In this interview, Margaret Chambers appeared on TNT TV to discuss the IPA’s research on Anti-discrimination laws.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Vikki Campion:
We are meeting now with Margaret Chambers. She’s a research fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. She studied history, religion, and Australian settlement at university. And it was there, Margaret encountered firsthand the militant nature of socialist political thought. Margaret, welcome to the show.
Margaret Chambers:
Thank you so much for having me, Vikki.
Vikki Campion:
Now, you’ve done a great article this week titled, Hate Speech or Censorship? Queensland To Give More Power To Activists. Do you want to tell us a bit about what pushed you to write this, once it’s legislation, the Queensland Government’s Respect at Work and Other Matters Amendment Bill 2024 was lodged?
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah. So I read up a little bit about the bill. It’s been a long process of reforms in Queensland to the Anti-Discrimination Act, and there have been multiple discussions about how best to reform the act. And in reading about the Respect at Work and Other Matters Amendment Bill, I just realised how absolutely shocking it was and how important it was to write up on it because I’ve seen very little in the media about this issue. And it’s a bill that affects the freedom of speech of all Queenslanders and their ability to participate in public debate. So yes, that’s what motivated me to write that article.
Vikki Campion:
Yeah. You went to anything in the media. We don’t mean journals anymore, mate, they’re gone, but you are doing this very good public work in doing this now. Do you want to talk to us about what are the changes proposed in the bill and how did they differ from the existing anti-discrimination laws?
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, sure. So this bill seeks to dramatically expand the scope and reduce the standard for what is considered unlawful speech in Queensland. So currently the standard within the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991 is that conduct is unlawful if it incites hatred. But this bill would take that a step lower by suggesting that it would be unlawful if somebody considered the speech hateful. Now, hateful is a terribly subjective word. There’s no objective legal test as to how that would be interpreted, and it means different things to different people.
So what I consider to be hateful would be completely different to what somebody else would consider to be hateful. And yeah, it fails one of the fundamental principles of the rule of law that if somebody’s subject to the rule of law, they have to be able to understand what their obligations are under it. We see this principle in operation in our road rules where we have very clear speed limits on the sides of our roads that tell us how fast we can go. And everyone understands that it would be completely unfair to be pulled over and fined for speeding if there’s no expectation set about what the speed limit is. But that’s exactly what this law is seeking to do. Yeah. It has these vague and subjective standards that no one knows how they’ll be enforced.
Vikki Campion:
That’s such a good analogy, Margaret. I mean, this is the thing about this hateful speech is that we’ve had the Greens recently, we’ve had certain green senators after there was the vandalism that occurred on the National War Memorial on Anzac Parade, and I found that quite hateful. I thought that was quite hateful, but according to the Greens, that’s just their freedom of expression. And this is the thing that I worry about is that what are the legal implications of not having a clear and objective definition of hateful conduct? Because I reckon they would shut me down in a heartbeat if they could.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, and that’s the problem with these laws is that we absolutely see them get weaponized time and time again against conservatives by activists. We see this with Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act as well, which has been used to shut down debate in this country. We saw that case brought against Bill Leak, the former cartoonist at the Australian with activists trying to shut down his cartoon where he was seeking to have a legitimate public debate about indigenous affairs, but it was weaponized against him and he was called a racist and guilty of hate speech. And that’s just the way it seems to go with these hate speech laws.
Vikki Campion:
That’s right. You’ve just got to look at it and you go, oh my, does this align at all with the existing principles of free speech and expression and what is free speech and what is freedom of expression? That is something that a lot… It is up for debate at the moment, and especially this week, I’ve been following this Greens led Senate inquiry into right wing extremist movements in Australia. And one thing that I… And I’ve done my column on it for in tomorrow’s Daily Telegraph. It’ll probably be up online tonight, otherwise you’ll be able to catch it in the print edition tomorrow. But it was the one thing that we kept hearing from the senators, particularly the green’s deputy leader in New South Wales, Senator Marine Faruki. She was pushing for, oh, we need truth telling about discriminatory policies. She’s complaining that far right ideology is increasingly mainstream thanks to dog whistling.
And she was pressing anyone who went and gave evidence to the inquiry was pressing them to agree with her to bring in stronger civil and criminal penalties for what she deems to be hate speech. But this is a problem is that what someone who votes for the Greens or someone certainly who becomes the deputy leader of the Greens nationally in Australia is going to have a different opinion on what is hate speech to somebody who is, for instance, the head of the L&P in Queensland, or the member for Herbert, Phil Thompson who we just had on. He’s a pretty centrist kind of guy. He went and he’s actually been to war, he’s been to East Tim Maori, he’s been to Afghanistan. He did get blown up by an IED. He has suffered. He’s a wounded veteran, but what he thinks would be hate speech and what Marine believes would be hate speech would be very different. I just worry about what happens to us in terms of individuals and our rights to free speech when we have the legislation like this proposed.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah. And I think that’s the problem with these laws is that people in the Greens and on the left would try to use them to shut down anything that they don’t like and they would call it offensive. They’ll call it hate speech, and they’ll weaponize the language to latch onto it and shut it down. And we saw this throughout also the Voice parliament referendum debate last year, 68% of Queenslanders voted no against the government’s proposals. But if you imagine if this law had been in place at the time of the referendum debate, how many of those Queenslanders would’ve had to front the Queensland Human Rights Commission rebutting a complaint that what they had said in seeking an honest debate about the government’s proposals was hate speech. It’s an absolutely appalling idea that you can have such vague and subjective standards governing what people can and cannot say.
Vikki Campion:
And this is the thing they always… Well, sorry, I don’t want to sound conspiracy theorist or they always do this, but in this specific example, the Attorney General is saying, well, we’re doing this under the guise of making things better for women, so making things better for me and you, Margaret, that’s why we’re doing this. But in practise, what do you think it’s actually going to be?
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah. Well, I think that this bill absolutely is a Trojan horse. I don’t think it’s about bettering the lives of women at all. I think it’s about controlling the debate and controlling what people can think and what they can say and disguising that and addressing that in this sort of wrapping paper of bettering the lives of women is just a convenient way of hiding laws and sliding in laws into parliament that reduce what we can say freely and controlling what you and I as women can say.
Vikki Campion:
Yeah, that’s just so much equality there. So good. There’s no definition of what is hateful in that entire piece of ledge.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s not defined at all. So it’s completely up to the human rights bureaucrats at the Queensland Human Rights Commission to interpret what that would mean. And you can just imagine that it would be whatever’s short of politically correct in that day and age that they would see as being hateful. Another problem with this bill is that it imposes an obligation on employers to root out objectionable conduct. And it’s the same thing where objectionable is not defined in the legislation. So can you imagine how arbitrary and absolutely subjective that means? So how subjective objectionable is. Anything that a human rights bureaucrat would consider to be objectionable is what they’d be seeking to stamp out in the workplace. And the problem with that is that workers in workplaces already censor themselves around the bosses, but if you had the added pressure of the Queensland Human Rights Commission breathing down the necks of bosses, there’d be that added pressure that I really can’t speak my mind at work, otherwise I might get in trouble not only with work, but with the Queensland Human Rights Commission. So it’s a terrible precedent.
Vikki Campion:
This sends me back to when I started in newspapers 20 years ago, and it was, if you’re talking… They’re talking about hate speech and what’s offensive. I’m like, wow, you should have been in a newsroom back then because that was wild. I mean, it was definitely… I think some of these guys would faint at some of the things that have occurred in workplaces of the past, but they were also really fun places to work, which is why you did it for no money. Are we just going to be so politically correct if stuff like this comes in?
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, I think about the comments of Jerry Seinfeld that he made a couple of months ago about how political correctness is killing comedy. And I think he’s absolutely right. One of the explanatory memorandum to the bill suggests that the standard for objectionable, that duty that is placed on employers could actually be what is disrespectful. So you’ve got bosses who have to root out disrespectful behaviour and disrespectful comments. You can imagine how many jokes would be considered disrespectful by these human rights bureaucrats. They’d be stamping out any kind of free expression, any kind of cheeky comments. It would all be swept up in this legislation.
Vikki Campion:
Yeah, it’d be very boring, very stale. And what’s the point? You wouldn’t even want to go in, would you? The other thing that you brought up in here is that the activists understand that the process is the punishment. I really like that line.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think part of this is that it’s such a drawn out and protracted process that it has a deterring effect in and of itself. That the way that it works is that if I was offended by something that you said, for example, under this legislation, I would go off and I’d lodge my complaint to the Queensland Human Rights Commission, and then a bureaucrat in the Queensland Human Rights Commission would assess whether or not it had merit. Now, there’s no transparency into that process or oversight. It’s just whatever they think is hateful or whatever they think is disrespectful, and they can proceed to whether or not that complaint proceeds to the next stage. And that next stage is a conciliation conference where you and I would have to sit there and talk about it and reach a resolution. Now, part of the complaint process is that I can actually list what I would want the desired outcome to be.
So that could be financial compensation for the woes that I’ve suffered as a result of your comments. Or it could be a public apology. It could be a retracting of the statement. And we’d go into that conciliation conference and try to reach a resolution. And of course, the Queensland Human Rights Commission staff members sitting there with us trying to work it out, and they’ve promised that they won’t take sides. But as we know, these organisations are politicised and they have sides inevitably. So then if it doesn’t settle at the Conciliation Conference, it goes off to the tribunal, which is essentially a court case. So this is a protracted and drawn out process that nobody wants to go through that. And I think activists absolutely understand that, and they would weaponize that to shut down debate.
Vikki Campion:
That is actually terrifying. I mean, the Sunshine State used to be so cool, and now it’s just full… It’s just sounds like it’s just going to be full of people who are just shrill and they want to shut everybody down. It sounds… Honestly. But I mean, what are your thoughts though on will this be enough to make an election? Oh, we have three minutes to the news. Sorry. Do you have any final thoughts that you want to put out there, Margaret?
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, well, just on your comments about the election. Obviously, it’s coming up in a couple of months and we haven’t seen a clear position from the opposition on this bill, which is appalling, given that it’s such an egregious assault on freedom of speech. So what I really want to see is someone coming out and opposing this in plain terms and just calling it out for what it is, which is an assault against the ability of Queenslanders to express themselves.
Vikki Campion:
Oh yeah. I mean, wow. So I didn’t know that. That’s not good.
Margaret Chambers:
No, it’s not. And I think it’s compounded by the fact that there’s very little discussion of this. As I mentioned at the start of the interview, that I haven’t seen a lot about it in the media. People are quite quiet about it. It’s sort of being, as we said before, it’s under the guise of bettering the lives of women. They’re sort of just sliding these laws, which are quite terrible into Parliament. No one’s really talking about it. The opposition’s been sleeping at the wheel. So we really need to raise the alarm on what is a terrible assault against Queenslanders.
Vikki Campion:
Absolutely. Now, if you want to read this piece, go to the IPA website. It’s the Institute of Public Affairs, and you’ll be able to see what Margaret’s written. Is there anywhere else that they should follow you, Margaret?
Margaret Chambers:
I think it’d be great to join the IPA as a member. You can go on our website and join us there. Otherwise, follow us at The Spectator and see what we’re writing and putting out on various different media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, X, all the works.
Vikki Campion:
Doing all the work, doing all the work, getting it all out there. Well, that is fabulous. And what else are you looking at for next week?
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah, I’ve been doing a bit of research into religious freedom and the threats to religious freedom in Australia. So I’ve been looking at proposals at a federal level to repeal exemptions for faith-based educational institutions at a federal level. So yeah, the Sex Discrimination Act. Yeah, so it’s quite well-
Vikki Campion:
We’ll look forward to that. We will look forward to reading that, Margaret. We’ll have to get you back.
Margaret Chambers:
Thank you so much.
This transcript with Margaret Chambers on TNT Tv from 1 August 2024 has been edited for clarity.
