People from across the opinion spectrum are insisting on the right to speak their minds.
GET ready for a spate of freedom of speech and freedom of expression cases coming forward in 2007. And expect some strange and uncomfortable alliances developing as media moguls line up with independents and religious groups hold hands with the sex industry in an effort to defend their own particular forms of public speech, utterance and expression.
Last year ended with a mishmash of cases all across the world. Proving that authoritarianism is still alive in the country of Adolf Hitler's birth, Holocaust denier David Irving was first jailed for three years by the Austrian Government for loudly proclaiming his inability to tell historical fact from fiction, and then released on appeal after serving only a year. Neo-*** in Europe popped the champagne corks on both occasions while 95 per cent of the population was left to contemplate Winston Churchill's definition of history as just ``one damn thing after another''.
An Australian man was forced to take his T-shirt off at Heathrow airport before he could board a plane, because it featured an image of George W. Bush as a terrorist. Airport authorities said it was a security matter while the man claimed he was merely expressing his opinion. Would things have been different if the image had been one of Osama bin Laden? What if it had been Rolf Harris? Would wobble-board terrorism have been enhanced by wearing it on to the plane?
This incident is interesting because it did not involve any speech as such and the image would not have run foul of any classification laws either, as clothing in Australia and Britain is not a classifiable item with government censors. Surely this Australian man had as much right to wear his anti-Bush T-shirt on an aeroplane as an Iranian woman has to wear a burka or a British soldier to get on in a militaryuniform.
Pauline Hanson has arrived on the political scene again, banging a familiar drum and claiming that African immigrants to Australia bring with them pestilence and plague and are of no benefit to the country whatsoever. These are deeply insulting words, not only to black South Africans but also to long-suffering fish and chip shop owners. Many called for her to be silenced under vilification, defamation and discrimination laws.
But why? Judging from the flurry of considered letters to the editor that followed her outburst, many thousands of people now have a much better understanding of her pitbull points of view on race and ethnicity.
The Blue Hills of Australian free speech cases entered its fourth year in 2006, with two Christian pastors from Victoria's Catch the Fire Ministries winning their case in the Victorian Court of Appeal against charges of inciting religious intolerance against their Abrahamic brothers over at the Islamic Council of Victoria. The court determined that the previous court had not used the proper legal test for incitement and so sent it back for a review.
Notwithstanding the fact that these same two Pentecostal pastors would no doubt deny free speech to abortion clinics that want to inform women of their choices or the adult film industry in expressing adult sexuality to millions of Australian couples, many people see this case as nothing more than a game of Dungeons and Dragons where one lot of mythic characters acts out a violent fairytale on another. But the case has highlighted a fault in all prosecutions that seek to silence free speech. In his summing up of the appeal, the presiding judge, Geoffrey Nettle, said: ``It is conceivable that a statement made about religious beliefs in the course of a talkback radio broadcast could run foul of section eight of the act while the same thing said as part of intellectual discourse within a seminary or faculty of theology would not have that effect.''
In censorship parlance at the Office of Film and Literature Classification, it's called context, but it's as big a furphy there as it is in the courts. At the OFLC it's OK to show explicit sex in a film and not cop a ban in every state in Australia as long as it's educational. That means it gets the lesser R rating. But show the same scene in a film where it may be perceived as titillation or designed for sexual arousal and you get an Xrating and a ban in every state.
It's a nonsense argument that seeks to stifle freedom of expression by claiming that speech in one situation is OK but identical speech in another situation causes brain damage to babies and makes adults want to rape and kill. It also says that speech or expression that educates or informs people is good but if the same speech makes them horny then it becomes bad. It's a patronising approach at best; at worst, it can serve as a justification for banning almost any dissident voice.
This argument has now surfaced in one of the most interesting free speech cases in the US for many years, where Rupert Murdoch's Fox Broadcasting stands accused of ``broadcast indecency'' over two spontaneous utterances during the 2002 and 2003 Billboard Music Awards. During live broadcasts of the event, the ageing rock queen Cher responded to critics of her performance by saying ``F--- 'em''. The second alleged breach involved The Simple Life star Nicole Richie complaining, ``Does anybody know how f---ing hard it is to get cowshit out of a Prada purse?''
In the US, ``broadcast indecency'' turns only on issues that involve ``sexual or excretory activities and organs''. Violence on its own cannot form the basis of an action against a broadcaster.
Thus the bloody scenes of death and destruction from the Iraq war can never be said to be indecent when played on the 6pm news before millions of children.
The prosecution against Fox is being brought by the US Federal Communications Commission, which is similar to our Australian Communications and Media Authority. Under intense questioning from one of the judges on the case, the FCC conceded that if the two offending broadcasts were to be re-broadcast today within a current affairs program, they would not be subject to a prosecution.
On the basis of this absolute nonsense, I predict a win for Murdoch and civil liberties that may have ramifications for many other free speech cases.
Author: ROSS FITZGERALD
Source: The Australian, 15th January 2007