Transcription
Let's stick on next week's legislation. It's the combining of the gun laws, I think, and the hate speech that's causing especially the NATS and One Nation to wonder whether tougher gun laws are even needed. I mean, many people today are saying, well, they haven't even uh, you know, completed the gun law reforms that John Howard introduced after the horror report, Arthur.
Joining me now, former Speaker of the House, Brahman Bishop and News Corp columnist Angela Mard. Great to have you both with us. Um, Brahman, you know more about drafting legislation and amended bills and voting in the House and what's going to happen in the Senate. This is a wide ranging, complicated, major change with some arguing it will be a danger to to free speech. Is it being rushed too quickly?
Certainly it is. And my view of the bill as it is presently constituted is that it should be rejected. It is an affront to uh freedom of speech. You know, freedom of speech is something that is inherent in a democracy and it's a western culture concept. Um it it came through uh Magna Carta up through the bill of rights of 1688, the writings of Milton, uh the enlightenment and and it is JS Mil. It's come to us as an important pillar of maintaining a democracy and to rush through this piece of legislation which is amalgamated material which doesn't relate to each other um simply so that they the government in its cynical way knows it can find division for the National Party uh and of course one nation over the question of guns because they say quite rightly that they are going to make normal law-abiding citizens um pay for the guilty actions of the terrorists.
So, it is a mishmash, but there's nothing accidental about it. This bill has taken a good deal of time to draft. It goes through a lot of stages to come to the exposure draft. Um the the explanatory memorandum takes a long time to put together. And so this time that the prime minister has been saying, "Oh, we might have a um a royal commission or we might come back." He has been behind the scenes crafting what he knows will be a disastrous bill and it should be rejected.
Angela, I speculated at the start of the program that you mean obviously the prime minister needed to to change the narrative to get the arguments away from him not calling a royal commission and him not uh, you know, being strong enough to to react straight after Bondi, you suspect with what Bramin said there and and when you look at this that that might might in fact be the case.
And that's right, Steve. Look, there is reacting and then there's being reactive and I think he's being that at the moment. He is trying to formulate policy from a place of grief and actually it needs clearheadedness. I really like what a British lawyer has said overnight. He said that laws written in the heat of an outrage become rights lost in the cold light of day. And he goes on to say that he's a um a free speech lawyer. He says free speech isn't the enemy of social harmony. It's the foundation of social harmony. And I think at the moment what's happening with this legislation and the fact as Brahman mentioned that it's all being rolled into one piece into one piece together with the gun laws which of course are a regional and a um and a a city issue. Quite different approaches to that is that it's too much at once. It's confusing. But more to the point, it's not driving us in the direction that we want, which is cohesion at the moment rather than division.
Well, there's certainly going to be a heap of division when everybody gets back to Camber. I note Liberal MP Andrew Hasty this afternoon, Brahman has shared on social media that he'll be voting no to the changes. Here's what he had to say.
I'll be voting no to this bill. I'll be voting against it for two main reasons. The first is this bill is an attack on our basic democratic freedoms. Freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, and freedom of religion. But secondly, the prime minister is showing absolute contempt for normal parliamentary process. For a bill of this size, we would normally take a few months to consider it. It would go into a committee process and the public would have an opportunity to make submissions. There would be public hearings. MPs and senators would debate it and they would consider fully the unintended consequences of this bill. Instead, the prime minister has reduced that process to a couple of days.
Well, Brahman, Andrew is basically saying there what you said. So, how does the new Liberal leader, Susan Lee, now handle this be? Because she's got people splintering all over the place. What What does she need to do next week?
She needs to pull them all together and vote no. And the reason I say that is that the Liberal Party and the Coalition generally is bleeding to One Nation. And the reason that it's bleeding is because One Nation is presenting a case which is clear, concise, and consistent. And this has seen to be the coalition dithering. Now, I think Susan Lee has done a very good job through this uh appalling time that we've gone through. She's been strong and she's been morally courageous. Um but on this particular issue, this bill is a travesty. everything that was said by Andrew about the length of time that a bill of this size would normally take, but it has been deliberately contrived to put it together to cause um argument and discourse which will the Labor Party hopes put the um opposition into um illreute because they're not agreeing with what they're saying is going to be the solution.
There is one question and one question only that needs to be answered both in legislation and in the Royal Commission and that is how did we get to the situation where two alleged radical Islamists hunted Jewish and other people who were attending but mainly Jewish at a Jewish function to kill them in the name of religion. How did we get to that stage? That's what we want to know because then we can determine how to stop it.
Yes. And of course, I mean, those allegations are all going to be be tested in court. We'll see where that goes. Angela, I note the Trump administration's given Labor a slap over the new laws themselves. Senior US State Department official Sarah Rogers believing that they could lead to quote deeply perverse outcomes. I mean, we are saying here that the administration of the Albanesei government is so cynical that they're going to use this not to bring the nation together is which is what the prime minister is constantly saying. This is about social cohesion. I can't see this creating any social cohesion.
That's right. And what the point she makes is that you can critique uh jihadists and find yourself with um fairly severe consequences for that. But as a jihadist, you can quote from the Quran or whatever document you like and you are safe. Now the as Andrew Hasty mentioned, there are so many potential unintended uh consequences from this hate speech legislation. And we've seen that play out magnificently. Well, you know, with with huge um uh consequences in the UK where ordinary people making criticisms online, a small tweet, that sort of thing, have found themselves in prison for 12 month sentences, that sort of thing. If you think about it, under the new legislation, Israel Fala, who of course uh was thrown out of the walabes for uh his hate speech, would have had a different consequence under these new laws. So you have to think really carefully about where they will land and how they will impact ordinary people if you push ahead with them.