So far, 26 people have been arrested for voicing or displaying words that the Crisafulli Government has declared illegal. If found guilty, writes Dr John Jiggens, those arrested face up to two years in gaol for uttering words.
IN MARCH, the Crisafulli Government in Queensland introduced controversial hate speech legislation, outlawing two expressions deemed antisemitic: "from the river to the sea" and "globalise the intifada”.
The Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies urged a ban on expressions that incited violence, harm or offence. They said the two phrases played a key role in intimidating Jewish people.
The proposed laws were criticised by civil liberties experts as extreme. Arif Hussein, a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre (HRLC), said:
“These rushed laws will not improve community safety or reduce hate in Queensland. Instead, the Crisafulli Government is turning the temperature up by passing laws to increase division, discrimination, and suppress peaceful political communication.”
Queensland Council for Civil Liberties (QCCL) President Michael Cope expressed his concerns about free speech:
“Free speech is a fundamental right that deserves the maximum protection. Offence is a nebulous concept. Everyone is offended by something. In the QCCL’s view, offence is too low a bar to be set for the criminalising of speech. These laws put the standard far too low and are a threat to the fundamental right of free speech.”
Over the past months, Queensland’s constabulary have been tasked with policing Crisafulli’s new hate speech laws at pro-Palestinian protests. So far, 26 people have been arrested for voicing or displaying words that the Crisafulli Government has declared illegal. If found guilty, those arrested face a maximum two-year prison sentence for uttering words.
On Sunday, May 17, fifty Queensland police officers were on hand to enforce Crisafulli’s new hate speech laws as several hundred members of Brisbane’s Palestinian community and their supporters gathered in Queen Victoria Park to remember the 78th anniversary of the Nakba.
The Nakba, or catastrophe, originally referred to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestine. For Palestinians, Nakba has become more than a historical event; it is a continuing process of displacement that has never stopped.
The memorial began with the grandchildren of Nakba survivors, who spoke of their grandparents' suffering during the Nakba.
One young man, Zac, one of the 26 arrested for uttering the outlawed words, spoke of his grandfather's expulsion from his village in 1948 during the Nakba and how this inter-generational trauma influenced his decision to oppose the hate speech laws.
At eleven years old, Zac’s grandfather was forced to carry his grandmother on his back for four kilometres to a safe house. On the way, he witnessed the slaughter of the people who had raised him: bus drivers, shopkeepers and tea shop owners. Ordinary people who had done nothing wrong lay dead in the streets. At eleven years old, his grandfather was forced to bear witness to this.
His grandfather now sees the same thing happening on his phone in Gaza. A whole new generation of Palestinians is experiencing the same catastrophe he did 80 years ago.
Zac told the crowd:
That is why some weeks ago I chose to defy these new Crisafulli laws targeting the Palestine campaign. I could not sit back and watch this government spread lies and slander about the suffering of my family and the millions of other Palestinians. If Crisafulli is allowed to get away with this, he will not stop there. He will try to encroach further into our right to speak out for the Palestinians and our family.
Another speaker at the rally was Nick Hanna, a Sydney lawyer assisting the Hate Speech 26, whom he described as:
Very brave individuals who were being prosecuted for defying one of the most repressive laws ever passed in this country.
They had been told that if they called for a faraway land to be free, they would risk prison. Knowing the risk, they went ahead and did it anyway.
These people defied this ban because they oppose racism against all people and not just some. Because they knew all of Palestine was occupied, not just in the West Bank, not just in the Gaza Strip, but from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, and they wanted freedom for the land and its people.
Queensland’s laws "are among many that have been passed during the last two-and-a-half years that restrict our freedom of speech and right to protest", Hanna said. The wording of the laws differs from state to state, but the objective is always the same: to stifle criticism of Israel and its crimes.
Hanna continued:
We are now witnessing the most aggressive crackdown on civil liberties in living memory. Israel is trying to shut down the debate altogether. This is why these laws are being passed in this state and in this country. In the past, the world was largely blind to Israel's crimes.
The Nakba, which we are commemorating today, was carried out in the dark. No one was aware of the massacres, of the rapes, the ethnic cleansing, until it was too late. Well, how times have changed.
For the last two and a half years, we've been forced to witness a genocide in Gaza live-streamed on our phones every single day. We've been exposed to things so horrific that we will never be able to forget them. The world has woken up, and we are never going back to sleep.
So, having lost the debate, Israel is trying to shut down the debate altogether. This is why these laws are being passed in this state and in this country.
Nick Hanna is working with other civil liberties lawyers to bring an appeal before the High Court to declare Crisafulli’s hate speech laws unconstitutional because of their curtailment of free speech.
Dr John Jiggens is a writer and journalist currently working in the community newsroom at Bay-FM in Byron Bay.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
Support independent journalism Subscribe to IA.
Related Articles
- Why do politicians get to inflame, but citizens don’t?
- Apply hate speech laws "equally" — send us all to gaol
