Does anyone have the courage to declare, ‘Je suis Bill Leak’?, by James Allen.
First the defenders of 18C came for Andrew Bolt. …
Then they came for some law students at the Queensland University of Technology. …
Yet still most people look the other way. The politicians, too, turn a blind eye. Heck the Liberals, the party supposedly with John Stuart Mill in its DNA, can’t even bring themselves to indemnify the QUT students’ costs, as the Attorney-General could do any time he wishes. This is the political party that has gone from wanting to repeal this awful law to saying it’s too busy and not lifting a finger to support these students.
Bill Leak:
Now the speech-stifling zealots are using 18C to come after a prominent cartoonist who works for this country’s pre-eminent daily newspaper. I know, it sounds like something out of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or something that would happen in Russia, not in one of the leading and oldest democracies.
You might think the millions who emoted “Je suis Charlie” for some French cartoonists might summon up the gumption to yell “Je suis Bill Leak” for a man who simply drew a cartoon of the plight of Aboriginal children with one Aboriginal ne’er-do-well and one Aboriginal policeman. No, “that offends me,” cried the zealots as they invoked 18C and brought Leak under the aegis of this abomination of a law.
Of course, before that happened the HRC’s Race Discrimination Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, had gone on Facebook more or less urging people to make an 18C complaint.
Surprise, surprise, when one did the HRC accepted the complaint and is proceeding to conciliation. And did you know that Soutphommasane joined the Labor Party at 15 and worked at one time for Bob Carr (speechwriter) and then Kevin Rudd (research officer) before being appointed to the HRC for five years by Labor just before Abbott won office in 2013?
hat-tip Barry Corke
