Monday, July 21, 2008

It's your democratic duty to be offensive (Contribution)

Last Thursday, the Federal Court of Australia did something positively British.

It ruled that a law passed by the New South Wales state legislature, making it an offence to 'annoy' any of the Catholics who would be attending the World Youth Festival in Sydney, was unconstitutional because it conferred 'powers that are repugnant to fundamental rights and freedoms at common law in the absence of clear authority from Parliament'.

The case against the NSW state legislature was brought by two members of the No to Pope Coalition, university students Rachel Evans and Amber Pike.

If they hadn't taken this initiative, the NSW legislators might have got away with it.

The passing of the NSW law, which provided for fines of up to £2,700, was a response to the intensity of anti-papal feeling in Australia, a good deal of it felt by the 26 per cent or so of the population who are Catholic.

The No to Pope Coalition has targeted not only the Catholic ban on abortion and the use of condoms, but also the baptism of infants and the church's attitude to homosexuality.

Benedict XVI yesterday apologised for the abuse of children in Catholic institutions and by the Catholic clergy.

Earlier, he had congratulated Prime Minister Rudd for finally apologising to Aboriginal people, but he must have taken heart in the realisation that it hasn't cost the Australian government a penny in damages, restitution or compensation.

Freedom of speech cannot be maintained in a society where nobody ever says anything subversive or inflammatory. Academic freedom is only real if academic institutions exercise it. Freedom of the press cannot exist if newspapers censor themselves. In order to keep freedom of speech alive, the citizens must keep saying things that offend people, often deeply.

Agitated though we might feel by some of the things people say, we have got to go on defending their right to say them. If we don't, our freedoms gradually shrink. If we allow witnesses in criminal cases to give evidence anonymously, we undermine due process; it is a short step from there to lettres de cachet, to 'disappearing' people against whom the authorities feel they could not get a verdict.

As long as we fail to challenge the Americans about Guantanamo, Guantanamo affects us all.

Unless it is resisted, the erosion of civil liberties will continue until there is no such thing as liberty and all opposition to authority will have become crime.

Every few weeks, the British get into a bate about what it means to be British and how we might teach the foreigners who keep on turning up in our midst 'British values'.

The most important legacy the British left the old Empire, now the disappearing and despised Commonwealth, is the package of British liberties, of which most important is probably habeas corpus, by which no one is to be imprisoned without trial.

The Australian Federal Court justified its action in striking down the NSW law against annoying pilgrims by reference to the 'common law', the most precious inheritance any Briton can claim.

When David Davis threw away his political career, the very newspapers whose liberties he was desperate to defend sneered at him, even though they must have realised that what they were witnessing was tantamount to self-immolation.

Almost nobody credited Davis with acting on principle. So far has the erosion of British liberties already progressed that most people were not aware that Davis had anything to defend.

His action was probably pointless.

The media chose to belittle his action and represent it as an ego-trip, without significance.

The action of the Australian Federal Court is a reminder of just what is at stake.
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