Send lawyers, lawyers and lawyers: is all targeted speech now ‘harassment’?

Send lawyers, guns and money, the great Zevon sang, with a follow-up note as to why. In Australia these days, it appears to be just lawyers.

Independent MP Alex Greenwich is suing NSW One Nation Leader Mark Latham for a nasty tweet, and has made separate complaints regarding vilification and using a carriage service to harass or offend. Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi is suing One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson for a tweet, in which La Hanson suggested that Faruqi go back to the country from whence she emigrated if she believed Australia to be so hopelessly racist and colonialist, as she had expressed on Queen Elizabeth II’s demise. 

Now the right is in on the act, with expelled Liberal MLC Moira Deeming launching a defamation suit against the leader of the party she’s trying to stay in, and a complaint from David Flint for Australians for Constitutional Monarchy about the ABC’s pre-coverage of the coronation of King Charles III, which featured a panel consisting of monarchists, republicans and sui generis Stan Grant, with the chat fairly heavily slanted to the anti-monarchist side. 

Finally, Climate 200 has got in on the act. The group designed to demonstrate that addressing climate change is everyone’s business, raise money on that basis and inter alia win blue-ribbon seats has now decided that money raised for this purpose should be spent on helping a gay politician put a single anti-gay insult into the courts. 

So what’s going on?

The short answer is that on both the cultural left and cultural right, belief in a pluralist public sphere as the place to thrash out differences — with the attendant risk of insult, hurt and offence — is collapsing, and people are defaulting to law as a way of conducting basic political contestations between different parties (understood in a general sense). 

Doubtless, there’s a fundraising aspect to all this; nothing like a court case to turn a vague set of affiliations into a cause. But the fact court cases have to be used as a way of drumming up money and interest, if that’s what’s being done, is itself a measure of how little faith there is in the capacity of ideas and beliefs to motivate political action. It is part of the larger process by which the public sphere is being hollowed out as an autonomous zone of action, and the state being invited in to run it. 

Greenwich’s libel suit against Latham looks ridiculous. Should it get to court — and I can’t see Latham apologising, even if there is more chance of a Greenwich win than I’m assuming — there will be a parade of witnesses saying they’re an average, reasonable person, they find male homosexual activity disgusting, and they think less of a person for engaging in it. 

The court case itself will have people queuing up at 3am for a seat in something resembling Pasolini filming a Joe Orton play. Humiliating now? The tweet itself is already fading, while Latham’s cancellation by the right remains. 

That’s not because he said something politically incorrect, but because he made visible a feature of everyday life that none of us want to think about. Latham’s the scapegoat, loaded up with all our secret knowledge of romance — that we give roses to mask the filth of it all, gay and straight — and sent into the wilderness. 

Greenwich is now on course to either: 1) get an unlikely apology from Latham; 2) have to back down and give Latham a free speech win, thus getting Latham back into the game; or 3) go to trial and be cross-examined about his sexual practices with his partner. 

The glittering career of the man who stabilised the independent political dominance of central Sydney would dissolve in a welter of ridicule. He’d be the punchline to a joke for evermore. People who supported him politically would find it impossible not to laugh at it. Is it too much to ask of gay men in public life that they have a working knowledge of the life and times of St Oscar Wilde?

The truth is that it’s necessary for the health of protest and vigorous political activity from the left that both Greenwich and Faruqi lose their cases and lose them badly and humiliatingly. How are we to target — in a political sense — right-wing climate-denialist MPs, wage-thieving corporate figures and others for action if victory by Greenwich and Faruqi sets the bar of “harassment” so low that any form of directed action counts as harassment? 

Were someone to make a Twitter call for a protest at an MP’s office, would that then count as harassment? If the staff inside, mild-mannered volunteers doing a few hours, are suddenly besieged by a crowd with some fairly lively, not always respectful types, could they claim that the organisers are guilty of harassment by a carriage service? 

Do a strike and a picket line count as harassment? They haven’t for decades, because we had specific laws treating them as protected actions. But before those were introduced — and they have been virtually abolished in this country — such action was subject to the common law, which did not recognise protected collectivities.

The more that the cultural left relies on this framework, the more it materially constitutes the public sphere as a space of relations between individuals that are contractual in nature. Yes, beneath these processes is our old friend neoliberalism (actually something deeper than that), encompassing the culture so totally that it now expresses itself from the left. 

These are disastrous moves. Greenwich, Climate 200 and Faruqi are acting like entitled elitists or pursuing a blinkered strategy, or both. Climate 200, designed to tell everyone that it could support action on climate change without having to sign on for the Greens’ kooky cultural policies, has now told them that not only is there a set of social and cultural policies you must subscribe to, but that we’ll use the money you donated to save the planet for your grandchildren so that a Sydney grandee can sue a has-been for a bad pub joke. What strategic genius!

That they are joined by the right is small consolation. But it’s not no consolation. For some time now, the cultural right has been getting its sooky-woo on about slights and insults and going to lawfare, and it’s glorious to watch. Remember the right’s chest-beating stuff about snowflakes, toughening up and all the rest? That was then, in the Trump-Boris-ScoMo years. Now they’ve screwed up everywhere, destroyed their own parties, and lost the support of their own class base. So it’s time to play the victim. Pawww Bill Leak’s heart gave out because the nasty weft pweeple did an 18C on him. Decades of cocaine use making it as hard as a hockey puck had nothing to do with it. 

Pawwww Bawwy Humphwies, who never insulted anyone, cwied hisself to sleep because the Melbourne Comedy Festival lived up to its reputation of being the most joyless organisation since Lufthansa.

On and on it went, a product of a changed need in the News Corpse/Sky as dark AF bunkers. Their audience numbers are so low that they have to hold on to those they have, who are the hardcore resentful, who want to feel put upon and victimised. The youngish people who work at such organisations are pretty much doing the cultural equivalent of adult nappy-changing, over and over, with the hope that the papers and the channels — cut to the bone — can somehow remain financially viable. 

That someone like Deeming would sue her own party leader, rather than simply organise against it, is a measure of how comprehensively this logic is spread (and also that possibly, Deeming herself is really, really stupid, just dumb). 

The complaint against the ABC’s teeth-grindingly irritating coronation pre-coverage — itself a sign of left weakness, the republicans such a pathetic non-movement they have to piggyback on ABC coverage to make a point — is in the same spirit. The ACM knows it’s going to lose. The panel had multiple viewpoints. It was one way to fill the lead-up hours. But ACM can play the victim again and raise a bit more cash. 

This collapse to lawfare is the sign of two elite formations coming to the end of their command of the public debate. It doesn’t mean one should never go to court in a fight within an organisation — the “rational” Greens in the Victorian party may soon have to — but it does mean that the pursuit of individual public legal action is a good sign that your politics is breaking up, and that, by said actions, you are hurrying it on to that collapse.

Beneath the surface of these deadened culture wars, a new and more inchoate politics is moving around the politics of inequality and exclusion and the failure to address either. Whoever can start to tap into that, and organise it to represent itself, will reap the rewards. As regards those activists who support our decadent elites, pursuing their own interests, well, the shit is going to hit the fans.