Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Hate Speech or Free Speech?" with Prof. Alan Davison

Transcript

"Hate Speech or Free Speech?" with Prof. Alan Davison · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  G'day humans, welcome to the Safe Space, the Dangerous Ideas, and the ultimate dangerous
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  idea, the dangerous idea to rule all dangerous ideas.
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  The rosetta stone of dangerous ideas, the magna cata of the dangerous idea, is the question
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  of what a free and open society should do about hyper-dangerous ideas.
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  How should you deal with them?
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  Is it a little bit old-fashioned to say, well, a bad idea, especially if it's full of
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  hate, should just be combated with better ideas, and if someone is out in the street saying
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  that we should kill all the Jews, then we just have to sit them down and have a reason
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  conversation and persuade them that actually neo-nazism is not the best way forward.
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  Or is there a case to be made for a civilized society, a multicultural society, a society
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  that wants to be a pleasant place for people to live to put some strict limits?
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  Capital limits than many Americans would be comfortable with, strict limits than the
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  American Supreme Court would be comfortable with, given America's First Amendment, on
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  what people can say and the kinds of hateful things and ideas that they can express.
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  This is something that's happening in Australia right now, both at a federal level and at a
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  state level in the two most popular states, New South Wales and Victoria.
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  And this conversation is an absolutely fascinating romp through the intellectual ins and outs
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  of free speech and hate speech with the new incoming president of Australia's free speech
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  union.
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  So if you're not an Australia, don't worry, this is not an Australia-specific conversation,
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  this is really about the philosophical underpinnings of how we should deal with notions and ideas
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  that we detest.
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  I just want to begin by giving you some background specifically on the latest eruption of cancel
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  culture in Australia.
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  There has been a disinvitation of one of Australia's most promising and exciting artists from
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  the most important artistic festival in the world, the Venice Biennale.
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  This is sort of like Sundance or Khan is to film, this is to the art world, and there's
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  been a huge controversy in the sort of higher echelons of Australian art, because
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  Khaled Subsabi is a Western Sydney artist that's a working class of sort of migrant heavy
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  part of the city.
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  He's a Lebanese Australian guy working class background and has been doing really exciting
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  art, apparently.
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  I mean, I've never heard of him because I don't swim in these circles, but the art world
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  was kind of really excited in Australia that he had been selected as essentially Australia's
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  ambassador to the Venice Biennale in 2026, Australia's representative.
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  Then Australia's shadow arts minister, Claire Chandler, stood up in Parliament and asked
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  this question.
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  My question is to the minister representing the prime minister, Senator Wong.
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  The Australian government-funded organisation Creative Australia has announced that Khaled
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  Subsabi will be Australia's artistic representative to the Venice Biennale.
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  Mr Subsabi features the dead, his balla terrorist leader, Nazrilla, in his artworks.
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  With such appalling antisemitism in our country, why is the Albanese government allowing
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  a person who highlights a terrorist leader in his artwork to represent Australia on the
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  international stage at the Venice Biennale?
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  After that exchange, Australia's art minister, Tony Burke, apparently contacted Creative Australia,
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  which is the nation's peak arts body, the CEO of that organisation, Adrian Khaled, to
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  discuss the matter.
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  And the minister says that he made no ultimatum.
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  He said whatever decision you come to about whether or not Khaled Subsabi will remain as
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  Australia's representative to the most prestigious art festival in the world next year is fine
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  by me.
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  I'll support whichever decision you choose.
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  The subtext of course being that Creative Australia is dependent on government funding
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  and doesn't necessarily want to be engulfed in a massive cultural tempest.
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  So Creative Australia's board convened, they decided to revoke Subsabi's invitation
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  to the Biennale and there was significant backlash within the arts community.
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  There were multiple resignations in protest from Creative Australia.
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  The works of art that Subsabi has produced in the past that have got people riled up
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  and raising their eyebrows include a 2007 artwork, which was called you.
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  It depicted the late Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli
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  astray class year.
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  And a video rendering that Subsabi had done of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks.
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  This was a work he did in 2006 and it was entitled Thank You Very Much.
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  In a related but unrelated arts story, the head of the Sydney writers festival has resigned
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  after 12 years in the job.
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  She is a Jewish Australian and she wasn't specific about the reasons for her resignation,
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  but there is a lot of speculation about her discomfort with some of the speakers who
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  have been invited to the Sydney writers festival.
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  The program hasn't been released yet, so we don't know who they are, but when it comes
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  out on March 13th, ahead of the festival's commencement on the 19th May, we will perhaps
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  be able to glean some of the more controversial figures who Kathy Shand, the head of the
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  writers festival, felt she needed to resign in opposition over.
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  Her statement said, and I quote, artistic freedom and independence are to be garnered
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  and cherished, but freedom of expression cannot and should not be used as a justification
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  to accept language and conversations that compromise the festival as a safe and inclusive
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  space for all audiences.
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  Every session that is planned needs to reflect the values of the festival and represent the
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  highest standard of consideration and curation.
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  I think that's the upstanding thing to do.
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  Kathy is clearly a man.
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  You step aside when you disagree and I suppose you fall on your own sword and you stand
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  up your own principles rather than in a cowardly fashion, pulling the rug out from under the
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  people who you've already invited, I just need to reiterate once again, canceling people
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  is not the solution.
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  It really is not.
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  If you've invited colored subsabi to represent Australia at the Venice Biennale, then just
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  let him go and represent Australia.
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  The idea of a government minister of a bureaucrat looking at works of art from 10, 20 years ago,
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  seeing images in them that they find offensive in the context of a current Middle Eastern conflict,
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  of a current spate of anti-Semitism that was not the defining feature of Australia at
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  the time when those artworks were made.
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  Putting pressure on the world of arts and ideas where we're supposed to be able to wrestle freely,
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  where we're supposed to be able to poke the bear and kick the hornet's nest and try to
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  wrestle with the biggest questions that humanity faces.
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  The idea that those ideals are going to be subjected to the scrutiny of some
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  personality bureaucrat or government minister who's reactive to the political wins of the time.
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  No, that does not a free society make.
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  That is not what an open society is about.
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  That's not what a flourishing society is about.
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  That's not what a strong society is about or a vibrant culture is about.
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  I have no way of judging whether or not colored subsabi was the correct choice
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  for Australia to send to the art world's highest event in Venice next year,
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  but there were obviously reasons why he was thought legitimate by his peers,
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  by people who know a lot more about the arts than you do, or than I do,
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  or than the arts minister himself in fact does.
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  And certainly, then the shadow arts minister and the people who are lobbying her to try
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  to get this person yanked from the Biennale do.
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  Once someone's invited, that's it.
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  Lie in the bed that you've made.
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  Now we can have a long conversation about whether or not there are
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  political preferences and prejudices and biases that have been meant to insinuate
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  themselves into the institutions that are making these kinds of decisions,
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  such that they're more likely to favor an artist like colored subsabi than they would,
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  for example, a young Jewish artist.
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  I don't know if that's the case.
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  And if that is the case, then we need to have bigger conversations about the way that we're
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  interpreting our multicultural nation, the way that we're interpreting the manner in which we
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  bump up against each other when there are toxic and hostile foreign clashes going on.
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  And the extent to which we import those animosities into our society,
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  the extent to which we allow ourselves to side with one ethnicity over another because of
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  something that's going on abroad.
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  But those are big questions that will not be resolved by us hunting for misdeeds that people
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  have undertaken allegedly in the past and trying to whip up a frenzy against them and get them
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  uninvited to pressure the arts community to pressure people who are, frankly,
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  wrestling with much bigger issues than any politician ever will.
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  Questions of what it means to be human, what it means to be alive, how we deal with ourselves
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  in this cosmos.
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  These are the questions that artists and thinkers and philosophers and creators are wrestling with,
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  not how they're going to get elected, how they're going to placate this one pressure group over
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  another, how they're going to trade off the needs of one angry mob online against the human rights
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  of the rest of the country.
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  The, you know, political considerations are on one level.
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  Artistic, creative, and ideas are on another level.
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  Leave them be.
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  There is something worryingly stylonist about a country that thinks it's appropriate for
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  elected politicians, officials, bureaucrats, and pen pushes to put pressure on artists and thinkers
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  about who they can nominate as the most valuable among them to represent them internationally.
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  Even if it were the case that Khaled Subsabi were an anti-Semite, and there is no evidence of that,
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  zero evidence of that, I would still think that the conversation to be had about whether it's
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  appropriate to extend to him an invitation to represent this country needs to happen before
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  it is done by the people who are involved in the arts, in the world of ideas, not by political
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  hacks, after the fact, who are essentially breaking down a separation of powers by reaching
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  outside of the political realm and into the artistic realm.
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  My opposition to cancel culture does not stem from any particular outlook.
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  It is a matter of principle.
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  If you disagree with somebody, then attack their ideas. Do not try to have them uninvited.
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  Do not try to sever their ties with their professional employees and their colleagues.
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  Do not try to demean them. Do not call out a mob to harang them.
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  Push back on ideas, not people.
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  Furthermore, I just find it ridiculous to imagine that someone who is not an artist can look
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  superficially at one instance or two instances of someone's of an artist's body of work,
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  see the images that they are portraying, and because he happens to use iconography of Hassan
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  Nasrala from Hezbollah or of the Twin Towers in George W. Bush after 9-11, you can
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  immediately regard those things as being offensive. What if those things were being used in satire
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  and you were just too stupid to get the joke? What if those things were being wrestled with by
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  someone who is trying to understand the world in a messy and complicated way? It is a little bit
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  like when we try to ban the use of certain words in our conversation. What depends on how you
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  are using the word? It depends on what the comic was trying to say. What point the comic was
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  trying to make? Don't criticize them for making a joke until you understand what the true target
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  of the joke is. Maybe superficially, the target of the joke seemed to be, I don't know,
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  Jehovah's Witnesses. But maybe the person, although they're using Jehovah's Witness in the line of
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  the joke, is actually satirizing their own inner prejudice or their own ignorance of Jehovah's
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  Witnesses. We just don't know. That's why we have to allow the sphere of ideas of thinking,
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  of argument, of conversation, of which the arts are a fundamental cornerstone to flourish in
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  the absence of political pressure. So I think it's outrageous that colored subsabi has been uninvited
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  to represent Australia and Venice next year. I strongly suspect that if colored and I sat down
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  and discussed Middle East and politics, we would strongly disagree. There may be things that I
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  believe that he would find beyond the pale. He is playing in the world of ideas. A big culture,
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  a strong culture, a vibrant culture, a generous culture would be a culture that says, let him play.
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  It's crucial to bear in mind the difference between endorsing what somebody says versus
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  respecting their right to say it versus allowing bureaucrats and HR managers in corporations to
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  dictate which artistic and intellectual expressions should be excluded from the public square.
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  Which brings us to hate speech legislation. The backdrop to this is largely anti-semitism.
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  For the first time in the history of Australia's spy agency, it seems, the head of the Australian
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  version of the CIA, the, which is called ASIO, the Australian Security Intelligence Organization,
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  has elevated a form of racism or ethnic prejudice domestically as its top priority,
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  its top threat. Normally it's looking at threats like China or Russia or whatever it might be.
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  But the boss of Australia's chief spy agency, Mike Burgess, has said that no form of domestic racism
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  has ever been elevated to his knowledge to the number one concern for ASIO. Now, anti-semitism is
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  it. In October of 2023, many of you will recall the mobs on the steps of the Sydney Opera House,
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  which were originally erroneously reported to be saying, gas the Jews, what they were actually
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  saying was, where's the Jews? Not a huge consolation, frankly. Why were they asking where's the
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  Jews are? And why weren't they grammatically correct? Where are the Jews? At same month,
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  members of the neo-Nazi National Socialist Network marched in Melbourne in front of Flinders
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  Street railway station, the main railway station, displaying a banner reading exposed Jewish power,
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  and handing out neo-Nazi literature. Early last year, the personal details of 600 creative
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  people, Australians who work in the creative arts, who were Jewish, who were on a WhatsApp thread,
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  who were, which was basically for support and sort of community support after October 7th,
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  and helping people who might have lost people or might be grieving and so on. Those
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  personal details were doxed and leaked, and that led to some harassment and some death threats.
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  I was originally on that group, someone invited me, didn't know what it was, it was after October 7th.
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  After a few months, I decided that it was not for me, and I departed with a parting shot to
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  everybody in that group, saying, essentially, the point that I just made about cancel culture,
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  because they were talking about trying to pressure, well, not all of them. A few loud people,
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  as is always the case, were talking about trying to pressure publishers, media organizations,
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  podcast networks, whatever it might be, to disassociate themselves from people who were very
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  active online in the pro-Palestinian space, and I was saying, don't do that. If you disagree,
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  if you think that some pro-Palestinian influencer activist online is verging into anti-Semitism,
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  then fight with the ideas. Don't go behind the scenes and try to get them fired.
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  So I wasn't part of that, but I was part of that group that ended up getting doxed.
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  Then in December of last year, the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne was a fire bond,
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  well, set on fire during a morning prayer service. There was significant damage. One person,
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  at least, was injured. Last month, January, so just to give you a sense of why this hate speech
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  legislation is coming to a head right now. In January, a child care center in Sydney was
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  torched and defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti. Same month, last month, a man from Western Sydney
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  was arrested for allegedly posting death threats on the Jewish Association's social media page.
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  That was actually the very first arrest ever under this new Australian federal police
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  task force, a unit, dedicated to combating anti-Semitic crimes. He can get up to 15 years
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  in prison for that. He wanted, but he could, if he's guilty. Also last month, there was a
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  planned anti-Semitic attack that police found a caravan containing explosives in a suburb that's
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  like a motorhome in a suburb northwest of Sydney. It contained a list allegedly of Jewish targets,
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  including the addresses of synagogues, the premier of New South Wales, which is like the governor
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  of the state, labeled this as a terrorist act officially. Then this month, two men were charged
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  for allegedly vandalizing the home in Sydney of the co-chief executive of the Executive Council
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  of Australian Jewry, a Jewish community leader. It was fortunately turned out to be his ex-home,
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  but they presumably didn't know that he no longer lived there. They sprayed anti-Semitic graffiti
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  and they destroyed some vehicles. That's the context into which both the federal government
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  and the state government have leapt to try to say, we need laws. We need stronger laws against
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  all this. Because these homes and schools and synagogues have been set on fire and cars
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  vandalized with anti-Semitic messaging and so on. Last month, national cabinet convene
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  to address this spike in anti-Semitic attacks. Their solution was that this month, a couple of
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  weeks ago, the Australian parliament passed a new law. It's an amendment technically to an existing
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  hate crime law, which makes it a crime to quote advocate or threaten the use of force of violence
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  against individuals or groups based on attributes such as race, religion, sexual orientation,
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  gender identity, and intersex status. It also includes mandatory minimum jail terms.
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  12 months for waving swastikers or doing the Nazi salute, that kind of thing.
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  12 months in jail. Does that include like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, if they'd done their
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  salutes in Australia? I don't know. And six years in jail, I'm in a minimum for terrorism
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  rate activities. Now, concurrently, and I won't be in the weeds for too long, I promise,
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  let's work just understanding the contours of this. Excuse me, concurrently, New South Wales,
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  the most populous state in the country has introduced its own measures to combat hate speech and
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  anti-Semitism. And these are even ifier, frankly. It's now against the law to protest near places
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  of worship and impede access to places of worship and harassed worshipers, which I kind of
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  understand more. This is aimed to protect religious communities from targeted hate crimes.
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  But the point has been made by some human rights lawyers and others that the law doesn't specify
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  that the protest needs to be related to the place of worship. Like, if there's another pandemic
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  and people want to protest a lockdown, for example, and they happen to be on the same block
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  as a church, then do the police now have additional powers to arrest those people beyond what
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  they would otherwise have because of this new hate speech law because they're near a place of
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  worship? The literal reading of the text makes it seem so. The New South Wales legislation
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  also includes an excitement of racial hatred as a crime, that is, behaviors that promote hostility
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  or violence against individuals based on their race or religion. Again, in America, this probably
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  sounds crazy, right? Given the First Amendment, the idea that you could be arrested criminally,
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  not civilly, but criminally by the police, for a behavior that promotes hostility against a
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  race or religion. Well, to be fair, against individuals based on their race or religion. And it
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  outlaws the display of offensive symbols. It's also worth noting since we don't mention it in this
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  chat, we're not going to the whole offensive symbols and imagery conversation. Can you imagine
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  a future government having a different interpretation of what offensive symbols are? Obviously,
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  the legislation is not limited to symbols that the legislation explicitly lists. It's just a
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  criminal offense to display offensive symbols. Could you imagine a future
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  anti-Semitic government that regards the Star of David as an offensive symbol of settler
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  colonial occupiers, Zionist puppet masters? Can you imagine an Islamophobic regime that
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  bans the Muslim crescent moon as a symbol of jihad? The state member for Sydney, Alex Greenwich,
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  is opposed to these laws because he says that it's vitally important for
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  vilification laws to apply equally across the community. So at least in this reporting,
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  and perhaps I have to happen on the show to ask him directly, but at least as it's been reported,
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  he does seem to say that if you're going to do this, then we need to do it for all communities.
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  Including the LGBTQIA plus community. He says, quote, I know from personal experience
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  that neo-Nazis and other hate groups are targeting LGBTQ people as well as people who are Jewish,
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  protecting one group, but not another, would be nonsensical, cruel, and inappropriate.
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  He said, and I quote, it sets a dangerous precedent to provide for the first time protections
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  for one attribute, but not others. And it risks sending the message that the government doesn't
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  treat the incitement of hatred against those other groups as seriously. He's got a point
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  which, as we'll come to in the coming chat, can also be interpreted as a reason for not having
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  hate laws at all because of the ever-expanding sphere of that they should cover. If you're going
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  to protect Jews, why aren't you protecting gay people? And if you're going to protect gay people,
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  why aren't you protecting transgender people? At which point is the claim that biological males
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  can't be women, a form of hate speech? It's certainly anti-trans speech. And if we've expanded the
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  purview of hate speech from Jews to gay is to transgender people, why not? Last thing I'll say here
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  is that the nurse in that video, the two Muslim, apparently Muslim nurses who were apparently
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  allegedly talking on a social media video chat app to an Israeli and who said the following.
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  So I've said that you're Israeli. Eventually you're going to get killed and you're going to
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  get the johannam in Charlotte. Johannam, Arabic for help. Why do you think I'm going to get killed?
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  It's Palestine's country. Not your country.
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  One of those nurses now has been charged. And these are offences relating not to anything that
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  she did apparently, as I understand it outside of the video, but just to the use of the internet and
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  the telephone service to make those kinds of apparent threats. And these are charges that
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  have up to 22 years in jail. Again, it's highly, highly unlikely that she'd get anything like that.
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  But this is the kind of stuff we're talking about. You don't have to be doing anything other than
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  saying words in Australia now to feel the full force of the law. And the question we raise in this
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  conversation is what's the most parsimonious way to deal with hatred? I copped a lot of flak
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  last time I spoke about these nurses for listeners from listeners who felt that I was being too
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  generous by withholding judgment of them and saying that a mob is not the best way to adjudicate
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  matters such as this. There have been many cases in the past where people have been caught out of
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  context saying something. They thought they were joking. They thought they were being satirical.
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  Maybe they were baited into it. We just don't know. And people were saying, come on.
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  This is a flakering example of anti-semitism. If you're too waffly and both sidesy,
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  to, you know, if you're such a nuanced bro, you can't even just vocally condemn what is obviously
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  a gree just Jew hatred, then where do you even stand on anything? Let me be clear. I think anyone
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  who speaks the way that those nurses spoke should not be working in a hospital. They should feel
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  the full force of whatever professional repercussions come from behaving in such an unprofessional manner.
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  My worry is about the toxic mob climate of cancel culture, where many, many people
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  think and say things that many of us would find beyond the pale. And get away with it because
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  they're either not stupid enough or they're just lucky enough not to get caught. And I don't think
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  that the most efficient way to create a more robust and collaborative communication environment
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  is by accidentally stumbling upon one stupid ejaculation of hateful silliness,
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  and then the entire nation and the entire internet of billions of people come down like a ton of
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  bricks on those people and make examples of them, whilst failing to address the context in which
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  they thought that it was okay to say that. The union who came out with a melee mount opposition
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  to them saying that what they did was bad, oh yeah, but Islamophobia is bad too. So what?
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  There is a soup in which we're all swimming that is giving rise to this. And I am just uncomfortable
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  with cherry picking the easiest example to pile onto. It has been reported that the reason why
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  the female nurse has been charged and not the male nurse is because he continues to be
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  under psychiatric care in a facility because of what he's had to go through. Because of what
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  it's like to have the entire world make you the number one story and demonise you and vilify you
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  for something stupid and maybe even hateful and wrong that you did. I've been the target of
• 27:26
  social media pylons. I know what it feels like. This is not the most effective way to impose
• 27:33
  standards and to adjudicate sensitive issues of hate speech. It reminds me a little bit
• 27:41
  of Abu Ghraib in 2004 when there was abuse of Iraqi detainee prisoners in Iraq if you're old
• 27:49
  enough to remember. It was a scandal and two low-level army reservists went to prison. One of them
• 27:57
  got 10 years handed up serving six and a half years for mistreating Iraqi detainees. What did Donald
• 28:04
  Rumsfeld get? What did Dick Cheney get? What did George W Bush get? What did senior military
• 28:11
  officers get? Nothing. They launched a war that killed a million people and we spent months in a
• 28:20
  new cycle in 2004 about how badly the Iraqi detainees were being treated by these guys and how
• 28:26
  we needed to hound and punish the individuals responsible. The individuals responsible were behaving
• 28:33
  in a context inside a permission structure where they thought what they were doing was acceptable.
• 28:39
  They obviously thought that otherwise they wouldn't have done it and they wouldn't have taken
• 28:43
  photos of it and these nurses obviously were operating inside a permission structure where they
• 28:47
  thought what they were doing was on some level acceptable because they wouldn't have done it on
• 28:51
  video camera if they hadn't. So their worst crime is of being fuckwits potentially allegedly.
• 28:59
  You know, if the Abu Ghraib guy who ended up getting sentenced to 10 years had just had an F-16,
• 29:06
  hey, he could have shot the detainees from the sky before they even got to the detention center
• 29:11
  and he might have gotten Air Force Commandation Medal. This is the kind of inconsistency and
• 29:17
  hypocrisy that I'm just allergic to. You know, think if you don't remember Abu Ghraib,
• 29:21
  think back to the financial crisis in 2008 where a few low level financial workers were charged
• 29:29
  for sinking the global economy and you know, who was not punished top executives from any major
• 29:40
  financial institution. No top executive at Goldman Sachs, no top executive at Lehman Brothers,
• 29:48
  were they blameless? No, they were creating the context in which the people who ended up paying
• 29:54
  the price who ended up being victimized felt that they could operate. So I'm just not crazy
• 30:02
  about the gleeful hounding of accidental examples of deeper phenomena. The deeper phenomena here
• 30:11
  is a true sense of antipathy towards Israelis and Jews from large swathes of the community in
• 30:19
  the West and that's what a lot of Jews are feeling and that's something that we touch on in this
• 30:25
  conversation. So Alan Davison, formerly the dean of social sciences at the University of Technology
• 30:34
  Sydney here and I worked together there. We had a sub podcast inside this podcast, so I suppose
• 30:41
  an umbrella, a kind of branded umbrella called permission to think which was fabulous and you should
• 30:46
  go back and listen to some of those specifically uncomfortable conversations that relate to the
• 30:50
  academy and to teaching and to learning and to you know, the expansion of thought inside universities
• 30:56
  and so on. We had Jonathan Hyte, we had really interesting thinkers. He's left there now and he's
• 31:00
  now the academic lead at the Australian Catholic University's governance and public affairs center
• 31:06
  and more importantly, he's the new president of the free speech union in Australia. I hope you
• 31:14
  enjoy as much as I did. The one, the only Alan Davison. And where did you are interested in
• 31:22
  free speech come from? Is this because of academia not having been quite as tolerant or
• 31:29
  open-minded at places you thought it was going to be? But my I'm not a libertarian, the libertarian
• 31:36
  bend, but I consider that free speech is one of the, it's the bedrock principle, the proper democratic
• 31:45
  functioning and also needless to say but probably pointless to say it's absolutely essential for
• 31:51
  academic inquiry as well. But I think we can probably tease out academic freedom and academic
• 31:57
  inquiry that's related to or a subset of free speech and let's say open inquiry more generally.
• 32:04
  So my interest in free speech has stemmed back many years probably from the writings of folk
• 32:09
  like Karl Popper, the philosopher who talked about the open society and the closed society.
• 32:15
  And free speech fits very much within that idea that there should be a free exchange and
• 32:20
  contestation of ideas non violently obviously. And we can only improve society and we can only
• 32:27
  progress if ideas get put on the table. And it's through the strength of logic, argument,
• 32:33
  and evidence. All those things that seem really quaint nowadays. I was going to talk about evidence
• 32:37
  in logic. I was going to say like it even the even your defensive of free speech does sound a
• 32:43
  little bit like someone's been plonked from the either the 1700s or the 1990s into the
• 32:50
  cacophony of today with Elon and X and like craziness and Kanye's literally a Nazi and to come
• 32:58
  along and say well actually the free exchange of ideas. That's one of the goods all of civilization
• 33:03
  you're like yeah but can we just not with the kill all Jews? You know what I mean? So what's your
• 33:09
  retort to that? That's an excellent point and I knew it would sound quaint. So let's try to
• 33:16
  modernize it. Hey let's try to update it with at least a coat of paint. A commitment to free
• 33:23
  speech and a free and open society in the in the visions they have power popper lovers does not
• 33:29
  mean that a blind eye is turned to a misogynistic racist hateful actions or speech. It's all about
• 33:39
  what you do about those things. So in other words if there's people marching down the street saying
• 33:44
  kill all Jews it's not that we stand up and go oh well it's there right to say it when an open
• 33:49
  society. The question is what are the tools and mechanisms in a 21st century society like
• 33:55
  ALS and a rich and complex multicultural one as well with its own history and challenges?
• 34:02
  What is the appropriate set of responses and tools to address what is open you know openly
• 34:08
  um flagrant anti-semitism in some cases but I won't pair it together as often does as often does
• 34:17
  anti-Muslim sentiment or Islamophobia that's a different thing to talk about. I do notice and
• 34:22
  note this in passing that whenever a politician gets up and talks about anti-semitism they've also
• 34:27
  got to somewhere else in the paragraph refer to Islamophobia. Two different things they can be
• 34:32
  talked about in two different ways. So it's a matter of how best to address the kinds of
• 34:39
  attitudes, actions and definitely hateful actions and speech that we do see. So it's a matter of how
• 34:45
  to address that and the idea of free speech and a commitment to free speech means don't jump on
• 34:52
  the immediate response which is to clamp down through sort of legal tools suppressing speech.
• 34:59
  Now happy to go into that. Yeah so why not what's wrong with the argument that says okay don't
• 35:04
  suppress ideas so if someone has an idea about something that could conceivably be constructive
• 35:10
  allowed into the public square but there are simply hateful adjaculations of instinct or gut
• 35:18
  motivation that are fair game to rule out of bounds. So we could all jot on the back of a napkin
• 35:25
  a bunch of things that we're going to say we're going to decide communally that in this society
• 35:30
  we don't say women are inferior to men in this society we don't say cool the Jews in this
• 35:37
  society we don't say we should lynch black people like yeah you know what's what's wrong with just
• 35:42
  saying you know we draw boundaries around speech for defamation put for the purposes of defamation
• 35:47
  you know not crying not shouting fire and a crowd of theater or all that sort of stuff
• 35:51
  where do you draw the line and why why why aren't we entitled to draw the line tighter than you
• 35:57
  want it well there are lines already drawn in a many ways there reasonably robust so you know
• 36:02
  incitement towards violence is a very clear one so if you're marching down the street say go and
• 36:06
  kill this person now or go and go and attack these groups people that's clear incitement to violence
• 36:12
  so I think even and that isn't should be a crime you're asking for my view personally yeah yeah
• 36:18
  yeah direct incitement to violence absolutely and they are ready so it's not like if there's
• 36:23
  people marching down the streets calling for the death and destruction of people that are
• 36:28
  literally around them perhaps trying to avoid their marches absolutely but you also throw in
• 36:34
  their ideas like women are inferior to men well well they're not but that's a different type
• 36:39
  of utterance to saying let's go and you know a call to violence against me so there will always
• 36:44
  have to be lines drawn so I suppose the question is and the position that I would take in the free
• 36:49
  speech and is let's start from a position of as much freedom of speech and exchange of ideas
• 36:55
  as possible and just be very cautious and very considerate about how we move to address
• 37:01
  that moving anywhere away from that sort of absolute freedom which I agree absolute freedom
• 37:07
  is definitely not the state we want to be in but there are already rules regulations policies
• 37:13
  and a whole variety of instruments that check the kinds of things you're talking about and I don't
• 37:18
  have any particular problem right so we find ourselves at the moment in Australia in sort of the
• 37:23
  midst of a conversation about hate speech there are hate speech laws that have either just been passed
• 37:28
  or underway or a bit under debate both at a national level and at a state level in some of the
• 37:32
  most populous states just this week we saw charges level against one of the nurses in that
• 37:39
  viral video of the bankstown of the Muslim bankstown apparently Muslim bankstown nurses who
• 37:45
  were saying that they wouldn't treat Jews and that they're threatened to kill Jews now one of
• 37:49
  them has been charged we that just want to get this right there's a three federal Commonwealth
• 37:55
  offenses one is called threatening violence to a group that's an offense using a carriage
• 38:00
  service which basically means a telephone or you know be internet to threaten to kill and using
• 38:06
  a carriage service to menace harass or offend those are the three charges after this person
• 38:12
  seemingly you know bragged about refusing to treat Israeli patients and maybe killing them and
• 38:17
  saying that they would go to hell what's wrong with is that well is there anything wrong with
• 38:24
  charging such well not in not in my view basically someone saying they have killed or would kill
• 38:32
  a person of a particular attribute that's that's not a free speech matter that's actually saying
• 38:38
  that someone with the responsibilities look after the health and well being of all people that
• 38:42
  come under their care is actually saying openly they would kill or may kill a certain person
• 38:47
  of a certain background certain race whatever so that's not free speech that's just someone making
• 38:52
  an actual threat or a post about doing harm what if she'd only said all Israeli patients should die
• 39:02
  then I suppose it's less of a direct threat and then it's up to institutions like the hospital
• 39:08
  which are to side though they all have their own professional boundaries and expectations about
• 39:13
  duty of care and if you sign up to that organization and the duty of care is you treat all of your
• 39:19
  patients with equal concern then they'd be in breach of that duty of care yeah I don't see
• 39:23
  other free speech issue okay okay I mean because the argument could be made and perhaps will be
• 39:28
  made by her lawyers who knows that this was said in a spontaneous you know irreverent exchange
• 39:35
  with somebody who she didn't know I mean I'm inventing this entire I don't know what her
• 39:39
  defense is going to be but you could imagine a scenario in which you try to code what is what is
• 39:44
  being said as each has an opinion yeah yeah essentially that it's just a clumsy or
• 39:51
  impolite way of articulating a point of view that Israelis as a group don't deserve
• 39:58
  consideration and don't deserve medical treatment and ought to go away and suffer right now that
• 40:05
  might be a nasty idea but that still strikes me as an idea rather than a threat yeah but again
• 40:13
  if they weren't if they weren't nurses and they weren't actually at their place of work in their
• 40:17
  scrubs so you know it's not like they're attending a stand-up comedy gig but nobody saying they shouldn't
• 40:22
  be fired yeah nobody reasonable is the question is should she face potentially up to two years and
• 40:28
  I think I think that's where the discussion needs to be had so in other words expressing hateful
• 40:33
  things and if it's demonstrated that no actual physical harm was caused then the harm is obviously
• 40:40
  through the distress of those utterances so rather than saying yes or no my point would be we need
• 40:47
  to have a very considered discussion around where the precisely the lines go now it doesn't mean to say
• 40:52
  a line can't be drawn and has to be drawn from practical point of view we can go from the you know
• 40:57
  a vert call for incitement hatred and murder to the saying I'm off off the cuff rather off
• 41:04
  color remark obviously there needs to be a line drawn somewhere through that continuum but I think
• 41:10
  what we're facing at the moment with the raft of hate speech laws coming through both the state
• 41:14
  federal and also as a good sort of global mood is that I think there's there's many members of
• 41:19
  the community who are feeling vulnerable and I'm certainly trying to appreciate the vulnerability
• 41:24
  that say people in Jewish community may feel when they see this kind of thing it seems to me that
• 41:29
  the move towards legislating hate speech just needs to be considered a bit more carefully because
• 41:35
  the arguments put forward at the moment are around safety and keeping us safe from hate and leaving
• 41:42
  aside the legalistic determination of what is hate from the legal perspective you get the feeling
• 41:48
  nowadays that hate isn't what's that song love is all around you know it's like hate is somehow
• 41:51
  everywhere it's like some kind of pathogen and we need to protect ourselves from hate now
• 41:58
  we need to look at that idea that hate is somehow pervasive along the rise to actual harm being
• 42:04
  caused by it and are there better if you like countermeasures to addressing or pushing back against
• 42:13
  the perception of this rising hate hate speech is one type of tool hate speech laws is one kind of
• 42:19
  tool but I think there's one there's one law that overrides all other law it's the law to rule
• 42:25
  them on that's the law of unintended consequences I think we need to be very careful if we bring in
• 42:29
  and clamp down much stronger and more vigorously sort of prosecute at hate speech laws it's worth
• 42:36
  thinking about in two three five years time there might be different governments there might be
• 42:41
  different sway there might be different communities who are now utilizing a set of tools that can have
• 42:46
  all kinds of consequences beyond the current application of them and the other thing is if we're
• 42:53
  concerned about and this term gets thrown around a lot you know social social cohesion polarization
• 43:00
  if the genuine concern from our intellectual leaders and political veterans is that we need to do
• 43:06
  something to address social polarization let's go hate speech rude okay good I'm probably more
• 43:14
  interested in let's talk about who's doing the hating where the hating comes from rather than how
• 43:20
  the hate manifests in speech so if we're in a complex multicultural society and there is significant
• 43:28
  minorities of people motivated enough to say things like where are the Jews let's kill the Jews
• 43:33
  etc there could be enough a group but let's use that example rather than jumping on the let's
• 43:39
  ban that as speech my first argument would be it's good to know they're saying it as opposed to
• 43:45
  not saying it as you don't know you're thinking well they're gonna they're gonna say it they're gonna
• 43:49
  say it they're gonna say it they're gonna say it loudly to each other or they're gonna say it loudly
• 43:52
  and then they're saying the quiet gets out loud because they feel involved in to do so not pleasant
• 43:57
  but let's say that's a hypothesis then the next thing is if we're generally worried about social
• 44:03
  cohesion we should probably be more worried about the upstream elements that have led to that
• 44:09
  downstream consequence of making those hateful utterances and the irony of hate speech laws is that
• 44:17
  you run the risk of being accused of things like Islamophobia if you talk about certain clusters
• 44:22
  of beliefs within say Islamic communities particularly the more you might hard core ones that might
• 44:27
  all might not manifest themselves in these kinds of speech acts but to actually look at the
• 44:33
  cultural or sociological underpinnings of those very beliefs becomes almost impossible to talk about
• 44:39
  why because of hate speech and anti vilification so in other words the cure is actually making
• 44:45
  that the cure at the end of the pipeline let's whack on hate speech laws actually makes the deep
• 44:52
  nuanced and difficult conversation that we might need to have as a complex multicultural
• 44:56
  society almost impossible to have because we need to talk about upstream what is multiculturalism
• 45:03
  what is social cohesion whereas our tolerance for intolerance who decides those things
• 45:09
  and it's not necessarily your critical race theorists from a university and it's not necessarily
• 45:13
  your politician fascinating so just I'll get you to say that again and let me try to articulate
• 45:21
  this because I think it's a really interesting way of sort of flipping the script on hate speech
• 45:26
  is you're are you implying that had we been less averse to having conversations 15 years ago
• 45:35
  that might have been coded as hateful or bigoted or xenophobic or Islamophobic or anti-Semitic or
• 45:43
  whatever had we been more free and ran bunches in in the conversations we were willing to have
• 45:50
  we might not have gotten to a point at which the underpinnings of the current moment of hate speech
• 45:57
  had become so intense and so read a heart that the hate that the speech that we're currently seeing
• 46:02
  and the kinds of ideas that were expressed by those nurses would be present because we would have
• 46:08
  addressed I don't know the integration of Muslim communities into the broader Australian project
• 46:15
  but we weren't able to do so because to talk about that was to be labelled as a hate speech or
• 46:21
  a simulation of store something like that right and very well put yes no you have expressed
• 46:26
  it really well so say very well put no I mean I did it I'll give myself like maybe a six out of 10
• 46:31
  no I was five and a half and so but but the risk is that in the the push and the natural response
• 46:39
  from many people who feel vulnerable as the targets of hate speech is to jump on something it seems
• 46:46
  readily available and readily applicable hate speech someone gets charged bank it seems very
• 46:53
  pragmatic approach is that it will further obfuscate our ability to have conversations about what
• 46:59
  the upstream causes and being curious about what leads to these views in the first place and
• 47:08
  should we be concerned as a collective Australian community that these kinds of views
• 47:13
  fester where do they fester how they'd been allowed to fester and where were the where was the
• 47:21
  counter speech or counter arguments about those views being openly discussed right and for me
• 47:27
  jumping on the hate speech bandwagon as a as a fix makes that other conversation practically
• 47:35
  and we should say the you know in case this is misconstrued as us you know jumping on the Muslim
• 47:41
  community in Australia needlessly the the similar dynamic can occur with regards to the right
• 47:47
  and claims of anti-semitism where they'll use the cudgel of anti-semitism as a way of shutting
• 47:52
  down speech about Israel's you know in propriety so anytime Israel has anything monstrous yeah
• 47:58
  and someone points it out people say that person pointing it out is being anti-semitic because
• 48:03
  they're criticizing the Israeli government it's a similar dynamic where if we were actually able
• 48:07
  to openly and freely hash out and wrestle with our conflicted opinions about Judaism,
• 48:15
  Jewry, Israel is reallyness Jewishness multiculturalism in Australia how we bump up against
• 48:22
  each other you know Palestinian advocacy the Arab community Islamism,
• 48:27
  Judaism and talk about this stuff without being so anal about treading on egg shells then we
• 48:33
  probably would be coming at this with a greater sense of comedy and cohesion absolutely yeah and I
• 48:40
  have no doubt that the vast majority of people in the vast majority of communities want
• 48:46
  common good social occasion and to be left side left side by side with their neighbors irrespective
• 48:52
  of faith and background unfortunately we're not talking about majorities and I think there's
• 48:57
  several things to unpack here firstly precision of what you're talking about is absolutely critical
• 49:03
  so if one is criticizing the actions policies of say the Israeli government or of Netanyahu
• 49:09
  whatever then do those things and yet when we see manifestations of anti-semitism which by rights
• 49:19
  of what you've just said should be particular targeted criticisms of policies and actions by
• 49:25
  a particular government that's what it is after all and yet somehow with all that being there we
• 49:32
  still see these manifestations against Israelis broadly conceived many of whom would not agree with
• 49:38
  the actions of their government presumably and of course that just bleeds into the idea of Jews
• 49:45
  now yet be just to know whether or not the nurses who were talking about not treating Israelis
• 49:49
  or including the one in five Israelis who are Arabs in that get you know if an Arab showed up
• 49:55
  and was bleeding and it was they were in Israeli citizen would they also refuse care to that person
• 50:00
  and and this is one thing and this is where we move from a normative question about what do we
• 50:07
  think we're talking about is trying to find things to an empirical question that is what are
• 50:12
  who are they really talking about what are these things really about and it's not just
• 50:16
  in Australia as demonstrated by the nurses but it's also in research it's been done in Europe
• 50:20
  particularly with young Muslim men that in a as was published a few years ago basically Jews
• 50:29
  Israelis and various other terms are used pretty much interchangeably by a whole lot of young
• 50:33
  Muslim men of a particular Islamic bent in other words they're indistinguishable in their mind
• 50:39
  now a lot of other reasonable people including a lot of reasonable Muslim people would find no
• 50:43
  there's a fine to and legitimate distinction we must make but again talking about all this stuff
• 50:50
  which requires nuance factual correctness and precision of terms it all sounds very difficult
• 50:57
  at the moment in the sort of maelstrom of hate speech whirling around where I think very simplistic
• 51:02
  tools of yeah pull off the shelf yeah it's because there's a much more complex the law is a blunt
• 51:07
  tool isn't that I mean so you can target very specific ways of talking about something and then
• 51:12
  people will just find a slightly different way of talking about it I mean we've seen this happen
• 51:17
  about with with respect to Jews specifically in the aftermath of October 7th when people just
• 51:22
  substitute the word Jew with Zionists that's right and this is not to say everyone who ever
• 51:28
  talks about Zionist is doing this because obviously Zionism is a separate thing but they you know
• 51:33
  very popular and influential people in Australia who have hundreds of thousands or millions of
• 51:38
  followers on social media would be talking about how Zionists love the the taste of the blood of
• 51:43
  Palestinian children or like Zionists to have a blood lust for yeah and and so on in order that
• 51:49
  you know one I remember saying Zionists want to want to pretend that they're not white but
• 51:54
  they're doing the white they're behaving than the whitest possible way which is to be colonial
• 51:59
  yeah you know white supremacists well who's the Zion what does Zionist mean in that it was a
• 52:05
  white skin brown skin like loving the blood of babies we know what this is that we know what
• 52:12
  that word is a substitute for I mean some people were even talking about the idea of Israeli
• 52:17
  defense forces but using the idea of where if you remove the phrase the idea and you just put in
• 52:23
  Jews it would make total logical sense but it makes no sense whatsoever if you're talking about an
• 52:29
  army because they're talking about the characteristics of people yeah so hate speech law you know a hate
• 52:34
  speech officer might be able to come into those scenarios and go well there's nothing to see here
• 52:37
  they're just talking about the defense forces and they're talking about Zionists which is an ideology
• 52:42
  right much better to actually sit down with the person to have a conversation about what they're
• 52:46
  really talking about yeah so which is again greater wisdom while it's painful and we're obviously
• 52:53
  need robust underpinnings of civility which of course is now is now viewed out in a very
• 53:00
  derogatory land as things yeah do we need civility I mean I'm always I'm always the anti-civility
• 53:06
  person in a way because I feel like civility does a similar thing to hate speech legislation
• 53:10
  because it hapers over differences instead of just to just actually have the fucking conversation
• 53:14
  the way that you want to I agree I wouldn't use civility in the tweet the sort of
• 53:20
  tweet sense I do civility in this part of it part of it in a civil society we should be able to
• 53:26
  have robust maybe even heated debates but without constantly drawing a caricature of the opponent
• 53:32
  now so we're getting a little bit off free speech but it's all part of the maelstrom of where free
• 53:36
  speech arguments are at the moment and I think what happened is through through a variety of things
• 53:44
  over the last what so 10 20 years it is increasingly hard to have conversations that are on contentious
• 53:52
  issues often because the people who feel slited by those conversations are my cry harm now as I've
• 53:59
  often had to point out to colleagues and people in the community who talked to me there's a
• 54:04
  sliding scale of harm there's sort of Salman Rushdie harm getting getting nearly killed by an
• 54:10
  islamist with a knife and then there's causing offense harm now in the line prior to sorry to
• 54:16
  interrupt but even prior to this latest outrage against Salman Rushdie you know you could say well
• 54:22
  when he was completely untouched by any physical harm that's what I've had his life entirely
• 54:27
  arranged by words and pondering you know for all those of us that are old old enough to remember
• 54:33
  the satanic verses sort of controversy in the fatwa against him
• 54:38
  we were screwed then as as a sort of liberal democratic society of elites supposedly you know my
• 54:46
  colleagues in universities politicians and another so-called four leaders public intellectuals
• 54:51
  because so much of the response when that initial fatwa came out and a man was basically put
• 54:57
  on a hit list for writing a book that offended people it was well he's caused a lot of harm and
• 55:04
  you know he's really offended Muslims and blah blah blah now the fact that it was so poorly managed
• 55:11
  at the time it's it doesn't surprise me at all that what 30 years later or whatever it is
• 55:17
  we're really fucked because that was a very early case and indeed even a landmark case
• 55:23
  of the capability to turn around and say I'm sorry it's caused you harm but in our society
• 55:28
  western open democratic societies with all of its faults and flaws and troubled history etc
• 55:35
  causing you offence is something we are perfectly prepared to support him doing and in fact
• 55:44
  you can you can be offended we're okay with you being offended but if you dear threaten the life
• 55:50
  of this person already supporters his publishers and others who did pay with their lives and
• 55:54
  around all this stuff yeah people are aware that there were people actually killed that's right
• 55:59
  his translator that his translators was was assassinated one of his that was a disgraceful scandal
• 56:05
  of weakness from western liberal democracies at the time because already by this stage it was
• 56:11
  really setting in motion the idea that you have caused us harm so we're going to harm you now
• 56:16
  as a big sliding scale between offending your religion and killing someone or if there's not a
• 56:23
  sliding scale for those of us that aren't embedded within deeply fundamentalist religious cultures
• 56:29
  if there's not a sliding scale there's a problem so in other words if writing something it's offensive
• 56:34
  to your religion makes you feel compelled to respond with violence then sorry you're
• 56:41
  religion get stuffed in our society if we have people in our Australian liberal democratic free
• 56:46
  society who feel that offending their religion is such an egregious thing to do they will threaten
• 56:52
  violence then you've got to ask why are you here and we don't want you here that's got nothing
• 56:57
  to do with hate speech and free speech that's got to do with what are the fundamental values
• 57:01
  of a liberal democratic society in the 21st century and what is our tolerance for intolerance
• 57:08
  and I see hate speech laws making that conversation even harder not even better because
• 57:13
  someone can then claim you caused me harm because you offended my conception of the
• 57:19
  of the sacred text of the sacred figure of whatever and my response is I'm sorry you're living
• 57:25
  in this country that's going to be the price of living in this country you can go to lots of
• 57:28
  countries where blasphemy leads to stoning and death in fact majority Muslim countries have
• 57:34
  blasphemy laws in place you can go there you're most welcome to be there can we have a conversation
• 57:40
  about do we want people in our country and it doesn't have to be Islamic by the way can be any
• 57:44
  religious or cultural view that if you take offense that badly you need to leave those values
• 57:51
  at the doorstep and not bring them here as opposed to us empowering them and indeed infantilizing
• 57:57
  them by saying oh no this speech is a cause is caused you offense it's hate speech it's interesting
• 58:03
  God forbid I am not old enough to remember the stonic verses but I am certainly old enough to
• 58:09
  remember Charlie Abdul which had a similar ring to it where I do remember reading very thoughtful
• 58:14
  pieces by very learned academics and activists in the United States at the time saying well yes of
• 58:22
  course you know executing people for publishing a magazine is bad but these people were peddling
• 58:28
  in the in the lowest grade kinds of you know racial and ethnic stereotypes about Muslims and
• 58:35
  and I remember being yeah somewhat persuaded in the sense of just like not in terms of the
• 58:40
  justice of shooting somebody but in terms of like the sort of what the fuck did you expect it was
• 58:44
  going to happen when you went up and whacked to the b hive of course the b's were going to come
• 58:49
  out and sting you and that's such a pernicious way of looking at things because it's completely
• 58:55
  um uh uh a moral like it it you know sometimes there is a utility in whacking a a b hive if the
• 59:03
  b hive is completely fucked at a range you know you want to make a satirical point about whacking
• 59:07
  b hives then you should be able to do so I agree we should stand up stand by you where we have
• 59:12
  enormous problems now as in in the current cultural moment of you know um my truth lived experience
• 59:19
  etc is that we've we've now allowed people who have been able to redefine harm truth values in such a way
• 59:29
  that it turns the tables on what would have been a perfectly sensible conversation maybe 20-30
• 59:35
  years ago about this isn't actually causing you harm it's just defending something about your
• 59:39
  religion or your faith not saying those things in themselves are good or bad we'll note though
• 59:46
  through history there's been a lot of very good critiques of faith and they are not unique we
• 59:50
  shouldn't focus on uh Islamic faith it's not like the Catholics and the Protestants haven't had their
• 59:56
  own trouble over here these things go back in the ages where there is this idea that you can get
• 1:00:02
  triggered so bad to your resort to violence because someone questions your belief systems
• 1:00:08
  it would have been nice to think we'd got past that with the enlightenment but something has
• 1:00:12
  now happened where those are using the they are able to weaponize taking offense
• 1:00:19
  and the grievance of taking offense to somehow put it on the same table of conversation about
• 1:00:25
  actual violence and that is absolutely not yeah I mean it's a bit it these people would not tolerate
• 1:00:30
  because you know the person who says what did you expect me to do you are offending me so badly
• 1:00:35
  I had to fight back and defend myself because you were erasing my identity or denigrating my
• 1:00:42
  identity or something how much time would those people give to a male perpetrator of domestic violence
• 1:00:48
  who said look what you made me do you were just I mean yeah it might not be right that I hit you
• 1:00:52
  but I mean of course you should have predicted that I was going to respond when I was so
• 1:00:56
  when you were behaving towards me was so much disrespect we don't tolerate that in a domestic
• 1:01:01
  violent situation and we shouldn't tolerate it when it comes to people's ideology exactly and I
• 1:01:04
  think you've you've you've really landed on what is the what is the call signal or message that
• 1:01:11
  you know something's really stuffed up and it's when you can't identify the perpetrator and the
• 1:01:17
  agency of the perpetrator we have moved thank God to the point where in the case of domestic violence
• 1:01:23
  and intimate partner violence we can talk about the perpetrator and get past those ideas of they
• 1:01:28
  were pushed to it or their masculinity was under threat or whatever no they went and killed
• 1:01:33
  this wife these kids were that chose us we need to look at their agency whenever you hear
• 1:01:38
  grievance stories to justify violence but somehow the the actor within that the perpetrator is
• 1:01:47
  strangely absent then I think alarm bells need to rise another tweet we hear about systemic
• 1:01:54
  this although they were caught up in Australia systemic racism now all of a sudden we're not
• 1:02:00
  talking about the perpetrators and their agency as we quite rightly do with domestic violence
• 1:02:06
  I would argue though that we don't even do that with domestic violence because have you ever heard
• 1:02:10
  about the agency of perpetrators when we talk about indigenous violence
• 1:02:15
  not much no why is that in fact what do you hear in its place you hear about Australia's dark
• 1:02:21
  colonial past you hear about systemic racism you hear about X Y Z funnily enough you hear very
• 1:02:28
  little about the agency the motivation potentially the misogyny and violence of the perpetrator
• 1:02:35
  they are raised from the narrative and yet anything other than a particular minority community
• 1:02:40
  we talk all the time about the agency of the perpetrator so it is very odd that when it comes
• 1:02:46
  to mainstream domestic violence that is the right kind of domestic violence in a verticommas
• 1:02:53
  we have progressed a long way in the last 10 or 20 years to call out agency of the perpetrator
• 1:02:57
  and stop making excuses right because what cisgender heterosexual males have agency
• 1:03:03
  traditionally disenfranchised communities do not it's it I mean up well apparently
• 1:03:08
  but the thing is um power is a great power is a situation that's narrative right power is
• 1:03:12
  situational so do we want a professor of critical social justice or something from a university
• 1:03:18
  on a on a ten-year position living in in a city apartment with a concierge telling us what the
• 1:03:24
  agency of violent men are in remote communities I don't know if we do like lies with you know closed
• 1:03:30
  religious communities of whatever it will happen to be could be Jova's witness could be ultra-orthodox
• 1:03:35
  Jewish communities violence towards girls sexual assault towards young children etc in any closed
• 1:03:43
  religious typically community um we need we need to be able to talk about what are the things that
• 1:03:49
  lead to that and it might mean at times having very uncomfortable conversations about
• 1:03:54
  what are the belief systems and the social dynamics that lead to those things happening
• 1:03:59
  but always with the clear view of the agency of perpetrators so again all this stuff gets muddied
• 1:04:05
  up with hate speech I mean you're reminding me a little bit I had a great conversation with Tim
• 1:04:09
  mentioned not that long ago where he was like making that point yeah about agent it's noticed
• 1:04:16
  the groups to whom we give agency and the groups to whom we have we give sympathy yeah so I think
• 1:04:21
  we were talking about Israel and Palestine where you know the the mainstream narrative amongst
• 1:04:29
  social justice types is that Palestinians are victims who have no agency you know the the fact
• 1:04:34
  that they voted for Hamas is written off as a what did you expect them to do after so many years
• 1:04:40
  of oppression the fact that Hamas you know slaughtered and raped Israelis is like well what did you
• 1:04:45
  expect them to do if they were trapped in an outdoor concentration camp the misdeeds of Israel
• 1:04:51
  are given agency like why the Israeli is choosing to do this why the Israeli is choosing to do that
• 1:04:57
  and it's revealing about a certain kind of anti-Arab racism even amongst the people who claim to be
• 1:05:03
  the spokesperson for the Arabs you know the soft bigotry of low expectations as Obama put it
• 1:05:09
  Brett Kavanaugh the the Supreme Court justice has 100% agency in the eyes of the people who were
• 1:05:16
  opposing his appointment for the actions that he took as an apparently misguided drunken
• 1:05:23
  handsy teenager and you know in college but a young black kid who who acts up is just a consequence
• 1:05:32
  of their environment in a way that Bruce Kavanaugh supposedly isn't so it is an interesting
• 1:05:36
  double standard I mean the the thing about Salman Rushdie to loop that back in here would be that
• 1:05:42
  in the modern era it's not the case that people who are agrived are normally respond with violence
• 1:05:50
  people who are agrived in the 21st century respond with a network of tactics that has come to be
• 1:05:58
  called cancel culture or you know some sort of I can't quite identify it but can you speak to
• 1:06:06
  that phenomenon of it's not that it's not that the the victims of a slight against their identity
• 1:06:15
  are becoming violent so we can't pin that on them but they are behaving in ways that aren't
• 1:06:20
  consistent with a traditional vision of free speech yes and I suppose that's we can broadly
• 1:06:26
  categorize I think the discussion around free speech and the risks to it or the threats upon it in
• 1:06:32
  two ways one of which is things like avert legislation laws you know sort of black and white things
• 1:06:38
  and then the argument is about how they applied what are their limits etc etc so that's one thing
• 1:06:44
  and then the other thing is about the sort of the free speech mindset of self-sensorship preference
• 1:06:50
  falsification all the stuff which if you spent long enough in the academy and maybe if you
• 1:06:54
  spent long enough in the media that's actually for me an issue of at least equal concern
• 1:07:01
  that is to say that it doesn't even make it to the point of being contested in the open is
• 1:07:05
  this a free speech issue because the issue itself doesn't even get raised discussed in any forum
• 1:07:10
  within interest in actors do a lot of there's not a lot of need for blasphemy laws in Saudi Arabia
• 1:07:17
  because nobody's going to say that's wrong anything against that's right Islam itself and so
• 1:07:22
  so look at the look at the incentive from the wards in in a university setting you're a you're a
• 1:07:27
  young student you're done well maybe you've done a knowledge degree you're hitting it off with
• 1:07:31
  your supervisor there will only be an overtoned window of topics that you can do in your area that
• 1:07:38
  are the right kind of topics with the right kinds of methods with the right kinds of people that
• 1:07:43
  you're quote they can even possibly lead you into a successful career in academia and I've had
• 1:07:49
  the case and this is based on firsthand experience of of people coming talk to me both undergraduates
• 1:07:55
  and especially post-graduates doing PhD in honors where they've actually said I I want to look at
• 1:08:02
  given examples saying the indigenous space I want to look at this particular framework of
• 1:08:07
  indigenous culture and but no they were given Bruce Pasco's book Dark Emu as their fundamental
• 1:08:13
  text to work from despite the fact that this is a different non-Australians this is a book that
• 1:08:18
  takes an extremely sympathetic view of First Nations prehistory and is has been criticized for
• 1:08:25
  for actually being overly for exaggerating how peaceful and sophisticated pre-European First
• 1:08:32
  Nations particularly around farming and agriculture as we frame it now and it's a work he's not
• 1:08:38
  he's not an academic although I think he enjoys a professorial position at a university
• 1:08:44
  he's of uncertain academic intellectual and cultural credibility in the minds of many people
• 1:08:50
  but nonetheless his book and his message became the thing to like decolonize assumptions about
• 1:08:57
  indigenous people being semi-nomadic for instance and their ways of life and the sophistication
• 1:09:03
  the technology and culture etc and so what we have is the narrative and the political correctness
• 1:09:10
  of your topic and how you frame it becomes more important than actually undertaking original
• 1:09:15
  critically-minded research and you can multiply that example by a thousand that by the time you
• 1:09:21
  make it to university and you start a research project and perhaps become a PhD student and
• 1:09:26
  you're looking at getting some part-time work with etc etc you want to get some grants you want
• 1:09:31
  to get references for jobs if you're known to be the person that goes against a narrative that
• 1:09:36
  is just taken for granted within that institutional context you've got Buckley's chance so what happens
• 1:09:42
  is there is a sorting within what is acceptable what is not acceptable to even talk about
• 1:09:50
  in a way that I think if you look back in the areas that I'm interested even 10 or 20 years so
• 1:09:55
  issues of male violence in indigenous communities sexual abuse violence towards women
• 1:10:00
  rampant problems 10 or 20 years ago there were social scientists people that were working
• 1:10:06
  social work there was remarkable scholars like Peter Sutton very very famous Australian anthropologist
• 1:10:13
  non-indigenous but he lived on country and multiple languages actually pointing out that
• 1:10:19
  there are whole areas of concern and study and discussion to have around both traditional and
• 1:10:25
  non-traditional elements of misogyny and male female hierarchy in indigenous traditional communities
• 1:10:32
  and some of those things need to be discussed in relation to how well those communities are
• 1:10:35
  functioning now also noting the often horrendous effect of colonization and a whole lot of other
• 1:10:41
  things as well so this is not white-bushing anything and yet in the last five or 10 years that
• 1:10:47
  literature has practically disappeared and the only thing we have now when we're talking about say
• 1:10:52
  dysfunctional disadvantage or the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians
• 1:10:56
  it's all around colonization they need to decolonize with it so as a young PhD student if you put
• 1:11:03
  forward the thesis said I'd like to follow up on Peter Sutton's idea about what he called
• 1:11:08
  the politics of suffering is the name of this book terrific book I'd recommend your readers and
• 1:11:13
  viewers check it out certainly Australian ones politics of suffering a young PhD student says look
• 1:11:18
  this is a very very fine scholar deeply embedded in indigenous culture enormous intellectual power
• 1:11:24
  and he had this particular threat of inquiry what do you think the chances are of that PhD
• 1:11:29
  proposal getting up getting through ethics getting a supervisor to supervise it because the
• 1:11:34
  whole debate is effectively being quashed so we don't even make it to the point of this is a
• 1:11:39
  free inquiry issue no one is stopping you asking those questions but there is no career to be had
• 1:11:46
  and you could multiply it over any number of wicked social problems all right let me try to articulate
• 1:11:51
  this let me try to seal man the position that would defend that if anyone would which would be to say
• 1:11:59
  such inquiries are not hate speech per se but they are kind of hate speech adjacent in the sense that
• 1:12:06
  a little bit like taking an undue interest in the relative IQ differences between black people and
• 1:12:12
  white people and Asians they are either ignorant of or or intentionally antagonistic towards an
• 1:12:22
  egalitarian vision of society where we reconcile ourselves to the sins of the past recognize that
• 1:12:29
  we live in a white supremacist society acknowledge that the country's founded on genocide and anyone who
• 1:12:35
  gets their rocks off by like trying to get their hands dirty wrestling with precisely how violent or
• 1:12:43
  sexist indigenous males specifically are is suspect to the overarching mission of making the world
• 1:12:51
  a better place and get uplifting the indigenous people that's a good still manning at least a bronze
• 1:12:57
  manning so couple of different things one of which is if you're genuinely committed to improving
• 1:13:04
  a lot of disadvantaged people you should be as a colony of that you should be interested in what
• 1:13:11
  other things that will actually make a practical difference to those people on the ground so if the
• 1:13:16
  betterment of society overall and bridging the gap is absolutely critical then you should have a
• 1:13:23
  passion for what works and then you look at how you control the narrative and possible negative
• 1:13:27
  aspects of how the narrative can be weaponized I see very little interest in that the second thing is
• 1:13:33
  on a more empirical this and what sort of normative approach on the more empirical approach is that
• 1:13:37
  there are eminent indigenous women scholars who have pointed out precisely this point about
• 1:13:42
  indigenous male misogyny in their communities their voices are practically being drowned out
• 1:13:47
  because of indigenous leadership in this country they claim so there are people within the
• 1:13:52
  communities themselves who are indigenous who understand or articulate this problem but they've
• 1:13:57
  got back these chance and again I commend the work of Suzanne Ingram very rare fine indigenous
• 1:14:03
  scholar that has written now several pieces on how narratives of colonization of the skate
• 1:14:10
  elements of indigenous misogyny and male violence and that has been that that debate can't even
• 1:14:17
  be had even by indigenous women themselves because it is so dominated by a convenient argument
• 1:14:23
  led by indigenous men right that's a good point so it's really in other words it's rarely about
• 1:14:30
  a white person's perspective and a black person's perspective it's usually about a white person who
• 1:14:37
  usually does carry some position of power because they might have the impromarter of an institution
• 1:14:42
  and academic institution behind them they might have wealth privilege and so on and they certainly
• 1:14:47
  don't face racism the way that people color do them choosing and selecting which members of the
• 1:14:53
  minority community get to have their voice elevated and which don't and we see there's a lot
• 1:14:58
  coming back to the Muslim community that there will frequently be a reflexive siding of white
• 1:15:06
  social progressives with some of the most regressive and misogynistic voices in the Muslim
• 1:15:13
  community because those voices are able to stand up and present themselves as being spokespeople
• 1:15:18
  for that community and it's actually there can be a silencing for example of the dissident atheist
• 1:15:26
  feminist 15-year-old Muslim girl because she's covered in a veil and inside while we applaud
• 1:15:34
  exactly the you know the the speechifying of some imam at a conservative mass so I think two
• 1:15:40
  things are good follow up there one of which is the this idea of in the room privilege
• 1:15:45
  it's actually the name of an article published a few years ago I can't remember the author but it
• 1:15:48
  really struck me I think he was a writer of color from the US I think it's called in the room
• 1:15:55
  privilege and others have referred to it it's the idea that any university organization
• 1:16:00
  business whatever they'll have their go-to people that in their own naive view represent or speak
• 1:16:08
  on behalf of that community so you end up with a collection of people around you that might have
• 1:16:14
  might be of different colors and genders and those that have organized them and arranged them
• 1:16:19
  to come in have that perception that somehow they are representative of their community
• 1:16:25
  but that's in the room privilege they just happen to be the people
• 1:16:28
  vitally or wrongly who have end up positioning themselves as the spokespeople for that community
• 1:16:33
  now if we want to talk about gender imbalance in some high control religious communities
• 1:16:39
  Muslim rabbis then wouldn't it be great to get the 13 year old teenage girl in
• 1:16:45
  who's going to do that who's going to speak for them probably not the 13 year old girl if we're
• 1:16:50
  going to talk about gay and lesbian youth within these close communities who's speaking behind
• 1:16:55
  that maybe they're a bit more organized so there's in the room privilege then the other thing is
• 1:17:01
  that people who position themselves as spokespeople for their communities
• 1:17:06
  yes they are and they may even be doing it in perfectly good faith that they've often got other
• 1:17:10
  agendas to push and when those of us let's say in the mainstream are desperately looking for
• 1:17:17
  connectivity into minority or marginalized communities it it behooves us to be extra careful
• 1:17:24
  about who we end up selecting because certainly in the US and in Europe we've seen the flourishing
• 1:17:31
  of organizations like Muslim Brotherhood because they are managed to position themselves as being
• 1:17:37
  the moderate non-violent voices of the Muslim community but in fact they have a vast array of
• 1:17:42
  political and often very anti-democratic agendas to push but because they're not the violent
• 1:17:47
  types that are threatening to cut the head off someone there that they're the ones that if you
• 1:17:51
  like the mainstream vote go to so you end up with all these proxy organizations you know the Muslim
• 1:17:56
  Association for this the people else etc that have the have the facade of looking like they represent
• 1:18:03
  an entire community whatever that means it's not like there's there's minorities within minorities
• 1:18:10
  there's dispossessed within minority communities as has been said there's the smallest
• 1:18:15
  minority of all is the individual yeah and and so we need to be aware and certainly not naive that
• 1:18:22
  when there are various community spokespeople there are certain people within those communities
• 1:18:27
  using the time and the verticals who will position themselves precisely for that function
• 1:18:32
  and my concern is you know when people ask me about my view about these religious things I said
• 1:18:36
  well talk to the atheists and the apostates talk to the people that have left these high control
• 1:18:42
  communities although I'd ever type islamical not get their reflections because they're the ones
• 1:18:49
  that can tell you about what it was like to be ultimately an outsider within a community that has
• 1:18:53
  high control over their beliefs and how they present it so ironically enough I probably got more
• 1:18:59
  ex-Muslim friends and Muslim friends but my ex-Muslim friends often have to travel incognito this
• 1:19:05
  is in Australia they travel incognito they're very conscious of their personal security and they
• 1:19:12
  know that they'll get no interest from mainstream Australian progressives who have they want to go
• 1:19:21
  to the in the room privilege of a self-appointed spokesperson for a community they don't want to go
• 1:19:27
  to someone that has been marginalized and left that community and hear their story that's
• 1:19:31
  right how many it yeah and you would probably steal man their point of view in a similar way to
• 1:19:37
  the way that I just did with the other point of view in that it would be something along the lines
• 1:19:41
  of why do we need to elevate voices that obviously have a chip on their shoulder and are trying
• 1:19:45
  to denigrate a community because they've been excluded by it instead of trying to hear from
• 1:19:49
  somebody who is in line with this community and is all about uplifting and spreading positive vibes
• 1:19:55
  about that community you know why why kick the hornets nest so to speak and having been a
• 1:20:00
  a producer before I was talent so to speak quite an quote talent I know what it's like to
• 1:20:06
  be putting together a busy show and getting a press release in your email and it's from some
• 1:20:12
  organization or association and they're offering up a person who is who has some credibility
• 1:20:19
  you know people who don't work in the media might not realize anyone out there can just
• 1:20:23
  hire a publicist or even do it themselves to create an association of something or other
• 1:20:28
  and write a press release that reads like a news article and journalists and editors
• 1:20:34
  and producers are so overworked and so starved for content that they'll just they can see it
• 1:20:40
  they can picture in their mind what the news story is they can imagine what the six-minute
• 1:20:44
  conversation on the today show couch will be like or you know on the talkback radio show will be
• 1:20:49
  like they can see how many column inches this is going to fill and the work is sort of done for
• 1:20:54
  them and it's like you know the association of you know Buddhist Australians or something you
• 1:21:00
  know has has come out against the government's bloody blire okay let's get this person on there
• 1:21:04
  from the there the president of the association of Buddhist what what are we call it's you know
• 1:21:08
  and that is how it works and that that's how you get in the room and meanwhile there is no
• 1:21:15
  nobody has the time or resources or inclination to dig into whether or not that's reflective of
• 1:21:19
  the broad-of-view views of Australian Buddhists yeah and now let's say the the business model
• 1:21:26
  in media is such that that's almost inevitable let's just say that for a moment then what other
• 1:21:31
  institutions need to be doing the job to make up for that and obviously our university is a key
• 1:21:37
  I thought you were going to say sub-stack sub-stack is the answer well let's end it up being the
• 1:21:42
  answer and that's the why you've raised that let's riff on that for a bit because the remarkable
• 1:21:48
  rise of podcasts sub you know people doing sub-stack going back now a few years that's terrific I
• 1:21:55
  think it's awesome but you could also take the view of it as being that's a symptom of a deeply broken
• 1:22:01
  mainstream process because there would be no need to subscribe to your amazing show with your
• 1:22:08
  terrific guests there'd be no need to to do all of these people that are sort of on the they've been
• 1:22:13
  in the mainstream but now perhaps on the periphery doing their own thing which there's a multitude
• 1:22:18
  those things wouldn't exist if you could open up your paper every day on your phone or on
• 1:22:23
  whatever and all that stuff was covered because people would be getting their fill of diverse
• 1:22:27
  perspectives reasonable in-depth nuanced discussions whether you agree or not at least you're
• 1:22:33
  hearing an articulate steel manning of something that's terrific doesn't matter if you agree with it
• 1:22:39
  but at least you've heard it because we're not getting that we've got the flourishing of
• 1:22:45
  sub-stacks and those that are on the margins and it's not just the joe Rogan's of it's that whole
• 1:22:50
  ecosystem of you know thousands upon thousands of people with these sub-stacks of anything from
• 1:22:55
  a few hundred to many thousands yeah there's a reason they're all there which is not to say there
• 1:22:59
  isn't a problem with that as well because you know the one of the downsides of the legacy media is
• 1:23:04
  that if I touched a subject that is one of these issues which we know is triggering a trip wire
• 1:23:10
  then I would know that I was going to spend a half a day responding to complaints about it and
• 1:23:14
  defending myself and it was you know that there was a high price to pay that's one of the downsides
• 1:23:19
  of being in the legacy media but one of the upsides of being in the legacy media is that you're
• 1:23:22
  going to have to spend a half day responding to complaints if you do want to really go out there
• 1:23:29
  and tackle difficult stuff whereas going out there and saying provocative things in podcasts
• 1:23:34
  to stand is consequence free in fact there may be a rewarding feedback loop in the list that you
• 1:23:40
  get more and more more and more of an audience so we're going to have to find some hybrid I mean
• 1:23:45
  I'm trying to do it myself but I'm one tiny data point in an ocean that we're going to have to
• 1:23:50
  find some hybrid that has the credibility and responsibility of the legacy media alongside the
• 1:23:57
  love of freedom and troublemaking and contrarianism of the independent press absolutely so it's not
• 1:24:03
  like I'm not saying it's a solution all I'm saying is it's an it's inevitable consequence because
• 1:24:07
  the demand is still there to have this stuff and it's not being met if you like within the mainstream
• 1:24:13
  for what for a variety of reasons I would say it's not just the business model it's also the
• 1:24:18
  almost you know ideological conformity but exists in many of these organizations that you won't
• 1:24:23
  even get a job you won't just like within academia you've got no career unless you're on brand
• 1:24:28
  and on message yeah and no doubt in journalism but certainly in academia you know the the sacred
• 1:24:34
  cow of academia is now social justice in an institution that used to be committed to that
• 1:24:41
  twee idea of truth seeking how clean is that you know so and yet somehow it's all just being allowed
• 1:24:48
  to happen and nobody really talks about it anymore and so as a result you know social justice
• 1:24:53
  trademark now cement that overton window to mean there's a whole lot of stuff you're just never
• 1:24:59
  going to talk about you're never going to study you're never going to see steel man and you're never
• 1:25:03
  going to have a career doing it and that's just it it's been set and it's been set now for I'd say
• 1:25:08
  for several years in academia and I mean the part of what's what that's throwing up for me is also
• 1:25:13
  this misunderstanding of what diversity means in the sense that you know a diverse you said you
• 1:25:18
  want to open the newspaper or open the newspapers app on your phone and see a diverse range of points
• 1:25:22
  of view well newsrooms for the past 10 or 15 years have been working really hard to increase the
• 1:25:28
  diversity of their journalists journalists and and their writers and their points of view you know
• 1:25:35
  entire ABC is just moved to Western Sydney at vast taxpayer expense as a as a sort of cowardly
• 1:25:41
  response to the conservative Scott Morrison government's attacks on it being an elitist white
• 1:25:46
  middle class institution in in the in you know in downtown Sydney it's going to a more ethnically
• 1:25:52
  diverse part of a city there's a misunderstanding about what diversity is in the sense that
• 1:26:01
  we've become obsessed with a bunch of checkboxes so that diversity means you hire a lot of people
• 1:26:09
  who come from different ethnicities or religious backgrounds or have different sexualities
• 1:26:14
  but we're not focusing on whether or not they are from different classes what their economic
• 1:26:19
  background was what their education level was you know what their political leanings are whether
• 1:26:24
  they have interesting ideological points of view those things aren't captured so you you can end
• 1:26:29
  up with quite an undiverse sort of sphere of thinking at the same time as you have a maximally
• 1:26:36
  diverse you know group of identities two things can be true at once and that is you can have that
• 1:26:42
  on on the surface diversity but you can also be in an echo chamber and and then sometimes I want
• 1:26:47
  to push and prod that idea of even diversity as it's currently manifest you know it'd be great
• 1:26:52
  to know how many people coming through certain programs at universities studying towards journalism
• 1:26:58
  or whatever it happens to be how many went to a certain type of selective school how many lived in
• 1:27:04
  a certain type of suburb how many of them did ballet lessons and music lessons after class how many
• 1:27:09
  of them went to extra tutorials or classes on the weekend run and being run around by their parents
• 1:27:15
  um you know there's a certain conformity to that as well so if if there's
• 1:27:21
  diversity is almost blindingly a good thing if it's understood to mean the full richness and
• 1:27:26
  representation of our of our you know complex societies but we need to think about the filtering
• 1:27:32
  that happens and those that remain standing that appear to be diverse at the end what are those
• 1:27:38
  qualities and characteristics that they have that that really represent a genuine diversity from
• 1:27:44
  a range of perspectives and that's where I think the classic Marxists are right they they bemoan
• 1:27:49
  the lack of interest in socioeconomic background because that for most people is the fundamental
• 1:27:54
  exclusion in getting into university getting into journalism having an unpaid you know position
• 1:28:01
  that you got to go to um there's all kinds of exclusions that occur but they're in some ways
• 1:28:08
  they're colorblind if I can use that term which I know is probably triggering for some people
• 1:28:12
  less the truly colorblind um there's there's a colorblindness that those that emerge through
• 1:28:18
  various almost inevitably elite programs will share an awful lot of similar characteristics
• 1:28:24
  and privileges in their life and you know there's there's been prominent examples in Australia where
• 1:28:30
  I can't remember her name in the name doesn't matter where a I think it was a female basketballer of color
• 1:28:36
  um was you know quite happy to be seen on um on marches through towards indigenous Australia
• 1:28:43
  and and was quite happy to go on media talking about Australia's dark colonial past and racism
• 1:28:50
  and then she got into massive trouble for calling a another a team player from an overseas country
• 1:28:55
  a monkey now did that person have a privilege background do they go to a private school
• 1:29:00
  do they ever have financial worries in their life does their skin color privilege them to make
• 1:29:06
  comments and judgments about other people based on the quality of their skin color or based on the
• 1:29:13
  actual quality and experiences that lived in their own life and I think it's a very topical
• 1:29:18
  thing at the moment in the sports space so I think this small idea of diversity it's thrown around
• 1:29:23
  and it's it's so fast I mean taking up your Marxist point it'd be interesting to see if you
• 1:29:30
  if like if an organization or an educational institution or a government department wanted to
• 1:29:35
  trial a form of diversity of DEI where whose sole metric was is what was the income let's get the
• 1:29:44
  income tax records of your parents from the age of from when you were born until the age of 15
• 1:29:50
  absolutely let's just make sure that we've got lots of people who earned who were in the
• 1:29:55
  the bottom quartile for example of the income bracket when they were growing up and
• 1:30:00
  I know it's certainly in Australia an offshore of the statistics but certainly in the UK
• 1:30:05
  there's a very troubling underclass of young angry white men that are poorly educated
• 1:30:11
  in systemically poor positions and even the practical empirical concerns about what might
• 1:30:16
  that manifest in in the future but the fact is they are deeply deprived deeply under appreciate
• 1:30:23
  and ignored because they don't fit the right color coding for diversity so it really is a matter
• 1:30:28
  of what do you mean what does one mean by diversity and what does one mean by disadvantage now maybe
• 1:30:34
  these young white angry teenagers that are in unemployed areas at the UK don't suffer from systemic
• 1:30:40
  racism that sort of term that gets thrown around but they may well be suffering from a whole
• 1:30:45
  lot of other deeply entrenched systemic disadvantages that are equally intractable and for example
• 1:30:52
  yes and they don't have the person who can speak on their behalf by putting out the press release
• 1:30:57
  and emailing it to journalists to say like you know the representative of the like what is their
• 1:31:02
  community you know like angry white unemployed people that's right because it's understandably
• 1:31:07
  and rightly taboo to conceive of oneself as white with a capital W and only a white supremacist
• 1:31:13
  or an E.O. Nazi would do so and would take pride in one's ethnicity right in one's race if you're
• 1:31:18
  white as a result issues that would otherwise be addressed on a communitarian identity basis if
• 1:31:26
  they were any other community and would have that press release and would have that spokesperson
• 1:31:31
  going on the radio and talking about you know what the community what you know what what the
• 1:31:35
  community of people living with disabilities really needs is blah blah blah you can't say what
• 1:31:40
  the community of young white men really needs I mean you know I was laugh even just imagining it
• 1:31:46
  you know it's a it's a comedy sketch to have like some unemployed angry white male talking about
• 1:31:53
  you know the the deeply felt you know historical trauma of his community and how he needs to
• 1:31:59
  how they need a better about a lot in life which brings us right back to the to the point about
• 1:32:04
  hate speech which is I got into an argument on Q&A on ABC TV with the Safety Commissioner Julian
• 1:32:10
  Grant when she was saying that it was hate speech that it was incitement to violence and it was
• 1:32:14
  it was I think she said hate speech but certainly incitement to violence for people for commentators
• 1:32:20
  like Elon Musk and Douglas Murray to in the wake of the London race riots say that this was
• 1:32:27
  inevitable that they'd been warning about it that it was going to get worse that Britain was headed
• 1:32:31
  for a civil war because that was inciting people to racism then it does blow up and when he says
• 1:32:39
  told you it's going to blow up everyone says incitement not a solution no and I think
• 1:32:45
  hopefully we're not in that state yet in Australia but we're certainly following all the patterns
• 1:32:51
  of hate speech laws and we're we're following the same trends that make it harder and harder to have
• 1:32:59
  conversations now it doesn't mean to say the conversations won't be hard it doesn't mean to say that
• 1:33:05
  the conversations might requiring people to understand you can hold two contradictory views in your
• 1:33:09
  head to at least understand them that is all true and but it's also true and I think you've pointed
• 1:33:15
  this out in your own podcast and reflections on this subsequent to that exchange entanglement that
• 1:33:21
  you had with the Safety Commissioner that the only people left talking about it are the people we
• 1:33:26
  do not want left talking about it because there are genuinely racist misogynistic people in our
• 1:33:32
  society yes who are not what the vast majority of people want saying things even if those things
• 1:33:38
  are true so there's a fundamental lack of authority and legitimacy to having difficult conversations
• 1:33:48
  and because of that that absolute vacuum of having those conversations amongst people that are
• 1:33:54
  actually concerned but prepared to sit down and try to nut it out it is left to the nutters
• 1:33:59
  and that is that is doubly bad because it also means of course and you've pointed this out that
• 1:34:04
  people on the other side will say look they said it yeah yeah I mean that's right yes after
• 1:34:09
  the after that television appearance I wrote a piece in the city morning Harold in which I said
• 1:34:14
  something like if the only people talking honestly about the challenge of multicultural integration
• 1:34:23
  xenophobic fascists then we're in trouble because people are going to listen to xenophobic fascists
• 1:34:29
  if they're the only ones you know speaking about it we have to sort of reclaim the same center
• 1:34:34
  from the extremes because people aren't going to people aren't just going to believe bullshit
• 1:34:40
  indefinitely that's not going to they're not going to believe the the patina of gloss that we try
• 1:34:44
  to put over things indefinitely at some point you've got to have a reckoning at some point you've
• 1:34:49
  got to have the conversation either you're going to have a conversation or you're going to have
• 1:34:52
  riots so so the key thing then becomes what institutions and leaders need to step up to address
• 1:34:59
  that absolutely existential threat for you know cohesive safe civil society and one of the key
• 1:35:08
  institutions that needs to be in there are our universities but obviously media and others as
• 1:35:12
  well politicians will play political games but they're doing so to both feed and respond to
• 1:35:18
  what they see and hear and what gets leveraged we need to be able to deconstruct and challenge
• 1:35:25
  a whole lot of really difficult and nuanced topics in a way that we can be disagreeing but at
• 1:35:34
  least engaging in the complexities of it understanding that people may or may not get offended along
• 1:35:41
  the way but perhaps not the usual suspects that cry I'm offended this is hateful
• 1:35:47
  and all of that is going to become so much harder if we continue to clamp down on so-called hate
• 1:35:52
  speech and to continually intimidate people from raising what they see and hear with their own eyes
• 1:36:01
  and their own ears they know this stuff is challenging they can see it happening also around
• 1:36:06
  the world and they're wondering who's taking who's taking center stage to start curating with
• 1:36:14
  sensitivity and compassion these kinds of very difficult discussions and we're not going in the
• 1:36:18
  right direction at all look it's hard when you're talking about this stuff I find sometimes because
• 1:36:23
  people want examples of the kinds of things that you want to be able to say that you can't say like
• 1:36:27
  sometimes when I have arguments about free speech a social justice person will say all right you
• 1:36:31
  tell me what is it that you can't you know you talk about cancel culture you say right now the
• 1:36:36
  thing that you wish you could say that you can't say I won't tell anyone what is it what is it
• 1:36:42
  that you can't say and it's very it's a very difficult question to answer because it's not like I'm
• 1:36:47
  walking around with this desire in my head to say a particular thing that I can't say but it
• 1:36:52
  might be helpful just to say a few things that you could imagine some of these new hate speech laws
• 1:36:59
  someday prosecuting like since we were on the subject of Islam would it be legitimate to say
• 1:37:05
  that Islamism as a that Islamists for example are incompatible with Australian democracy right
• 1:37:11
  yes that's something that you could imagine being regarded as Islamophobic it's literally talking
• 1:37:18
  about Islamism and you know is that a kosher part of the conversation I don't know is it kosher
• 1:37:26
  I meant I use the analogy of women are you know aren't as intelligent but you could certainly
• 1:37:31
  imagine saying something like you know gender dysphoria is a is a disease or something or gender
• 1:37:40
  dysphoria is a type of mental illness something like that these are things that
• 1:37:47
  these aren't things who's right to say we defend because we like saying them the things who's
• 1:37:52
  right to say we defend because you're never going to find out exactly what the truth is unless
• 1:37:57
  you're in unless people are having robust conversations about what is true and what is not true right
• 1:38:04
  let's just address the the trans issue for a moment because that's probably the one where I don't
• 1:38:10
  know if you'd agree there's been the greatest level of hypersensitivity or sensory ismasin recent years
• 1:38:16
  that's now unfortunately in my view swung back so far in the other direction that you've got really
• 1:38:21
  nasty transphobic back lashes especially in the United States um don't want to say I told you so
• 1:38:27
  but you can say I have been saying for years be careful how you know how far you force people to
• 1:38:34
  you know to swallow a particular ideology because eventually there's there's going to be a pushback
• 1:38:39
  but um this is one of those areas where points of view ideas were coded immediately as hate speech
• 1:38:48
  yep and worse than that as actually erasing people's existence I mean I was having a conversation
• 1:38:53
  with the organizers of an event and we were throwing around some ideas about various controversial and
• 1:38:58
  provocative uh conversations that we might be able to have um at this forum and I sort of gently
• 1:39:06
  suggested the possibility of talking about um the media reaction to pediatric gender transitions
• 1:39:15
  and um the person who was a member of the LGBTQIA plus community themselves said well we're
• 1:39:22
  not going to count on that's having any conversations that erase people's identities
• 1:39:26
  and then we moved on to the next subject or that erase people's existence as I think it was
• 1:39:31
  right which is a very strange turn of front it's a bit weird isn't it what have you made of
• 1:39:38
  this arching wave well I have some lived experience in the turmoil of it you and your lived
• 1:39:46
  experiences and you know Richard chair lived experience because somehow it enables us to speak
• 1:39:51
  more truth than people that have facts and evidence but anyway um I think there are two
• 1:39:57
  firstly and this is not throat clearing there are very vulnerable people and communities
• 1:40:04
  in this domain of conversation whose well being and care and respect needs to be
• 1:40:13
  forefront now when I'm in vulnerable I also mean those that particularly um depending on the
• 1:40:18
  categorization and some people might say I'm erasing um kids with gender dysphoria who might be
• 1:40:24
  suffering from a variety of comorbidities as many specialists would say psychiatrists and others
• 1:40:33
  as pointed out by major reviews such as the Hillary Cass review in the UK on the Tabestock clinic
• 1:40:39
  which is still criminally under reported in the Australian media with the mantra about it's not
• 1:40:45
  relevant to the Australian context which I will note is utter bullshit because the vast majority
• 1:40:52
  of Hillary Cass's review is looking at a systemic systematic review of the robustness of the
• 1:40:57
  evidence that underlines gender care globally it is not UK specific versus Australia specific
• 1:41:04
  so to all of those people who have been told the Cass review is not relevant to the Australian
• 1:41:09
  context what about hopping on the worldwide web checking out the summary of the Cass review
• 1:41:16
  and the various bits and pieces that led to that you will also note there in some of the material
• 1:41:20
  that was in preparation of it that when they an organisation was brought in I'll make this point
• 1:41:27
  before returning back there was brought in to discuss attitudes and concerns around frontline
• 1:41:34
  healthcare workers working with gender dysphoric young people and children what emerged as one of
• 1:41:40
  the most concerning themes is their anxiety about the poor quality of evidence
• 1:41:47
  and the risk of being called transphobic if they raised concerns about the nature of that
• 1:41:53
  evidence and that was from work done with frontline medical practitioners and other healthcare
• 1:41:58
  practitioners all of that is available for any journalist at the ABC if they wanted to get off
• 1:42:03
  their ass not listen to a trans advocacy group and go and check their facts first then they can
• 1:42:09
  decide whether they think the Cass review is relevant to the Australian context so when I'm talking
• 1:42:14
  about sensitivities and being conscious of vulnerable communities the most important vulnerable
• 1:42:19
  community are those kids suffering from gender dysphoria and however that it might manifest
• 1:42:26
  in whatever the best outcome for them might be there as a legitimate and concerning conversation
• 1:42:31
  to be had about what is best for their welfare and that question is not settled and to reduce it to
• 1:42:38
  the idea that we are raising identity or existence of a trans kid completely question begs the
• 1:42:44
  question the issue of what is a trans child who has decided for us what a trans child is
• 1:42:51
  and then there's if you like the trans community as of probably is typically conceived
• 1:42:56
  obviously any hate director towards them is utterly unacceptable but then there's also things
• 1:43:02
  called sex based rights now what point did a person who who says that I am a trans woman
• 1:43:12
  there are also the rights of other people as well one person's rights or one group's rights do
• 1:43:17
  not automatically and unreflectively trump another group's rights so for things like obviously
• 1:43:24
  this famous case in the US of Leah Thomas a biological male who then identified as a female in
• 1:43:32
  swimming competitions in the US college competitions I believe it was walking around with no clothes
• 1:43:38
  on in the female change when the when the girls complained they they were told to undergo
• 1:43:45
  diversity training or whatever it is because of their their bias now that's what turned many
• 1:43:50
  people we know the Leah Thomas case in the US was one of those turning points where a normal
• 1:43:55
  person went hang on a minute at the very least there is a conflict of rights it is the right
• 1:44:02
  of a a natal female biological female particularly a younger person to be in a room without a man
• 1:44:10
  without a penis is that a fundamental right or isn't it or is that right somehow raised because
• 1:44:16
  the biological man that the penis says I'm a woman now and they've got the rights of those women
• 1:44:22
  these are not insignificant issues and they cannot be brushed aside by allegations of transphobia
• 1:44:30
  or the the myopic the myopic championing and segregation of so-called trans rights against the
• 1:44:39
  rights of all the others that are affected by these things so if a trans woman goes to a a waxing
• 1:44:45
  clinic and asked to be waxed the poor Filipino person that's whackens the famous case in in
• 1:44:51
  Canada I believe it was for years ago whose rights are being know is that the the the poor migrant
• 1:44:57
  woman that's probably on a minimum wage having to wax around a penis or is it the person that
• 1:45:02
  claims to be a trans woman demanding to have a bikini wax these are not insignificant matters
• 1:45:08
  well you say they're not insignificant but the the pushback to that would be actually they're
• 1:45:12
  insignificant in so far as they're vanishingly rare and the amount of oxygen that they take up in
• 1:45:18
  the cultural conversation is completely out of proportion to the number of times that there are
• 1:45:25
  actually people who are disadvantaged are impacted by this and therefore we there's obviously
• 1:45:31
  something else going on which is a kind of manipulative emotive you know whipping up of kind of mob
• 1:45:37
  transphobia about this stuff because really nobody should be paying attention to it but
• 1:45:42
  caring about it apart from the few people who are involved to come back to that how rare is rare
• 1:45:47
  enough that's the first thing who decides is that one in a thousand one in a million if you look
• 1:45:53
  certainly at a sort of club and young sports in the US I think you'll find that there's more than
• 1:45:58
  the vanishingly rare instance of poll voters cyclists runners sprinters swimmers who are biological
• 1:46:06
  male doing very well but leaving that aside you know what what is vanishingly rare but certainly
• 1:46:12
  in the in the first category we are talking about regarding the lifelong impact of gender based
• 1:46:19
  medicine I wouldn't say that's vanishingly rare at all that's actually at some scale and
• 1:46:24
  certainly was in the UK it's hard to get the data and the figures here and of course that's
• 1:46:28
  much more concerning so the former sort of situation I was talking about where the having a conversation
• 1:46:38
  and having a fruitful and difficult conversation about the nature of evidence and expertise that's
• 1:46:43
  offered or profit around these issues of transgender medicine what the outcomes are what the nature
• 1:46:50
  of the evidence is what the experiences of detransitioners are all those that have assisted all of that
• 1:46:57
  it seems to be has been captured by a veracious and often quite toxic trans activism that has
• 1:47:05
  denied the very possibility that there might be another point of view or another set of data points
• 1:47:10
  to this conversation now considering even if the numbers are relatively low by absolute in the
• 1:47:16
  Australian context these are lifetime consequences to the people affected by these decisions and we
• 1:47:23
  want to know in Australia as in elsewhere around the world and they are coming to this conclusion
• 1:47:29
  elsewhere around the world what is the nature of the evidence based nature of the care that we're
• 1:47:35
  providing but my concern from the sort of public intellectual university context is how we got to
• 1:47:41
  this stage where very real and obvious questions about the nature of evidence and its application
• 1:47:48
  have been so utterly perverted by a series of ideological and perspectives about what is gender
• 1:47:54
  and what is sex that is deeply concerning and that will have lifelong consequences one way or the
• 1:47:59
  other for a whole lot of people and their families i'd add two things to that one is that on the
• 1:48:04
  question of how rare is it one is that if you introduce the question of women's prisons which is
• 1:48:09
  another thing that comes up there was some staggering statistic which i think was in Queensland but
• 1:48:14
  don't quote me on it where it is it is a not insignificant number of the inmates and female
• 1:48:20
  prisons in some jurisdictions are biological males i mean was you know like more than 10% or
• 1:48:25
  15% or something like that so in terms of the measurement it depends where you look i suppose and
• 1:48:30
  at what and the other thing the other point that i would make which i think is relevant to what you
• 1:48:35
  were saying is one that i'm stealing from yasha monk who said that the trans debate is is a good
• 1:48:42
  example of what happens when instead of using persuasion an activist group tries to pursue social
• 1:48:49
  justice through coercion and sort of you know silencing of other other points of view you make
• 1:48:56
  these very rapid advances because you're using the sword essentially and you're making people
• 1:49:00
  be too afraid to question it but there's shallow advances because nobody's actually won over so if
• 1:49:06
  you compare it to a more of a hearts and minds social justice or civil rights movement like gay rights
• 1:49:13
  for example you know between the 1960s and the 2010s basically you know the gay rights movement
• 1:49:21
  was probably the fastest civil rights success story in the history of the world because
• 1:49:27
  after a brief spasm of you know run-ins with violent police and so on to get to get noticed it's
• 1:49:33
  not like it was all you know pacifism all the way but as soon as the as soon as the microphone
• 1:49:39
  was in the face of gay activists they were really preaching a message of unity and universalism
• 1:49:46
  saying we want the same things that everybody does we want to not be discriminated against when
• 1:49:50
  we're applying for home loans we want to be able to go on a rental application together we want
• 1:49:55
  to be able to visit each other in hospital when we're sick we want to be able to share our assets
• 1:49:59
  the same way we want love we want you know community we want family and homes they didn't say
• 1:50:07
  you must endorse anal sex you know that's right you have to say it's good you have to say you
• 1:50:14
  like it you have to say it's perfectly natural your auntie and your grandmother have to all you
• 1:50:19
  know be on board yep I'm the stickers on there all right and you they have to start putting
• 1:50:24
  the signatures in their emails saying like anal sex yeah yeah or whatever you know blow jobs
• 1:50:29
  between guys thumbs up it was like it wasn't an ideological it wasn't a coercive ideological
• 1:50:35
  movement it was appealing using persuasion to deeper values that we already share and unfortunately
• 1:50:41
  for trans people the the strategy that was taken by a lot of activists over the past five or ten
• 1:50:45
  years was not was not that it was a maximalist position of using as much coercion as possible to
• 1:50:51
  try to get as many gains as quickly as possible and that's just come crashing down which is is
• 1:50:56
  doubly tragic for start amongst you this is why the transgender community whatever I was
• 1:51:01
  imagined that's an imagined community what do they do get together every week that's of course
• 1:51:04
  you know yeah I'm ostensibly a member of the community because I'm gay yeah so it's I'm always
• 1:51:09
  got but I do often wonder how many transgender people who look at what the transgender radical
• 1:51:18
  activists have done and think oh my god there might have been another way to do this or whatever
• 1:51:23
  but we barely know because their voices I mean I know because I know them and they probably don't
• 1:51:28
  speak because they'd be you know just like people of color get called coconuts when they speak out
• 1:51:34
  you know I could only imagine what it'd be that for a transgender person who doesn't believe
• 1:51:39
  with these tactics could ever possibly speak out against them God only knows what they wouldn't
• 1:51:44
  need for them but the other thing you meant about that very sort of coercive element you know I've
• 1:51:48
  been you only need to go online and look at sort of trans activism marches and protests often you
• 1:51:55
  someone with a with purple hair screaming at a 60 year old woman in a cardigan with a with a
• 1:52:03
  a banner saying suck my girl dick as if that's somehow somehow they're on the right side of history
• 1:52:10
  now like the old lady in the cardigan's going to go oh that was against you that was my but that's
• 1:52:14
  yes very good point and you know and and you don't need to be you don't need to be super
• 1:52:20
  astute to notice there are some very disturbing arguably misogynistic trends within trans
• 1:52:26
  indirectivism and it's most ugly form there seems to be something that and this is what worries
• 1:52:31
  the feminist activists often is they've picked up on there's elements of what looks like deep anger
• 1:52:39
  towards women at times now don't a psychoanalyze but there are often very unsavory elements within
• 1:52:46
  some of the more radical side of of the trans activists you can see it in this signage you can
• 1:52:52
  see in the way that it's almost a vertically aggressively sexual as well and I often think I
• 1:52:57
  wonder how many transgender people are looking at that shit and going that that isn't what I want
• 1:53:01
  I love who I am yeah and attack and of course they've been silenced by people that have in the
• 1:53:06
  room privilege again it comes back to the 15 year old atheist feminist Muslim girl who's in the
• 1:53:11
  veil inside while we're all listening to the Imam that's right listening to the trans
• 1:53:15
  who's marriage has been arranged yeah so but again what interests me from the academic perspective
• 1:53:21
  is how have we got here what what's the ecosystem and what are the incentives and disincentives
• 1:53:26
  amongst our chattering classes and others that we are a right at situation because these are
• 1:53:31
  manifestations and symptoms of things that are not working in our civil society at a more
• 1:53:36
  deep level they're not in significant issues by the way they are significant on their own right
• 1:53:41
  but they're also manifestations of something that is absolutely not working in our civil society
• 1:53:45
  well is it does all it's a reversing because I can imagine some people will listen to this saying
• 1:53:50
  I mean yeah you're talking about you're talking as if it's 2022 like this there was a there was a
• 1:53:55
  greater wokening and now clearly we're in the throes of some massive kind of backlash some sort
• 1:54:01
  of almost fascistic alt-right backlash in the form of the make America great again movement the
• 1:54:07
  rise of the far right in Europe you know in fact in some respects I worry that there will be a
• 1:54:14
  memory holding of what happened we're moving so quickly in the other direction that the experience
• 1:54:19
  of some of the people who I know who for example lost their jobs as long-time columnists at all
• 1:54:24
  gust newspapers simply for trying to write about the controversy within the medical establishment
• 1:54:29
  that was raging around pediatric transgender care and you know that some of the most extreme
• 1:54:36
  that that it almost seems like another world or a fever dream that it's not that that wouldn't
• 1:54:41
  happen anymore are you not so sanguine about the death of wokeness um I wouldn't even say I'm
• 1:54:48
  cautiously optimistic look it's interesting what's happening overseas and I think fair-minded
• 1:54:54
  reasonable people whoever they are majority or not have reason to be worried about backlash
• 1:55:01
  yep hopefully in this country a little bit more sanguine and general perhaps there won't be
• 1:55:06
  the kinds of backlashes and movements that we've seen in some parts of Europe and in the US especially
• 1:55:12
  and let's hope we don't get to the point where that kind of backlash is energized because it's not
• 1:55:17
  a good thing either where I'm a bit more skeptical that I'd be surprised if things changed is
• 1:55:22
  um it's not necessarily a majority view but there's enough people that that are still true
• 1:55:28
  believers of these things peak woke from a few years ago who have managed to position themselves
• 1:55:35
  within important institutions universities being the most obvious one but possibly and arguably
• 1:55:42
  an other in you know media institutions and elsewhere and while they might make grudging noises
• 1:55:48
  and all the rest of it there are many true believers amongst them who believe there is nothing wrong
• 1:55:53
  with the peak woke we've had and and there is all a march towards justice and they see themselves
• 1:55:58
  now in positions of position authority and influence in those institutions certainly in academia
• 1:56:03
  so if there is going to be a change and that's going to be unwind from the fever dream of 2022
• 1:56:09
  I don't think I'll be doing it themselves it's going to have to be pushed upon them
• 1:56:13
  and it's going to have to be through some form of backlash or resetting
• 1:56:17
  so I think there's still a little bit of pain and and in the meantime we've had generations of
• 1:56:22
  students come through who will be you know they haven't had critical thinking skills they've
• 1:56:27
  had critical theory skills so called it's almost an oxymoron um that contradiction in terms rather
• 1:56:34
  so I think there they've been calling the shots for long enough in our key institutions to have
• 1:56:40
  generational downstream reinpacked so I'll be pleasantly surprised if things do turn around in a
• 1:56:46
  moderate reasonable way over the next few years whether that's a political solution or some other
• 1:56:51
  kind of intervention if you will imposed or not from within or from without but I'm still deeply
• 1:56:58
  skeptical and to be honest deeply disappointed at the failure of our institutions universities
• 1:57:04
  and their leaders especially in grappling with this stuff when they could have seen a coming
• 1:57:09
  years in advance and being an exemplary moderating reasonable voice amongst all the crazy shit
• 1:57:15
  we've been putting up with for the last few years such that good people wouldn't have lost their
• 1:57:19
  jobs and had their careers ruined such that actual the potential of actual physical and psychological
• 1:57:27
  damage actually being done to people particularly in the transgenderist and space might not have
• 1:57:31
  actually happened or might have been much more reasonably conceived of so I think I'll be
• 1:57:36
  pleasantly surprised if it turns around but I would love to see it turn around right and is your
• 1:57:41
  model something like I mean are there models abroad that you look to as being university
• 1:57:46
  administrations where they've been able to draw a line in the sand and go no guys you you're
• 1:57:51
  behaving like children we're going to uphold the small L liberal principles of free speech and
• 1:57:57
  reason and you know an equality and we're not going to go down the D I path to crazy town I don't
• 1:58:04
  see it here in Australia well I think there's too small there's not the right critical mass to
• 1:58:07
  have enough on the fringes I think in the U.S there's been individual universities that have
• 1:58:11
  either taken that path or reiterated that commitment like the Chicago principle of
• 1:58:18
  I've opened for open inquiry and all the rest of it but I think in Australia I still see the
• 1:58:24
  woke fever dream feeding its way through our institutions because there's a whole lot of other
• 1:58:29
  drivers to the way that our institutions are behaving both the sort of neoliberal corporate
• 1:58:35
  international students reputational brand I don't see any of these things changing soon
• 1:58:41
  so why wouldn't that run counter to work us a neoliberal corporate a desire to attract
• 1:58:47
  international students who probably don't care much about social justice issues it's an unhappy
• 1:58:52
  marriage of convenience so you know the woke staff and the social justice warriors with
• 1:58:56
  institutions to test their neoliberal managers and the neoliberal managers barely tolerate their
• 1:59:02
  woke you know social engineering neo marxist professors however they work to each other's benefit
• 1:59:12
  they can it allows universities and university vice-chances on million dollar salaries and their
• 1:59:18
  cohort and bloated administrations also on high salaries of which I was on a high salary for
• 1:59:22
  while as well when I had a viable career as a senior university manager no longer the case
• 1:59:29
  it allows them to point it all the great social justice and equity work that's being done by the
• 1:59:33
  university whilst they drive around in their Mercedes and beamed up using their car parking and
• 1:59:38
  all the rest of it which is fine you know that if that's what it is that's what it is so in a way
• 1:59:43
  it allows you to outsource what takes the place of a social conscience of an institution to a
• 1:59:49
  whole lot of nutty radicals the nutty radicals love it being the social conscience of the university
• 1:59:55
  but it also allows them to do the social engineering they want to do within their institution so
• 1:59:59
  I think they are not on the same page out social engineering meaning purging of
• 2:00:05
  dissidents and purging of dissidents and to make sure that you're not you're really teaching
• 2:00:09
  critical thinking and independent thinking skills and inquiry and the capacity to still man
• 2:00:14
  and opposing view you're teaching the right just path of what you're going to do in your discipline
• 2:00:20
  right a decolonial diversity equity all that that grab bag of hashtags that you throw together
• 2:00:28
  that is basically your social justice warrior no social engineering now so whilst the two sides of
• 2:00:34
  things the managerial class within the university and many academics and we're making very broad
• 2:00:39
  brush of course party for comic effect but hey I'm enjoying it um they they are working in
• 2:00:46
  constantly they're like some sort of parasitic relationship of some you know some ancient sea
• 2:00:51
  creature where one thing feeds off another one little fish on it it does and they're actually
• 2:00:56
  they're actually three organisms together but they'll sting still seeing the shit out of you
• 2:01:00
  if you go swimming in the ocean so there's there's a there's a strange symbiotic relationship
• 2:01:05
  between people with very different views and attitudes but they work in this I mean it sounds
• 2:01:10
  not dissimilar to corporations at the moment where they're able to divert to distract attention
• 2:01:16
  from actual policies of economic justice for example that would imply higher corporate tax rates
• 2:01:22
  in order to fund yeah you know ways of uplifting those bottom quartile that we were talking about
• 2:01:27
  when we were talking about actually getting greater diversity greater economic egalitarianism
• 2:01:31
  health care for everybody and all that sort of stuff um corporations are able to dodge that
• 2:01:36
  conversation by leaning into diversity and equity and inclusion programs and showing how highly
• 2:01:41
  they score on the LGBTQIA plus you know diversity metric and all this that's right um putting the
• 2:01:46
  rainbow flag in there uh Twitter bio and whatever it might be um yeah I agree so look corporate that's
• 2:01:52
  the sort of greenwashing whitewashing transwashing whatever you are I don't know what it is called
• 2:01:57
  in university it's more insidious though because uh you know these are the these are the people
• 2:02:02
  that we're trusting our children to get an education and critical thinking and open
• 2:02:06
  mindfulness and still manning and I'll worry that they're not so um the there'll be
• 2:02:12
  penicious long term effects that I don't see washing through anytime soon having said that
• 2:02:17
  I'm really heartened by the number of young people who have coming into universities with an
• 2:02:21
  open mind and this and a thirst perhaps to be controversial to be challenged so rather than the
• 2:02:28
  sort of safetyous nursery of universities that they might have got used to in the past I think
• 2:02:33
  young people are listening to podcasts they're watching a sub-stack they're watching you know content
• 2:02:37
  creators good bad or different so if there is any hope I think there is definitely hope in in
• 2:02:43
  younger generation coming through who perhaps all this uh this sort of um fever dream of
• 2:02:50
  weakness that's been around for the last few years and that for them that is their orthodoxy
• 2:02:55
  and they might be getting sick of it they might want to break out from it so I there are glimpses
• 2:02:59
  of optimism there and I get little bits of feedback through my teenage children when they're
• 2:03:04
  school or mods going on they just go this you know some of this stuff's crazy that we're hearing
• 2:03:07
  in school so uh we're around uh identity gender and things like that that you know there's almost
• 2:03:13
  open mocking of some of these programs from the kids at school now because they're they're just not
• 2:03:17
  buying it and it might also depend on the cultural background they come from yeah ironically enough
• 2:03:22
  yeah often minority cultures we shouldn't assume that they're on the trains train as much as you know
• 2:03:27
  or the any train any train or the any work train because they're often yeah Monari deeply conservative
• 2:03:32
  deeply family-based uh they can they can be among the most homophobic they can be among the most
• 2:03:38
  anti-first nations you know they voted in large numbers against creating a body for Indigenous
• 2:03:43
  Australians in the referendum that we had about that last year um you know it was and it was not
• 2:03:48
  an unlook in the Ukrainian Australians who were in favor of there was they were protested by
• 2:03:52
  um Muslim parents against um uh sort of gender programs being run in the school regarding sex
• 2:03:57
  education uh openness to you know different gender right you know the classic sort of as a rainbow
• 2:04:03
  unicorn type things in all the gender-brea demand or whatever it happens to be um they were
• 2:04:08
  running program like that and the Muslim community was for the ciferous in its protest against that
• 2:04:14
  and I think those kinds of incidents of cognitive distance are wonderful but there is so little
• 2:04:19
  reflection upon them uh is it that these um minority people in a systemically racist culture
• 2:04:27
  just don't understand what us well meaning white progressive people are trying to teach their kids
• 2:04:31
  I mean you know working your way through that these things are these things are not bugs they're
• 2:04:38
  an actual feature of the symptom and yet there is so little interest in talking about them
• 2:04:43
  let's um let's wrap with a conversation about hate speech and what constitutes hate speech online
• 2:04:48
  and because we haven't touched much on social media and algorithm some way to say there so
• 2:04:52
  Julian and Grant who's the e-safety commissioner of Australia uh the person who Elon Musk
• 2:04:57
  calls a censorship czar uh censorship commissar I think he called her um and with whom I was
• 2:05:03
  I appeared on the on Q&A on the ABC uh has recently lost a court case is that right or it's a tribunal
• 2:05:11
  hearing that's correct with someone whose content on twitter on x she had informally had suppressed
• 2:05:19
  what happened so that was a case recently in the administrative review tribunal which is the
• 2:05:25
  successor to the administrative appeals tribunal for those in Australia um that's what you'll
• 2:05:31
  know it from those names for those overseas it basically means I don't even know it's the
• 2:05:35
  it's the it's the government body that is allowed to review decisions made by the government
• 2:05:39
  or on behalf of the government so it's like an appeal yes but the government led decisions so
• 2:05:43
  the e-safety commissioner obviously being part of the government's apparatus it's an appeals court
• 2:05:48
  for citizens to challenge what the government's doing if you well yeah and so there was a uh
• 2:05:52
  social media uh content critic called saline bone garden also known as saline against the machine
• 2:05:59
  terrific social media handle she had I still can't say x she had tweeted something um about um I
• 2:06:07
  think it was a gay or trans or something club at a primary school um some kind of gender queer
• 2:06:15
  club at a primary school and she is of the gender critical persuasion where she actually was
• 2:06:21
  tweeting about why is there this I think it was queer club at a primary school you know endorse
• 2:06:26
  both that school presumably and all the rest of that tweet uh there was a tweet and I think
• 2:06:32
  there was something on instagram that tweet on x got geo blocked through an action from the e-safety
• 2:06:39
  commissioner um saline went through various appeal processes and arrived at the administrative
• 2:06:45
  review tribunal and the decision was led by a federal court judge so this is a very significant
• 2:06:52
  and weighty decision of considerable uh importance in our country and I think arguably overseas as
• 2:06:58
  well and what emerged was that whilst the e-safety commissioner can and has is legislated and able to
• 2:07:07
  direct a social media platform to take down something through a formal notice if it's in breach of
• 2:07:15
  certain um sort of requirements regarding hate speech etc forification
• 2:07:21
  act what has actually been happening in practice through the e-safety's commissioner's office
• 2:07:26
  is that hundreds and I think well over a thousand uh tweets or equivalent have been taken down
• 2:07:31
  informal notices so what's happening is her team ascending a notice to the platform
• 2:07:37
  to say there is a complaint about we'd like to say blah blah blah take it down and in the case of
• 2:07:43
  x those that received it actually took it to be a formal take down notice and of course you're
• 2:07:48
  not going to stuff around if you get a formal take down notice from someone that can you know
• 2:07:52
  find you because they're in government yeah so they want to talk now now the problem is
• 2:07:56
  if it was a formal take down notice there would be the opportunity for the person who's had their
• 2:08:02
  post taken down to get uh basically to appeal and to basically see what are the
• 2:08:08
  workings of this and certainly to go to appeal and to be known also that there's some people
• 2:08:12
  wouldn't have even known that is correct and in fact many people unless they've checked
• 2:08:16
  may well have had their tweets taken down through this mechanism and they would have had no idea
• 2:08:21
  now saline bone garden appealed this and despite the fact the safety commissioner felt that it
• 2:08:28
  wasn't something that could be appealed because it was informal the administrative review tribunal
• 2:08:33
  decided otherwise that it had in effect uh it was a formal take down notice because that's how
• 2:08:39
  it was received and acted upon by x and so as a result you've got this very opaque system where
• 2:08:47
  hundreds if not thousands of take down notices are happening informally with a complete lack of
• 2:08:51
  transparency and this is what that has now been ruled illegal it that it has and basically
• 2:08:59
  the it's probably a little bit too technical but people can look up the case if they if they wish
• 2:09:04
  administrative reviews tribunals case of bone garden saline bone garden and the safety commissioner
• 2:09:10
  the judge is very clear that this is simply not the way it has to work that it needs if it's going
• 2:09:15
  to be a proper formal take down notice with all of the mechanisms for appealing transparency
• 2:09:19
  accountability but you cannot in effect have what's taken to be a formal take down notice as far
• 2:09:25
  as how it's received and used but with all the lack of transparency saying arts in formal so we
• 2:09:32
  don't need I mean to an American listener this will sound extraordinary because it embodies
• 2:09:37
  their many Americans dystopia of what of where hate speech legislation could lead and why the
• 2:09:43
  first amendment is so important so I mean just to clarify the American listener we live in a
• 2:09:46
  country with no first amendment there is no constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech
• 2:09:51
  we have a newly created government position which is in charge of online safety and protecting
• 2:09:58
  people from harm online which includes hate speech that person that office in the government
• 2:10:08
  is able to send requests or it really when it comes from the government it's a demand not a request
• 2:10:15
  because it's backed by the force of you know of the law in this country and you know no company
• 2:10:21
  wants to not be able to operate in a medium-sized economy like Australia is if they can avoid it
• 2:10:26
  they can send a demand saying delete this tweet without the person knowing and that
• 2:10:34
  nor any recalls to appeal not with no appeal and your speech on that platform can be essentially
• 2:10:43
  caught over and eliminated according to essentially the whims of a bureaucrat as to whether or not
• 2:10:52
  your speech is transgressing a set of hate speech rules but fundamentally but now that's been
• 2:10:57
  the control at least you have to be told and you can appeal it but the but the tweet did not
• 2:11:03
  even meet the threshold to be formally taken down so that's it's in a way it's even worse and I
• 2:11:08
  note with some irony that in your entanglement with the U Safety Commissioner on the Q&A session
• 2:11:13
  that ABC sort of panel talk show that you're on you're both in furious agreement about the need
• 2:11:19
  for transparency this is a very disturbing case of a lack of transparency and I think it raises
• 2:11:27
  firstly there's the hate speech rules particularly if they pertain to the online space themselves
• 2:11:34
  what is hate what is not hate where do we draw the line what are the thresholds what are the
• 2:11:39
  consequences what are the appeals there's that the sort of legalistic side of things and then
• 2:11:46
  what this case highlights particularly concerning is there's the actual application
• 2:11:51
  in practice of those bodies or government agencies or departments or roles of what are they
• 2:11:59
  actually doing in practice and in practice they weren't even doing what is evident from the sort
• 2:12:03
  of black and white state of law itself right so we've got two issues it's the lack of transparency of
• 2:12:08
  what is actually happening on the ground when there's a takedown notice what form does it have
• 2:12:12
  where's the accountability who's deciding on my ground and then there's the actual well what does
• 2:12:17
  the law say about what you should be doing about them so there's two sort of separate conversations
• 2:12:22
  to be had and obviously once a piece of legislations in it's in I suppose and then the concern is
• 2:12:29
  how is it actually being used in practice I mean this is how this is the conversation that we're
• 2:12:34
  having with the hate speech legislation at a federal and a state level as well which is what do
• 2:12:40
  you include as hate speech against whom is hate must hate speech be directed in order to qualify
• 2:12:45
  as hate speech what protected classes are we going to list you know there have been some complaints
• 2:12:50
  that the new hate speech legislation includes religious or racial minorities but doesn't include
• 2:12:55
  LGBTQIA plus people like in which case if it did include them then would the would a would a tweet
• 2:13:01
  such as the tweet that said men aren't women which is one of the what tweets that actually got
• 2:13:07
  removed by Twitter in its pre long days for being hate speech and the kind of thing we're talking
• 2:13:12
  about here the safety commission are being opposed to to innocent Australian eyes viewing
• 2:13:18
  you know does that then become a criminal offense that could attract jail time if you were to
• 2:13:23
  express that against a protected class it all becomes once you start you know to loop back and
• 2:13:29
  close out with the reference to my first point which is why can't we just jot down on the back
• 2:13:34
  of a napkin the statements or ideas that we all want to rule out of bounds in our civilized society
• 2:13:42
  I suppose you've convinced me that the answer to that is that we will never agree on what goes
• 2:13:46
  on the back of that napkin that's why we just can't I think so we will not it will be an ever
• 2:13:51
  expanding napkin if you if you say your tablecloths were there won't be a tablecloth and by the
• 2:13:56
  if you if you put in you know you can't say your Jews caused all the wars in the world
• 2:14:03
  then pretty soon you're not going to be able to say you know I don't know been up women or whatever
• 2:14:10
  else it might be everyone is going to have everyone is going to feel that they have standing to be
• 2:14:14
  included in a protected class at some point best to adjudicate it with reason rather than with law
• 2:14:21
  and by talking openly and being as reasonable as possible even if it's heated disagreement there's
• 2:14:25
  nothing wrong with heated disagreement that is not causing you harm you know getting passionate
• 2:14:30
  about an issue is not harm and if you think it's harm you're in a very calm society yeah all right
• 2:14:37
  you don't want to wrap us up with a picture about the free speech union how can people get involved
• 2:14:41
  free speech union if you look up free speech union Australia you'll find our website don't type
• 2:14:47
  in FSU Australia I think it takes you to the financial services you which may well be a very far
• 2:14:52
  nod to your people sure it's fair but it's not us we're also we've got a very active LinkedIn
• 2:14:57
  page as my daughter says LinkedIn's like the Facebook for even older people on Facebook however
• 2:15:02
  if that's that we're on Twitter slash X and we're on Facebook as well so please check us out see
• 2:15:09
  some of the cases and the work that we've done so either through me or particularly my colleagues
• 2:15:13
  Ruben Kirkham especially in Durham with Donald have done various interviews and podcasts in the
• 2:15:17
  past so please check them out consider joining a few of interest but at least follow what we do
• 2:15:22
  and and we just enjoy people following what we're doing raising the conversation raising the awareness
• 2:15:29
  about free speech issues in the country Alan good luck to you thanks for being here cheers mate