Meet Your New “Freedom Commissioner”

While much of Australia was busy watching their team win back an urn full of ashes yesterday, Attorney-General George Brandis was applying the torch to our Human Rights Commission by announcing our next Human Rights Commissioner: Tim Wilson, former policy director of the radical neoliberal think-tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA).

Yes, that’s the same IPA that recommended the Human Rights Commission be abolished in January this year.

The very same IPA this year recommended these 75 radical ideas to transform Australia, including abolishing the carbon tax and replacing it with nothing, repealing section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, abolishing the ACCC and ACMA, withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol, immediately halting the NBN, repealing the Fair Work Act, privatising SBS, CSIRO, Australian Institute of Sport, Australia Post, and Medibank, dismantling the ABC, and defunding Harmony Day.

Ironic that someone who preaches steadfastly against needless bureaucracy will now accept a $300,000+ salary, no? And what for, exactly?

Wilson’s new role has the stirring, hand-on-your-heart informal title of Freedom Commissioner. It seems his main purpose will be to champion the fundamental human right of being free to talk shit on people, regardless of how much one’s position of privilege and influence might mean those words wreak damage on the people already marginalised by the structures holding up our far-from-level playing field.

In an op-ed for The Australian this morning, Wilson penned a persuasive defence of free speech, free expression, and free press. Here’s a quote: “A direct extension of free speech is press freedom. Protecting free speech is fundamental to the operation of liberal democracy. It is an essential principle for freedom of the press. Free speech and press freedom are one and the same; they are essentially interchangeable and mutually reinforcing concepts.”

It’s interesting that the press freedom battle which conservatives like Wilson choose to fight is with the Racial Discrimination Act: “Increasingly free speech has been pushed aside in favour of laws and regulations designed to stop people being offensive to each other,” Wilson writes. There are far greater threats to press freedom in our country at the moment, with far more dangerous consequences for human rights. Why isn’t he commenting on the Abbott Government’s asylum seeker media blackout? Where is his defence of Wikileaks, Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning?

In a statement yesterday, Wilson used an interesting choice of words to describe his approach to the new role: “As Human Rights Commissioner I will put freedom on the offensive: where it belongs.”

To be fair, he appears well qualified for the position of bringing balance to the rabid bleeding-heart leftism that has apparently been tarnishing the reputation of Australia’s Human Rights Commission in recent years. Somebody has to protect the human rights of established elites: they’re people too!

Here’s a brief resume of some recent media appearances and articles by Wilson, on a number of key issues relating to human rights and individual freedoms:

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On The Right To Discriminate

Wilson defends our fundamental human right to say offensive shit, in opposition to the oppressive agenda of his future employer, the Human Rights Commission, which pursues anti-discrimination at the expense of unbridled free speech. (Well, used to).

“Human rights these days have been conflated well outside of their ambit of what is a human right,” he says, “and the Australian Human Rights Commission is … pursuing anti-discrimination as a very important measure, at the expense of focusing on human rights.”

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On The Right To Drive Too Fast

Wilson defends the fundamental rights of racing car drivers to put lives at risk by hooning around suburban streets as fast as they bloody well like.

“You’ve got to come to the realisation that there’s going to be a point where there are a number of road deaths that are unavoidable. That’s what happens when you send cars heading down a road at a fast pace. Meanwhile you have this and other examples of government regulating people’s lives.”

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On The Right To Cheap Smiths Chips

Wilson defends our fundamental human right to buy affordable Smiths Chips in the face of the poverty an Emissions Trading Scheme would undoubtedly inflict on ordinary Australians.

“I can tell you exactly how much this [packet of chips] is going to go up. In the first year it’s only going to go up by a few cents. But this is a tax that goes up every single year and by 2020 this will have gone up by 9.15% and will have basically doubled the GST. And then it continues to go up into eternity.”

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On The Right To Treat Our Planet However We Like

Here he is appearing as the IPA’s Climate Policy Director on a special climate change denial themed episode of the Bolt Report (skip to 3:30 unless you want to watch Bolt’s hilarious editorial):

“If you go back and look at the original polling data when the public actually said they were concerned about climate change, a lot of it related to the drought. Now, I don’t think there’s any ambiguity: the drought has officially broken.”

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On The Right Of Men To Be Unburdened By Children

Wilson defends the average male taxpayer’s fundamental human right to enjoy the privilege of being born a man, on Q&A: “It’s not my choice that women have children. It’s genetic!”

(Skip to 2:05 for the comment, which even prompts Liberal MP Kelly O’Dwyer to quip “I think you might have lost the crowd, there”).

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On The Right To Gambling Addiction

Here’s Wilson speaking at the ABC’s Battle of the Think Tanks in 2011. Skip to 6:06 to hear his argument against the regulation of the gambling industry, in which he describes harm-minimisation measures like mandatory pre-commitment for poker machine use as “fundamentally immoral”.

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On LGBTI Rights

Wilson is a strong supporter of marriage equality, as well as one of a relative-few out-and-proud conservative voices — but his anti-discrimination stance sits uncomfortably with much of the work of the LGBTI movement. He recently penned an article in the Star Observer that urges LGBTI activists to abandon “special group rights” in favour of the kind of freedom of speech that guarantees the right to retaliate with equal amounts of vitriol should a homophobic member of an ethnic or other minority group “throw hostile verbal bombs”. Fight hate with more hate, said nobody ever a disappointingly large number of people.

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Our new Freedom Commissioner is one of those idealistic, fundamentalist conservatives who likes to quote the line mis-attributed to Voltaire but in fact written by his biographer Evelyn Beatrice Hall, to sum up the former’s philosophy: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”.

The problem with people who use that line is that they seem to forget its essence was conceived at a time and place when the only people allowed to talk in the first place were rich white males. What if the line wasn’t “I disapprove of what you say” but “I am crippled, discredited and silenced by what you say”? We’ve developed a bit more of a nuanced understanding of power relations in the world since the 18th century — and thankfully, many more voices have entered the fray.

There’s no doubt that all these competing voices have complicated things; history tells us that a fundamentalist pursuit of ‘freedom’ often comes at someone else’s expense.  The inconvenient truth is that rights are never truly ‘fundamental’, because there will always be moments when the rights of one individual or group clash with the rights of another. It’s up to organisations like the Human Rights Commission to navigate that minefield regardless of politics, to ensure that the society we live in is a fair and just one. Let’s hope it doesn’t all end up in a pile of ashes.

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Jenny Noyes writes from Sydney’s inner west. She enjoys making opinions about arts and isms, which you can read on her Tumblr or Twitter: @jennynoise.