Hate speech and other animals

Edited transcript of part of my Rainbow Report broadcast Friday 21 Oct 2005

I want to say something about hate speech, vilification and other assorted curbs on free speech.

I’m beginning to think they do more harm than good.

If you stop people from saying what they think in public, will it stop them saying, or thinking it? No – they will just go on saying, and thinking, and spreading those thoughts privately, out of sight.

And things that are underground have a habit of getting worse.

For example, before we had the so-called war on drugs, there were relatively few heroin addicts, and once they were registered with their local doctors, they were guaranteed a regular pure supply at a reasonable cost.

They had no reason to commit crimes to get enough money to feed their habit. They had no reason to sell heroin to others to feed their habit – though a few undoubtedly did, it was relatively easy to track and control, because almost all addicts were registered. Rogue doctors and users could be brought under control relatively quickly and easily.

Likewise there was little incentive for crooks to get involved in the trade, when their sources of supply were of lower quality and higher price. As a result, there wasn’t much of a heroin problem.

Then along comes the war on drugs, addicts can only get heroin substitutes from doctors, creating an instant market for the real thing, which crooks were happy to supply. And they didn’t need to worry too much about quality control.

Now the equation is reversed: addicts have every reason to steal, to become dealers themselves, anything to maintain their supply. In short, the cure is worse than the disease.

I suspect hate speech and vilification laws are the same.

Let the arguments of the bigots and hatemongers be heard, and countered, in public. Otherwise they will only be propagated in private spaces out of the public eye, in places where no counter-argument can be made. Susceptible people will hear only one side of the argument, not both.

Besides which, hate speech and vilification laws mean these people can complain they’re being victimised – and you know what – they’re right. They are being punished simply for speaking their minds. They may be deluded minds, but that’s no reason to silence them.

If a precedent is created that says certain thoughts are not permitted, certain things cannot be said, there is nothing to stop the same principle being applied when the political wind shifts to another quarter.

Hate speech and vilification laws have softened up the public to the point where they seem prepared to accept what was previously unnacceptable, for example, the current so-called anti-terror laws, without much of a murmur.

These laws will punish people for saying things that could be construed as encouraging or supporting terrorists. I say we should let people say those things if they want to – then we will know who they are. If they are forbidden from saying them, then they will be driven underground, where they will flourish out of sight.

After all, there have always been terrorists, just as there have always been junkies, and we’ve lived with that and coped with that for hundreds of years.

I think we have more to fear from the people who are pretending to safeguard us than we have from any so-called terrorist.

The Romans used to have a saying: who will guard the guardians? Meaning, if you give great power to a group of people, trusting them not to use it against you, how will you make sure they don’t?

It’s doubly troubling when the government department that is charged with, in effect, deciding what we can and can’t say and think, will be run by the man who built and ran what was effectively a network of offshore concentration camps for refugees whose face, according to the government, didn’t fit. The vast majority of whom, I may remind you, have since been found to be genuine refugees by any normal standard. Now the same man will be in charge of building and running what will effectively be an onshore police state.

Anti-hate speech laws are what started us down this slippery slope.