There is growing backlash to Queensland’s antisemitism laws on all sides of politics, with rightwing thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) the latest group to raise free speech concerns about the “vague” bill.
Margaret Chambers, a research fellow at the IPA, said the bill would confer extraordinary power on a single minister to “engage in censorship and the criminalising of opinions and debate” on the basis of a subjective standard, without oversight by the courts.
The constitutional scholar Anne Twomey said the laws were being “unduly rushed”, with a seven-day public comment period expiring on Tuesday.
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Under the proposed laws, the state’s attorney-general would have the power to ban a particular expression if she was satisfied that the expression was “regularly used to incite discrimination, hostility or violence” towards a “relevant group”, defined by “race, religion, sexuality, sex characteristics or gender identity”.
The attorney general’s proscribing power could be overturned by a vote in parliament, but Queensland’s unicameral parliament is almost always controlled by the government of the day.
“These proposed laws are so vague and broad that even phrases used by the no campaign against the voice to parliament, which over two-thirds of Queenslanders supported, could have been outlawed,” Chambers said.
The government has announced its intention to proscribe two phrases: “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada”.
The state’s premier, David Crisafulli, said on Sunday that the government would not seek to ban additional phrases, such as racist and antisemitic slurs.
Twomey said the state’s list of relevant groups was much broader than the recent commonwealth legislation, which only applied to “race, colour, or national or ethnic origin”.
“A banned expression could be one that is regarded as inciting hostility towards people who have transitioned, for example,” she said.
Crisafulli said the opposite was true: “It was the original federal bill that was so broad, and that’s the reason why the parliament went into meltdown.”
The legislation would make public recitation, public distribution, publication or public display of a proscribed phrase an offence punishable by two years in prison if doing so “could reasonably be expected to make a member of the public feel menaced, harassed or offended, and the defendant does not have a reasonable excuse”.
The government spent more than a month writing the legislation, which was tabled on Tuesday. It also deals with gun reforms developed at the national cabinet after last year’s Bondi beach terror attack.
The public has been given seven days to submit on the legislation.
Asked whether the process was rushed, Crisafulli said the timeframe “strikes the right balance”.
“I was being criticised before Christmas, before New Year, for not doing it quickly enough,” he said. “We genuinely took the time to get it right.”
A 17-day inquiry by the parliamentary justice, integrity and community safety committee will end on 27 February.
Chambers called on the state’s conservative government to “abandon … what is in many ways a carbon copy of” the federal government’s hate laws, which passed with the support of the opposition last month.
“The standard is so low that Queenslanders could face two years in prison for uttering a banned phrase that ‘incites hostility’ even when there is no victim and no proven harm,” she said.
Asked whether an offended person needed to attend a protest to trigger the law, the police minister, Dan Purdie, said: “We don’t want people at a protest or elsewhere chanting those sort of chants, which do incite hatred.”
Purdie said the government supported the right to protest peacefully – which is legislated in Queensland – “but what we are doing is stamping out hate, people calling for genocide of a particular religion or faith”.
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
