Sydney Morning Herald October 2, 2011
Marcia Langton
It is important to understand that Andrew Bolt and the Herald Sun have broken the law. It is also important to understand exactly how they did so. Justice Mordecai Bromberg has ruled that by communicating words to the public that are reasonably likely ''to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person or a group of people'' and doing so ''because of the race, colour or national or ethnic origin of the other person or of some or all of the people in the group'', they have committed an unlawful act.
Bolt and his defenders are crying about an imagined right to unrestricted free speech. But speech is already restricted, for instance, by defamation laws that protect people's reputations and by the Trade Practices Act, which outlaws false claims about products.
Moreover, it seems to me Bolt is saying that only people of the ''races'' he approves of are entitled to such protections. In my view, his claim to the right of unlimited free speech only works if the presumption is that ''white people'' like him are not members of a race, but normal.
In his way of thinking (and this is a common belief in Australia) only undesirable ''others'' are members of a race, and hence, being a member of a race as he believes such to be constituted is inherently a bad thing.
These trails of his thinking are not so much spoken out loud but the silent assumptions of a code of racial hygiene that is older than this nation itself. It was ideas about racial purity, racial hygiene, the master race, the inferior races, a perverted idea about the survival of the fittest and other such nonsense that led to the incarceration of Aboriginal people in reserves in the 19th century to prevent ''mixing'' of the ''races'' and later, the segregation laws that specified where and how ''half-castes'' and other ''castes'' could live.
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