On September 10 at 9 pm, the Queensland Parliament, where the Steven Miles Labor government has a majority, adopted the Respect at Work and Other Matters Amendment Bill 2024.

Considering that the state parliamentary election will be held on Saturday, October 26, the adoption of this bill was an eleventh-hour rush to ramrod this legislation through Parliament.

The effect, if not the intention, of the legislation is to stifle the freedom of expression of Queenslanders and to effectively extinguish the religious foundations of the Sunshine State.

It is an example of the type of social engineering legislation that Labor is keen to adopt; it is based on Labor’s secular anti-discrimination ideology – a cultural belief that justifies, and even requires, the adoption of social arrangements that often abrogate the rights of people.

Passing the legislation makes it certain that Labor will lose the forthcoming election and lose it badly.

There is anecdotal evidence that many people welcome the demise of Queensland’s rotten government which devalues the most important rights necessary for the maintenance of a thriving democracy. During their terms of office, the Queensland government has adopted formal ideological positions on highly political issues. For example, it has advocated the adoption of laws on controversial issues involving Aboriginal affairs, religion, free speech, gender transitioning, and gender self-identification, among others.

Part 4 of the impugned legislation deals with vilification on grounds of age, gender identity, impairment, race, religion, sex, sex characteristics, or sexual orientation. Section 124(1) relevantly states:

‘A person must not, because of the age, gender identity, impairment, race, religion, sex, sex characteristics, or sexual orientation of another person or a group of persons, engage in a public act that a reasonable person would consider hateful towards, reviling, seriously contemptuous of, or seriously ridiculing the other person or members of the group.’

Ominously, section 124B explains that ‘a public act includes any form of communication, including speaking, writing, displaying notices, playing of recorded material, broadcasting and communicating through social media and other electronic methods, to the public’ and ‘any conduct, including actions and gestures and the wearing or display of clothing, signs, flags, emblems and insignia, observable by the public’. However, according to section 124C, it is lawful to do ‘a public act, done reasonably and in good faith, for academic, artistic, scientific or research purposes or for other purposes in the public interest, including public discussion or debate about, and expositions of, any act or matter’.

Section 124D deals with inciting hatred, serious contempt, or severe ridicule. It states:

‘A person must not, in a public act, engage in conduct that is likely to incite hatred towards, serious contempt for, or severe ridicule of, a person or group of persons on the basis of the age, gender identity, impairment, race, religion, sex, sex characteristics, or sexual orientation of the person or members of the group.’

Dave Pellowe, the founder of the annual Church and State conference, commenting on the legislation, has argued that it ‘made it illegal to preach Christianity in Queensland’. His argument assumes that the public expression of Christian beliefs, especially those that are incompatible with the ‘enlightened’ views of the progressive left, may inflame the sensitivities of non-believers who would then be able to seek redress in the Human Rights Commission of Queensland. His analysis suggest that the legislation represents an outrageous attempt by a tired, demoralised, and Woke-infested parliamentary Labor party to muzzle the free speech of people and their right to exercise their freedom of religion. This new law facilitates the fashioning of an artificial society where it becomes impossible for people to talk to each other about controversial issues – necessary to maintain a healthy democracy.

If it is impossible to define ‘hate speech’, any speech potentially constitutes hate speech. It merely depends on the way in which the recipient interprets the speech. The recent complaint against Dave Pellowe proves the validity of this point.

My argument is that the greatest amount of freedom of speech is essential for the maintenance of a healthy democracy that respects the speech rights and religious freedoms of people. This is because the expression of religious views, if tainted by ideology, is merely a narrative that seeks to promote a secular worldview which, while it may be favoured by the ruling political class, fails to maintain and protect the freedoms of people in a democracy.

It is truly Orwellian to believe that laws, which prevent people from discussing issues frankly, openly, and robustly, promote the democratic foundations of society. The view that speech should be banned whenever there is a likelihood that it might violate a person’s sensitivities, is misconceived. A society that promotes such a view and enshrines it in contentious legislation surely is not a robust society where good policies are the result of a frank and uninhibited discussion among people.

Free speech is not a threat to democracy but a core principle of every authentically democratic society and necessary to nurture its prosperity and welfare.

Anyone who has diligently studied history knows that the free expression of ideas involves the search for truth, even if it is incompatible with established interests. Furthermore, in a real democracy anyone should have the right to choose words that best reflect their personal feelings, and ‘strong words may better convey to listeners the intensity of feeling than more conventional language’. This point has also been made by Salman Rushdie, the eminent British writer. He stated:

The idea that any kind of free society can be constructed in which people will never be offended or insulted is absurd. So too is the notion that people should have the right to call on the law to defend them against being offended or insulted. A fundamental decision needs to be made: do we want to live in a free society or not? Democracy is not a tea party where people sit around making polite conversation. In democracies people get extremely upset with each other. They argue vehemently against each other’s positions.

Rushdie went on to remind us:

People have the fundamental right to take an argument to the point where somebody is offended by what they say. It is no trick to support the free speech of somebody you agree with or to whose opinion you are indifferent. The defence of free speech begins at the point when people say something you can’t stand. If you can’t defend their right to say it, then you don’t believe in free speech. You only believe in free speech as long as it doesn’t get up your nose.

The Queensland legislation under review is symptomatic of what happens in societies run by ideologues.

For example, one of the first decisions of the newly elected British Labour government was to abandon plans to protect free speech on university campuses because it could expose students and other members of the academic community to ‘harm’ from ‘hate speech’. The government’s approach, however, fails to define ‘harm’. What constitutes ‘harm’ is subjectively determined by the recipient of the speech, and what some people may regard as constructive criticism may be deemed to constitute harmful speech by others. In a Queensland context, such criticism might constitute a breach of the new Queensland legislation.

On September 12, the Australian federal government, not to be trumped by Queensland, introduced its controversial ‘misinformation and disinformation’ legislation in the House of Representatives. It empowers the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to force social media platforms to tackle any alleged ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’ deemed to be ‘harmful’. It is quite revealing that only views that are incompatible with the official narrative of the government are considered under the proposed legislation as ‘harmful’. Not surprisingly, as the legislation does not define ‘harm’, an unelected agency, ACMA, will subjectively determine its content.

These speech-unfriendly laws – paternalistic Nanny State abuses – deprive people of their rights to free speech and freedom of religion. In contrast, a libertarian philosophy provides a socially healthy alternative to the implantation of the principle of paternalism. It is not the role of the State to hold the hands of adults as they make their own decisions as to what they want to view on social media or want to discuss publicly.

Queensland’s failure to protect free speech and freedom of religion threatens the survival of democracy in the Sunshine State. Free speech improves the mind through debate and intellectual challenge, but it also facilitates the survival of those democratic institutions that rely on the free flow of ideas and religious communication in the public square. In this context, the establishment of an Upper House in Queensland would assist in the process of reviewing speech-unfriendly legislation.

Think about the following question. Who decides what speech is harmful or harmless? Even if a recipient of allegedly hateful speech claims to be ‘harmed’, would banning it serve Australia’s democracy better?

It is now incumbent on the Leader of the Queensland Opposition, David Crisafulli, to repeal this legislation completely and immediately upon winning government. The question is whether the Liberal National Party (LNP) will have the courage to do this. We will soon know whether the LNP is a Labor-light version of Labor. If so, as Salman Rushdie has suggested, it may be necessary to disobey the law and ‘have it tested in the courts, which one hopes will recognise its manifest absurdity.’

For now, we know, as argued by Dave Pellowe, that the Queensland Labor government and the Greens ‘have declared open war on the 2.5 million Christians in Queensland’ and that ‘they voted to pass the most repressive speech laws in any Australian jurisdiction’. He fittingly referred to a relevant comment made by the Queensland Director of the Australian Christian Lobby, Rob Norman, who expressed the view that ‘Queensland Labor has pulled a death blanket over Freedom of Speech and Freedom of Expression of Religion’. Norman opined, ‘This new legislation means that religious people who refer to Holy texts or religious teachings that challenge sexual orientation or gender identity are open to costly action at the hands of the Queensland Human Rights Commission.’

The upshot is that the unelected bureaucrats of the Queensland Human Rights Commission will now have powers to characterise as hate speech, any speech that it deems to offend, humiliate, or intimidate.

Surely, the late-night adoption of the Respect at Work and Other Matters Amendment Bill 2024 serves as a powerful invitation to the LNP to commit itself to repealing this perverse legislation if elected on 26 October…