I’m just coming to the end of a four-week speaking tour Down Under and have spotted some worrying signs of what our new government might have in store for us, particularly on the free speech front. During its six years in power, the Labour party in New Zealand tried to criminalise ‘hate speech’ against minority groups, and Australia’s Labor government has announced it will bring forward legislation to strengthen laws against speech that incites hatred in relation to race, religion, sexual orientation and transgender identity.
Will Keir Starmer do likewise? In England and Wales, it’s already a criminal offence to stir up hatred on the basis of a person’s race, religion or sexual orientation, although Nicola Sturgeon went further. The Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act expanded that list to include disability, transgender identity, variations in sexual characteristics and age.
The Labour manifesto promised to deliver a ‘full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices’
In its manifesto, Labour said it would make all hate crimes ‘aggravated offences’. At present, only crimes motivated by hostility to a victim’s race or religion are ‘aggravated’ and so punished with higher sentences. Labour proposes to extend that list to include sexual orientation, disability and transgender identity. To date, it has not pledged to make stirring up hatred against people on the basis of disability and transgender identity a criminal offence. But judging from the behaviour of their counterparts Down Under, I wouldn’t be surprised.
Another clue as to what restrictions Keir Starmer might impose on free speech is the ban on conversion therapy, which already applies in New Zealand and three of Australia’s six states. The Labour manifesto promised to deliver a ‘full trans-inclusive ban on conversion practices’, which sounds a lot like the ban enacted in 2021 in Victoria, the most left-wing Australian state.
As in England and Wales, conversion therapy as it is commonly understood was already illegal in Victoria and there was little evidence that it was still happening. No, the real import of the ban was to criminalise ‘gender conversion’, e.g. parents and health professionals trying to persuade troubled adolescents not to embark on irreversible medical pathways.
Since the law was activated in Victoria in 2022, no one has been prosecuted for this crime, but that’s because people are self-censoring. According to parents of gender-confused children in the state, it’s impossible to find a licensed psychotherapist willing to deviate from the ‘gender-affirming care’ approach, recently criticised in the Cass Review, whereby a child’s self-diagnosis is taken at face value and they’re packed off for life-changing medical treatment.
Another sign of things to come is the way the Australian Online SafetyAct is being enforced. Passed by the federal government in 2021, it’s remarkably similar to our own identically named law that received royal assent last year. The agency responsible for policing social media down here is the eSafety Commission and the woman who runs it – a bossy head-girl type named Julie Inman Grant – is known as the ‘eKaren’. She hit the headlines recently when she lost the first stage of a legal fight with Elon Musk, whom she’d ordered to remove footage from Twitter of a 16-year-old Muslim boy stabbing a clergyman in Sydney. She didn’t just want Musk to remove it in Australia, but all over the world, which a federal court judged was a step too far.
In another takedown order, Inman Grant wrote to Twitter flagging up a video alerting parents to the creation of a ‘Queer Club’ at a primary school in Melbourne, claiming it was ‘cyberbullying’ and as such a breach of Twitter’s terms of service. On this occasion, Twitter removed the video, but when the creator complained she was told the notice was merely ‘informal’ and therefore couldn’t be appealed. No doubt Ofcom will get up to similar tricks when it starts enforcing our own Online Safety Act.
But if my trip Down Under has given me a taste of what to expect from Starmer’s premiership, it has also provided a clue about how to end it. There are two right-of-centre parties in Australia, the Liberals and the Nationals, roughly equivalent to the Conservatives and Reform respectively. Instead of fighting each other, they’ve been working together since 1946, with each party agreeing not to field candidates in constituencies held by the other. The arrangement has worked like gangbusters, with the coalition, as it calls itself, holding power for most of the postwar period. There’s got to be a lesson there.
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