suppose you go for a job and are rejected. As you leave the interview room you overheard your interviewers say that they didn't like your personality or vibe or that you seemed too introverted.:)
Liked much of what lady said & agree about border closures which achieved little as covid spread like fire regardless Border closure allowed some bureaucratic authority into play which was badly used There was no national method of dealing with pandemics so most states decided on own diverse measure of dealing with it to the frustration of others & again where little good was gained but more angry frustration was achieved
Hello Pat, Scott Morrison could have used the existing Pandemic Policy for our nation but instead created the National Cabinet and gave the States control. They made up their rules as they went along and as you say there was so much diversity, little cohesion.
I believe that National Cabinet was supposed to be in place for 3 months but is still in existence. Is that for the next scam? WHO knows.
Hi Luise, where did you see about National Cabinet supposed to be in place for three months? My understanding was the NC typically meets once every three months (four times per year) or 'as often as necessary' but that the scandal during Covid was the number of times NC met, Scomo secretly assigning himself to senior positions that allowed him to essentially host 'private' NC meetings with only one or two other people, and the refusal of both Lib and Lab to release minutes of the NC meetings.
Luise, Scott Morrison, National Cabinet, CMO Paul Kelly and the AHPPC opened the floodgates for coercive and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination, see: The destruction of voluntary informed consent via mandatory COVID-19 vaccination: https://elizabethhart.substack.com/p/the-destruction-of-voluntary-informed
I go into this in more detail in my paper: Misfeasance in Public Office? The Destruction of Voluntary Informed Consent for Vaccination, June 2024:
The dominant public belief seems to be that the bodies of citizens were rightly conscripted in a war against a highly dangerous virus. Of course, conscription has always been a contentious issue.
Into the moral calculus must go a consideration of the extent of the threat (by foreign nation or virus etc).
Is the force on our shores? Is the virus a highly contagious form of Ebola? and so on.
Methinks Vietnam and CONVID hardly justified conscription.
Imagine the absurdity that existed at border towns. Albury, Echuca and Tweed Heads come to mind, for instance. Yet I have a feeling the respective governments will give themselves a big tick on almost all of their measures and would double down on the lot.
As a further illustration of the madness, in Melbourne in 2021 we had patients who, upon declaring to GPs that they had at least one symptom of C19, were examined by double-vaxxed and double-masked 'doctors' whilst seated in their vehicles in the car park. It was almost a case of the GPs only being prepared to examine (properly) the healthy. :)
My mother in law was told (in the carpark) to go away and take cough suppressant or anti histamines only later to be told by a doctor who was prepared to use a stethoscope that she should be X-rayed. The latter revealed 4th stage cancer.
The expression 'clown land' comes to mind.
The most frightening thing (to me) was just how cooperative the population was when it should have engaged in peaceful non compliance. What has happened to the Aussie larrikin ... the people who treat authority with suspicion cum disdain? I know that Melbourne is the soy boy capital of the world but apparently it was no better anywhere else in this cuntry.
From what I've read and watched from Gigi, being an economist, her public commentary was primarily on lockdowns (and zero-Covid policies more generally) as they fall under her area of expertise. One of the core values of the organisation she co-founded, Australians for Science and Freedom, has core values of bodily autonomy, free speech and search fro truth via open discourse and scientific method. https://www.scienceandfreedom.org/about/#principles
You wanted someone to get a debate going. Well, maybe I will oblige here.
I have found myself resonating highly with the noise made by Gig over the past four years and I admire her courage in respect of the stance she took on Covid. This piece of hers that you have quoted, however, I am less favourably impressed by.
Human beings are uniquely defined by where they lie on a very large number of spectra – spectra having to do with skin colour, theism, masculinity, libertarianism (ie their position along the libertarian- conservatism spectrum), socialism (ie their position on the right-left political spectrum), extroversion, autism, intelligence, height, obesity/rotundity, integrity, authenticity, honesty, self-discipline, age, salesmanship, feminism, belligerence, gregariousness and so on (and yes, I accept that all of these have definitional problems😊). And any given person’s position on most of these spectra changes over time, sometimes within a single day, leading one to think about AVERAGE positions, say. On average I may be more intelligent than X but I may be more intelligent yesterday than today. Have you ever felt stupid one moment and clever the next? Ultimately intellect is measured by performance.
However, there is an unfortunate tendency amongst people, to dichotomise – to place people into one of two groups with respect to these variables (for which I have defined spectra). One will hear things like: X is a libertarian, whereas Y is a conservative. H is tall but J is short. D is a believer, whilst F is an atheist. P is smart whereas, Q is a dumb ass. Perhaps this is to make it easier to navigate through life. Perhaps it is borne out of a want to belong to a group (or team) … of want to have teammates.
Gigi (a person who seems to be quite far along the integrity spectrum, btw😊) talks about (and seemingly attaches great weight to) Race and Religion as themes for team formation. J is on the Muslim team, whereas K is on the Christian team and L is an atheist. P is on the white (Caucasian) team whereas Q is on the yellow (Mongoloid) team and R is on the brown (Arabic) team.
Often, I hear or read the view that brown (or yellow) people moving to OZ need to adopt ‘Australian values’. WTF does this mean? If a government official were to ask me (perhaps on the occasion of bestowing citizenship upon me😊) whether I embraced Aussie values, I think I would return a puzzled look. Maybe Gigi would not (and/or did not, when she was naturalised) struggle with this. 😊
I suppose we are attracted to people whose belief sets appear to be similar to those of our own … attracted to people whose positions along a sufficiently large number of belief spectra are similar to our own positions. However, team formation, is a product of human psychology … is the fulfillment of a desire to for allies … for group membership. It is a tendency, though, that is ultimately (and ironically) divisive.
I might have more in common with a young Muslim XX than a white, hexagenerian, churchgoing Xy.:) In short, I would not be happy for Gigi to force me into teams.
I have often wondered which of the following are the best predictors as to conversational compatibility – commonality of gender, age, race or religion. Tis not at all obvious to me that the latter two (ie those accorded such great import by Gigi) are. I tend to believe gender is more binding/cohesive than race. For instance, in cafes I have observed many awkward conversations across gender and age, and many enthusiastic ones had by females of similar age.
I recall Jordan Petersen (before he succumbed to drug addiction, before he took the jabs and before he tweeted to Netanyahoo to ‘give em hell’😊) talking about the concept of intersectionality - based on his apparent perception of concepts being dichotomic, and not continuous. In the above example we see the intersection of Caucasian (or white) and Christian. We could add sex, too and sexuality (as defined in the very simplistic sense of which gender one is turned on by), two political groupings and age, so that a person might be in the intersectional group of: white, Christian, conservative, right-wing, heterosexual, male boomer. :) He made the sensible point that, taking this process to its ultimate results in the group sizes becoming so absurdly small they limit out as a group size of one … individuals. JP is human and fallible, and he stuffs up. I give him credit for this, though. Credit where credit is due.
Anyway, Gigi might wish to review her comments through more philosophical lenses.
Hate speech? Well, I was once called a ‘selfish teacher’, on an occasion of having a heated conversation with my brother-in-law, who’d not personally prospered in formal education. Was he being teacherist.:) Perhaps Gigi has been called a ‘typical Yank’, or some such. If so, the accuser was being racist, I suppose … or something like it. However, imagine someone goes online with the following comment: X is a Y (Y being the latest version of a ‘witch’ – commie, Jew, homo, terrorist, pedo) and they live at Z. I do have much more of a problem with this. I am not sure there is NO case for censorship. It is not simple. Life is not simple. LINS.
From a purely religio-philosophical point of view, the basic premise of this hate speech corralling is driven by the dominant group's clutch on pushing their plans forward. This (unnameable) group dominates the financial, pharmaceutical, media, and political spheres, and thus has the ability to censor opposition.
Contrary to this bulkhead, we, the people, now have the ability to broadcast our views and the objective facts via the Internet (for now). The controlling group attempts to control the discussion using its lobbying political power. We must resist this and create our own font of knowledge that shows up the dictators!
Correct, that's the reason it was pointed out ... The "Jewish" perspective is actually religio-political-philosophical. Please check out the links provided above before commenting further. Thanks!
Post-publication note from Gigi, 11 Oct 2024:
"Whether or not we should (have) protect(ed) the group-identity categories of race and religion in the first place, with the 2001 law, is not something I was trying to offer an opinion on. I was merely commenting about the danger of extending the law, versus retaining it as it was, which as I understand is the decision being faced. I felt it was important to explore some of the philosophy/sociology that may underlie the existing law in order to understand why those two categories were included, which is what I tried to do in the post.
"One would need a whole separate discussion to weigh the pros and cons of having hate speech laws at all, and if so, about what!"
This statement also applies to myself, "The group I identify with far more strongly than any other is not a race or a religion or even a nation but humanity in all it's wondrous and diverse glory." Imagine if humanity towards our fellow humans was our guiding light? But wait, isn't that the underlying teaching of every religion, although not applied and often violated? Let your religion be love and kindness, can't remember who said this first but that's what we need. I look at govts around the world and I see very little love and kindness. So I guess that means it's up to us. As Birdy's song says, 'People help the people'. Thank you for giving space to Gigi Foster Rebekah, very much appreciated.🙏💜
Sadly, humanity is too large a group for people to relate to.
Your prescription is noble, though.
My mind turns to Cassius Clay objecting to his conscription, saying that he thought it was silly that he, as a black man, should be forced by white men to travel halfway round the world to kill yellow people with whom he had no issue.
Twas a classic, methinks.
As a counter thought, there are conservatives who will argue that more progress can be achieved when a large group is chopped into smaller groups set into competition with each other.
genius idea to have a guest post by Gigi, this is wonderful. Thank you Rebekah!
It really is astonishing how few people within ‘the establishment’ challenged the Covid agenda, particularly coercive and mandatory vaccination.
I undertook much correspondence on this matter myself, e.g. as can be seen from links on this webpage: https://vaccinationispolitical.net/vax-australia/
As a result of the massive mis/disinformation spread by politicians, bureaucrats, ‘regulators’, the medical and scientific establishment, academia, the legal system, the churches, and the mainstream media, along with the medical ‘profession’ treacherously collaborating with coercive and mandatory vaccination, we now have no valid consent for Covid vaccination.
I’ll repeat that - we now have NO VALID CONSENT for Covid vaccination.
I wonder what this will mean when the penny drops?
Same old same old divide and conquer, wrapping a faux left polyester wrap around itself, calling itself "progressive".
I agree, thinking in the broadest terms of the "us" of humanity, of true diversity, is the best and safest way for us to think. And the most powerful way. Which is why they have to divide and conquer.
I'd love to know what goes on in these government spaces when they're drafting this dystopia. How many politicians in Victoria's parliament truly understand what they're doing? Endless questions about this end of town :)
I would hazard a guess that most of them mean well, have not thought deeply on the topic, and are relying on reports tabled by ‘experts.’
It's depressing any way you look at it, really :( How banal it all is, how evil it all is
Citizens no longer request bad laws to be repealed, and when we do, we are wholly ignored.
I heard someone suggest that every time governments want to bring in a new piece of legislation, they must choose an old one to repeal. In principle, I like the idea.
Wonderfully thoughtful piece, brilliant insights from Gigi who is clearly an intellectual gem.
I disagree that hate speech laws should ever have protected group identities, however. It should have been tightly limited to physical characteristics over which you have no control such as race, gender, age, physical disability and sexual orientation. This 2001 law should never have included religion because religion is a set of ideas and people can change their minds.
The freedom to mock, vilify and hate religion is the foundation of free speech. And religions are often chock full of terrible ideas that deserve to be hated (depending on where your perspective views it from).
Children don't always want the same religion as their parents, or want to incorporate it into their identity. Ex-Muslims get killed, bullied and ostracised - they do not need to have their intellectual freedom crushed by laws that side with their oppressors. These Victorian laws were blasphemy laws by stealth.
People's character, ideas and behaviour are the standards on which they should be judged, because you can change these things, they are in your power. Your physical package is irrelevant. This was the original concept from the civil rights movement and we should return to it promptly. I recall 2001 very well. That hate speech law was controversial then for this exact reason.
I would argue it was the silly inclusion of religion that left the door open to the concept that these laws can now be expanded to everything and the kitchen sink (except unvaxxed people - because the state likes that public hate).
Lastly: you can't legislate against a human emotion. It's not always wrong to hate a bad idea. The concept of "hate" is subjective and can be gamed for lawfare. Hate speech is free speech and therefore its legal limit should always have been restricted only to physical characteristics over which you have no control and should not be judged.
I was hoping someone would get the debate going 😆
So the obvious counter to your points is that a conservative Christian or Muslim, for example, might counter that sexual orientation is in fact not a physical/genetic characteristic, but is a choice.
On the flipside, trans activists may argue that trans identity is not a choice, but is innate.
So if you change the criteria from 'characteristics that define a people over time' to 'characteristics that are innate' there'll be a whole lot of argy bargy over what is and is not innate, and I can't see agreement being reached on that question in a multi-cultural/faith society, can you?
I thought it was interesting that Gigi expressed support for hate speech laws regarding race and religion while some free speech purists would do away with all of it. What do you think of that proposition? (ie: doing away with all of it)
Anything wrong with doing away with all of it?
It’s certainly a minefield when things go crazy…eg men with penises being put in prisons where they can rape women, and going along with the idea of ‘menstruating/pregnant people’ and ‘chest feeders’.
Honestly, common sense has gone right out the window, and it seems most people are too scared to speak up. Similarly doctors and nurses who inject people under coercion and mandates, because they’re told to? What is constraining people from speaking out and challenging obviously wrong things?
To show another example of where things are going to control us, what we say etc, consider this article in the UK Telegraph: Pub landlords to be turned into ‘banter police’ under reforms to workers’ rights. Fears free speech could come under attack, not just in bars but also universities, as Government plans to extend employment laws: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2024/10/12/pub-landlords-turned-into-banter-police-labour-law-changes/
It's likely behind the paywall, so I'll copy and paste some of it:
QUOTE
Pub landlords will be turned into ‘banter cops’ under reforms to workers’ rights, business leaders have warned.
Provisions in the Employment Rights Bill mean equality laws will be updated to make employers liable for staff being offended by “third parties”, such as customers or members of the public.
The laws would introduce a legal requirement for companies and public bodies to take “all reasonable steps” to prevent harassment by third parties relating to a “protected characteristic” such as sex, gender reassignment or age.
Free speech campaigners have warned that this measure is the government’s “latest salvo in its ongoing war against free speech” and will lead to pub staff having to act as the “banter cops” who ban customers for telling “inappropriate” jokes.
Scholars also fear the legislation will also have a “chilling effect” on academic freedom as it will mean university authorities are more likely to give into calls to “no-platform” contentious guest speakers for fear of being sued.
Kate Nicholls, chief executive of UKHospitality, said that staff in restaurants, bars, pubs and hotels are working in a “social environment” where “there are jokes and people are boisterous”.
She said while everyone wants to make sure their staff are protected “we don’t want to be policing our customers’ behaviour”, adding that she is keen to work with ministers to ensure “undue restrictions” are not imposed on customers.
Kevin Hollinrake, the shadow business secretary, said: “Running a business is hard enough as it is – even defending yourself in an employment tribunal can cost tens of thousands of pounds. We all know this agenda is being driven by wokeness and the unions.
“Ronald Regan once said if fascism ever returns it will be in the name of liberalism. The people who are supposedly the greatest defenders of basic liberties and quite happy to jettison basic rights – be it over property, the rule of law and free speech – if it doesn’t accord with their own views.”
END OF QUOTE
There should always be room for respectful, thoughtful debate/discussion. Sadly, that is not the human way, though. People play the man and not the ball and resort to personal attacks. Ego is a big obstacle.
I agree. There is nothing special about race and religion. Thus Gigi has probably made an error of logic ... of inconsistency.
Tis hard to know exactly where our sexuality (ie what we are turned on by) comes from. I do believe genetic make up is a strong determinant, however. Indeed, much of our personality is innate. Perhaps our CORE personality is entirely innate. Anyone who has had multiple children ought to appreciate the wisdom of this.
Gigi added a comment on this, see pinned at top of the comments section. She clarified that her comments were constrained to the issue of expanding the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act, not whether there should be such an Act at all.
But her piece seemed to have a tone of acceptance of the act, insofar as it pertains to race and religion, but not as it pertaining to other groupings ...that, whilst there is good reason for the initial act, there is not good reason for its extension.
Yes as she (and then I) said, this is due to the way I posed the question , which was about whether the existing laws should be expanded, not whether the existing laws should be repealed.
Oh how wonderful, Rebekah!!
Yes, a conservative religious person might posit that sexual orientation is a choice, however there is evidence that it is not. It's not as easy to pinpoint as gender which is ingrained in every chromosome and is not a choice. But yet there is evidence that the spectrum from gay through bi to hetero is biological. Biologists will point to homosexual behaviour in other species for example. Psychologists will point to the suffering of gay people who never wanted to be different and who even try conversion therapy only to find that nothing works. Gene candidates have been found that are linked to homosexuality and a brain region called the diencephalon differs in size between homosexual and heterosexual people, showing at least one physical difference in brain structure.
The trans activists yes they may argue it's not a choice. But they're right about that - they've got no choice they are simply the gender their chromosomes are. But their brain is telling them they are another gender, also without a choice on their behalf. So the problem is physical but it can't be fixed (sadly people are now glorifying it and pretending it can). It's hard to find ways to help I guess. Life is difficult.
I still think it is the best course of action to strictly limit "hate speech" laws to physical characteristics over which you have no control and should never be judged because any argy bargy over that is far more limited and reasonable than what you get when you expand it to ideas with fuzzy boundaries, over time.
Characteristics that define a people over time is far more complicated and open to far more argy bargy than ones that can be physically measured and defined.
Yes, the religious must firmly be told that a belief system is not a sacred cow that can't be mocked, the best societies are ones in which they can be mocked and mocked equally. You will notice that law came in 2001 and religion was included because of the Islamist attacks on 9/11. It is not right that say Christianity can be pilloried within an inch of its life, but Islam cannot. All must be equally able to be mocked.
Interesting point re: the doing away with all of it. I am tempted to say yes. We should simply have thick skin and not care if someone insults your race, as long as you can insult theirs back, it's a level playing field. The problem arises I think from mob pile-ons where it's not a level playing field and there is a need to protect the minority, which is no doubt why the left thinks anti-white racism is fine. I suspect this is why they think white people are fair game for racism, because they are the majority and therefore not in need of protection.
I think this may be necessary from a purely practical perspective - however it has gone absolutely too far with children playing dress-ups having their lives ruined as "racists" by click-bait media just because they wanted to pretend to be Mr T for example.
I dislike saying that there is even a respectable toe-hold for hate speech laws however. Perhaps the existing anti-discrimination laws were adequate and we didn't need any revision at all in 2001. After all, the 1990s were way more racially relaxed than the 2020s have been. We had no BLM in 1995. Nobody cared about race back then. We loved Eddie Murphy because he was funny not because he was black. Perhaps the 2001 hate speech laws in fact made it worse by making everyone paranoid and weaponising it. Or maybe that was just a cultural impetus pushed on us like the trans issue has been. IDK.
But it's so nice to debate with you!
Thanks for the food for thought. I’m just about to start reading Jacob Mchamangama’s book on the history of Free Speech. I feel pretty certain that expanding hate speech laws and making it a criminal offence is a bad idea, but I feel like I’ll be better placed to have a more fully formed opinion on whether there should be any hate speech laws at all (and if so, what sort) after a bit more research and thinking.
Characteristic we have no control over? Mmm.
Before we were hit by the great plague I was on social media and would frequently hear commentators talking about the impropriety of discriminating against people on the basis of "immutable characteristics".:)
I would chuckle to myself at their naivety ...at the apparent narrowness of their perception of the term 'immutable'.
Suppose you go for a job and are rejected. As you leave the interview room you overheard your interviewers say that they didn't like your personality or vibe or that you seemed too introverted.:)
Liked much of what lady said & agree about border closures which achieved little as covid spread like fire regardless Border closure allowed some bureaucratic authority into play which was badly used There was no national method of dealing with pandemics so most states decided on own diverse measure of dealing with it to the frustration of others & again where little good was gained but more angry frustration was achieved
Hello Pat, Scott Morrison could have used the existing Pandemic Policy for our nation but instead created the National Cabinet and gave the States control. They made up their rules as they went along and as you say there was so much diversity, little cohesion.
I believe that National Cabinet was supposed to be in place for 3 months but is still in existence. Is that for the next scam? WHO knows.
Hi Luise, where did you see about National Cabinet supposed to be in place for three months? My understanding was the NC typically meets once every three months (four times per year) or 'as often as necessary' but that the scandal during Covid was the number of times NC met, Scomo secretly assigning himself to senior positions that allowed him to essentially host 'private' NC meetings with only one or two other people, and the refusal of both Lib and Lab to release minutes of the NC meetings.
Like the closing pun.:)
Luise, Scott Morrison, National Cabinet, CMO Paul Kelly and the AHPPC opened the floodgates for coercive and mandatory COVID-19 vaccination, see: The destruction of voluntary informed consent via mandatory COVID-19 vaccination: https://elizabethhart.substack.com/p/the-destruction-of-voluntary-informed
I go into this in more detail in my paper: Misfeasance in Public Office? The Destruction of Voluntary Informed Consent for Vaccination, June 2024:
https://vaccinationispolitical.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/misfeasance-in-public-office-the-destruction-of-voluntary-informed-consent-for-vaccination.pdf
The dominant public belief seems to be that the bodies of citizens were rightly conscripted in a war against a highly dangerous virus. Of course, conscription has always been a contentious issue.
Into the moral calculus must go a consideration of the extent of the threat (by foreign nation or virus etc).
Is the force on our shores? Is the virus a highly contagious form of Ebola? and so on.
Methinks Vietnam and CONVID hardly justified conscription.
Imagine the absurdity that existed at border towns. Albury, Echuca and Tweed Heads come to mind, for instance. Yet I have a feeling the respective governments will give themselves a big tick on almost all of their measures and would double down on the lot.
As a further illustration of the madness, in Melbourne in 2021 we had patients who, upon declaring to GPs that they had at least one symptom of C19, were examined by double-vaxxed and double-masked 'doctors' whilst seated in their vehicles in the car park. It was almost a case of the GPs only being prepared to examine (properly) the healthy. :)
My mother in law was told (in the carpark) to go away and take cough suppressant or anti histamines only later to be told by a doctor who was prepared to use a stethoscope that she should be X-rayed. The latter revealed 4th stage cancer.
The expression 'clown land' comes to mind.
The most frightening thing (to me) was just how cooperative the population was when it should have engaged in peaceful non compliance. What has happened to the Aussie larrikin ... the people who treat authority with suspicion cum disdain? I know that Melbourne is the soy boy capital of the world but apparently it was no better anywhere else in this cuntry.
What was Gigi’s position on ‘the vaccine’?
From what I've read and watched from Gigi, being an economist, her public commentary was primarily on lockdowns (and zero-Covid policies more generally) as they fall under her area of expertise. One of the core values of the organisation she co-founded, Australians for Science and Freedom, has core values of bodily autonomy, free speech and search fro truth via open discourse and scientific method. https://www.scienceandfreedom.org/about/#principles
You wanted someone to get a debate going. Well, maybe I will oblige here.
I have found myself resonating highly with the noise made by Gig over the past four years and I admire her courage in respect of the stance she took on Covid. This piece of hers that you have quoted, however, I am less favourably impressed by.
Human beings are uniquely defined by where they lie on a very large number of spectra – spectra having to do with skin colour, theism, masculinity, libertarianism (ie their position along the libertarian- conservatism spectrum), socialism (ie their position on the right-left political spectrum), extroversion, autism, intelligence, height, obesity/rotundity, integrity, authenticity, honesty, self-discipline, age, salesmanship, feminism, belligerence, gregariousness and so on (and yes, I accept that all of these have definitional problems😊). And any given person’s position on most of these spectra changes over time, sometimes within a single day, leading one to think about AVERAGE positions, say. On average I may be more intelligent than X but I may be more intelligent yesterday than today. Have you ever felt stupid one moment and clever the next? Ultimately intellect is measured by performance.
However, there is an unfortunate tendency amongst people, to dichotomise – to place people into one of two groups with respect to these variables (for which I have defined spectra). One will hear things like: X is a libertarian, whereas Y is a conservative. H is tall but J is short. D is a believer, whilst F is an atheist. P is smart whereas, Q is a dumb ass. Perhaps this is to make it easier to navigate through life. Perhaps it is borne out of a want to belong to a group (or team) … of want to have teammates.
Gigi (a person who seems to be quite far along the integrity spectrum, btw😊) talks about (and seemingly attaches great weight to) Race and Religion as themes for team formation. J is on the Muslim team, whereas K is on the Christian team and L is an atheist. P is on the white (Caucasian) team whereas Q is on the yellow (Mongoloid) team and R is on the brown (Arabic) team.
Often, I hear or read the view that brown (or yellow) people moving to OZ need to adopt ‘Australian values’. WTF does this mean? If a government official were to ask me (perhaps on the occasion of bestowing citizenship upon me😊) whether I embraced Aussie values, I think I would return a puzzled look. Maybe Gigi would not (and/or did not, when she was naturalised) struggle with this. 😊
I suppose we are attracted to people whose belief sets appear to be similar to those of our own … attracted to people whose positions along a sufficiently large number of belief spectra are similar to our own positions. However, team formation, is a product of human psychology … is the fulfillment of a desire to for allies … for group membership. It is a tendency, though, that is ultimately (and ironically) divisive.
I might have more in common with a young Muslim XX than a white, hexagenerian, churchgoing Xy.:) In short, I would not be happy for Gigi to force me into teams.
I have often wondered which of the following are the best predictors as to conversational compatibility – commonality of gender, age, race or religion. Tis not at all obvious to me that the latter two (ie those accorded such great import by Gigi) are. I tend to believe gender is more binding/cohesive than race. For instance, in cafes I have observed many awkward conversations across gender and age, and many enthusiastic ones had by females of similar age.
I recall Jordan Petersen (before he succumbed to drug addiction, before he took the jabs and before he tweeted to Netanyahoo to ‘give em hell’😊) talking about the concept of intersectionality - based on his apparent perception of concepts being dichotomic, and not continuous. In the above example we see the intersection of Caucasian (or white) and Christian. We could add sex, too and sexuality (as defined in the very simplistic sense of which gender one is turned on by), two political groupings and age, so that a person might be in the intersectional group of: white, Christian, conservative, right-wing, heterosexual, male boomer. :) He made the sensible point that, taking this process to its ultimate results in the group sizes becoming so absurdly small they limit out as a group size of one … individuals. JP is human and fallible, and he stuffs up. I give him credit for this, though. Credit where credit is due.
Anyway, Gigi might wish to review her comments through more philosophical lenses.
Hate speech? Well, I was once called a ‘selfish teacher’, on an occasion of having a heated conversation with my brother-in-law, who’d not personally prospered in formal education. Was he being teacherist.:) Perhaps Gigi has been called a ‘typical Yank’, or some such. If so, the accuser was being racist, I suppose … or something like it. However, imagine someone goes online with the following comment: X is a Y (Y being the latest version of a ‘witch’ – commie, Jew, homo, terrorist, pedo) and they live at Z. I do have much more of a problem with this. I am not sure there is NO case for censorship. It is not simple. Life is not simple. LINS.
So in short, you do support some form of hate speech laws or uou dont? I can’t tell.
"in short" indeed.:) I do hate YES/NO questions.
Support for any proposition exists in DEGREES, surely.:)
Are you referring to the hate speech laws as proposed or hate speech laws, per se?
From a purely religio-philosophical point of view, the basic premise of this hate speech corralling is driven by the dominant group's clutch on pushing their plans forward. This (unnameable) group dominates the financial, pharmaceutical, media, and political spheres, and thus has the ability to censor opposition.
Contrary to this bulkhead, we, the people, now have the ability to broadcast our views and the objective facts via the Internet (for now). The controlling group attempts to control the discussion using its lobbying political power. We must resist this and create our own font of knowledge that shows up the dictators!
To this end, please refer to the following ... https://bit.ly/-Gurvitz-Israel-Mighty ... https://bit.ly/-NWO-Trojan-Horse ... https://bit.ly/-Israel-PfizerJab-Coverup
religio-philosophical? These do not seem to be good bed partners.:)
Correct, that's the reason it was pointed out ... The "Jewish" perspective is actually religio-political-philosophical. Please check out the links provided above before commenting further. Thanks!