Between now and the election (whenever that is) there will be at most five days on which both houses of federal Parliament are sitting: three this week and two at the end of March. That’s it for the pretence of lawmaking, pretence being the Morrison government’s core skill.
It says much about this government that it has chosen as the two laws it says it really wants to pass bills which have three things in common: they are unnecessary; they will do more harm than good; their real purpose is unrelated to how they are described.
The government might as well have added a third — its bullshit anti-corruption bill, which if passed would make federal corruption more likely rather than less — but couldn’t be arsed even pretending to want to meet that 2018-vintage election commitment any more. Instead it will waste its last few days of parliamentary time altogether.
It’s barely worth the bother of even reading the social media (anti-trolling) bill or the religious discrimination bill, let alone analysing them.
For the sake of posterity, however, here is a short list of the reasons they should be buried in the backyard.
The anti-trolling bill has nothing to do with trolling on social media, and will do nothing whatsoever to combat it. That’s not just my jaundiced take; the public servants responsible for drafting it have confirmed exactly that to a Senate committee. The bill’s name is intentionally misleading.
The bill is in fact an attempt at defamation law reform. It purports to remove liability for defamatory third party comments posted on media company websites from the media publishers and plant it with the social media giants. It also creates a regime intended to make it easier for defamation plaintiffs to discover the identity of people who’ve defamed them on social media anonymously.
Defamation law is state law, not federal. These reforms, were they needed, should be addressed at state level. They’re not needed. If they achieve anything, it will be to increase the already ridiculous volume of defamation litigation clogging Australian courts. Most importantly, though, they will do nothing to improve online safety or combat anonymous trolling, which is what the government keeps saying they’re all about. That’s a flat lie.
The religious discrimination bill, the government says, is needed to combat discrimination against people on religious grounds. What it will do is create additional space for discrimination by religious people and institutions against others whose existence offends them. Mainly LGBTIQ+ people.
Two developments just yesterday will suffice to prove my point. First, it has been revealed that Morrison’s sop to the moderates on his backbench, the on-again-off-again promise he’s been making for over two years now to protect gay school students from being expelled by religious schools for being gay (as the law currently allows them to do), will be restricted to gay students only.
The amendment to the Sex Discrimination Act the government is proposing will remove the exemption religious schools enjoy from the prohibition on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. It is, however, going to leave the exemption in place for discrimination on the basis of gender identity. Trans kids will still have no legal protection from being expelled or otherwise discriminated against by their school. So much for the faux empathy line.
Second and most instructively, the specific case study example Morrison chose to justify why the religious discrimination law is needed: “It’s a bill that means that a Sikh family can go and rent an apartment and not be discriminated against.”
There’s the sophistry, laid bare. It is illegal under existing racial discrimination laws in every state and territory in Australia to do what Morrison described. He is eliding racial and religious discrimination. It is beyond obvious that if a Sikh person in Australia suffers discrimination (as they often do) that is racially based, entirely on appearances. For fuck’s sake, Sikh men here and in the US suffered massive vilification in the aftermath of 9/11 because some ignorant idiots thought they look like Muslims due to their turbans. To pretend to claim that the hypothetical Sikh family being denied a rental property are the victims of religious rather than racial discrimination insults everyone’s intelligence. It’s specious and dishonest.
The religious discrimination bill will do nothing to protect anyone from genuine discrimination, because (as the government’s own review found) there’s no evidence that such a social ill exists in Australia. By and large nobody gives a shit about anyone else’s religion in relation to employment or the provision of services.
What the bill will do is encourage the projection of personal beliefs on to others. It will promote and protect the refusal of services, help and equal treatment to LGBTIQ+ people, along with their abuse. It will create, perpetuate and worsen division, discrimination and hate.
Bravo.
To its shame, Labor is toying with supporting both these bills, for the craven political reason that it doesn’t want to get wedged so close to the election.
That the Morrison government sees these two useless, poorly drafted bills as the most appropriately last of its pathetically short list of legislative achievements says so much about the government it has been. Like these laws: insubstantial, performative, divisive and, ultimately, pointless.
“To its shame, Labor is toying with supporting both these bills, for the craven political reason that it doesn’t want to get wedged so close to the election.”
Yes, here we go again. Clever Labor, the party that puts expediency ahead of any principles. Just like it did before the 2007 election when Howard tried to wedge Labor with the astoundingly cynical Northern Territory Intervention off the back of the Children are Sacred report. That bill was surely one of the worst ever brought to Federal Parliament, but Rudd showed his political genius by dodging the trap of opposing it. The bill sailed through with bipartisan support. Labor became the government. And then, in a brilliant twist nobody could have anticipated, Rudd’s government continued and expanded the intervention instead of scrapping it.
So we have a government trying to devise ever-worse legislation in the hope of tempting Labor to act like an opposition, and Labor, in its infinite cunning, getting ready to push the bills over the line when the government cannot even get its own MPs to support it. What a great system! Why is the public increasingly not enamoured of our politicians?
It would be difficult to remember a tory policy which Labor initially opposed, then collapsed in wedgie fear and conceded which it repealed when in office.
Krudd took an unconscionably long time to knock off WorkChoices despite it being a Manifesto commitment – just like the W/B reform promise.
That the latter gave us the entirely counterproductive Public Interest Disclosure Bill – not even presented until the dying daze of 2013 – added injury to the insult of making W/Bs easier to convict because of the lunatic requirement.
“Put not your trust in princes, oh Prince!”
Good point about Work Choices. And it’s worth noting that the Fair Work Act that eventually replaced it was more or less the same thing minus the truly unworkable bits, and it has served employers very well indeed, keeping workers and unions firmly in their place
Too true – completing the class betrayal of the Accord.
Is there any law or convention or whatever that says legislation can’t be about imaginary things? For example would a bill to outlaw interstellar aliens be valid? I’m just thinking that since religious beliefs are totally made up (on the basis that there isn’t a god) is it valid to protect them?
If you can prove there is no god you will have done something nobody else has been able to do through all the centuries of human history.
You can’t usually prove a negative. The onus of proof is always the other way around: prove that the thing that you say exists exists. Heck, even gravity waves have been shown to exist by now, and who’d believe them?
Absolutely agree, Andrew…you beat me to it!!
Yes, you can’t usually prove a negative. But you’re wrong that the onus of proof is therefore the other way round. The onus of proof falls on the one making the claim. Jimbo says there isn’t a god. That’s a truly remarkable claim because even the most determined atheists usually acknowledge they cannot go that far, for the fairly obvious and well-known reason you have given. But here’s Jimbo stating it as a fact, when it is just as much a statement of faith as any religious claim. Or this claim, from notorious atheist Christopher Hitchens
My own view is that this planet is used as a penal colony, lunatic asylum and dumping ground by a superior civilization, to get rid of the undesirable and unfit. I can’t prove it, but you can’t disprove it either. It happens to be my view, but it doesn’t challenge any of the findings of Darwin or Huxley or Einstein or Hawking.
Then there’s Simon Blackburn, a patron of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association). When asked to define his atheism, he said he prefers the label infidel over atheist:
Being an infidel, that is, just having no faith, I do not have to prove anything. I have no faith in the Loch Ness Monster, but do not go about trying to prove that it does not exist, although there are certainly overwhelming arguments that it does not.
It is ‘a matter of having no use for any conception of God’. The question of god’s existence is irrelevant.
As an antitheist, I find atheists as wishy-washy as agnostics.
Hitchens had clearly been reading Adams at the time. In Adams’ narrative the “superior civilization” were subsequently wiped out by a particularly virulent disease contracted from an especially dirty telephone. Aah, public telephones and the need to sanitize them. Those were the days!
Those who assert any proposition must provide evidence – especially when it affects other people.
Failing to do so must automatically render the claim invalid.
As the Hitch more elegantly put it, “that which is claimed without proof may be similarly dismissed“.
It’s a great pity that the Hitch subsequently went on to say a great many sillier and less convincing things. Puts the good stuff in a poor light.
And since Hitch was, at the time, referring to gods and religion, and the claims of their believers, the argument clearly applies in both directions.
I’ll happily go with the scientific approach: that hypothesis has not been proven. I don’t expect it to be. Not that I mind at all that anyone has other ideas. People believe all sorts of unprovable notions, and most of the time it does them no harm at all.
The victims, sometimes entire civilisations, cultures & races, might disagree that those obsessed with unprovable notions mostly do no harm.
When the good lack conviction those filled with passionate intensity are very, very dangerous indeed – apologies to WBY.
Let’s hope the government runs out of time before passing the Investment Funds Legislation Amendment Bill to block FOI for the Future Fund.
Wonderful stuff, as usual, Michael. Love the way you tell it like it is, with no frills!!
I cant prove it but I doubt there is a god. He was invented by people years ago in an effort to explain things. He is maintained now by crooks who need to keep the punters in fear so they can be manipulated and exploited.
Different folks can up with different gods but the idea was always the same.
Science is giving us a pretty good case for things being pretty random and providing a reasonable scenario for how things have evolved without the god hypothesis. If we are prepared to listen.