Suing Latham and Hanson achieves nothing and risks a free-speech culture war

Leading progressives appear to be getting their censorship on again. NSW Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi is the latest, suing One Nation Senator Pauline Hanson over a tweet in which she asked why Farqui didn’t “piss off back to Pakistan”. This was in response to Faruqi having essayed a tweet on the death of Elizabeth II, saying she could not mourn the deceased leader of a “racist empire”. Faruqi has served notice under 18C. 

This comes two days after Sydney MLA Alex Greenwich threatened to sue Mark Latham for defamation, and possibly harassment, for a tweet Latham wrote suggesting the combination of Greenwich being gay and some of the unwanted effects of anal intercourse made Greenwich a “disgusting” person, which is about as much detail as I’ll go into for a lunchtime read. 

The irritation and anger of both can be understood, particularly Greenwich’s. Hanson’s tweet suggested that you had to accept everything about a country to live there, or to commit to it, while Latham’s was designed to take a universal human activity and a certain aspect of it to humiliate and embarrass Greenwich. Takes a couple of days to walk that stuff off.

But walk it off both Greenwich and Faruqi should have, and should do now. In the case of Latham and Greenwich, surely it is obvious that Latham’s tweet has destroyed his relationship, possibly irrevocably, with the Sky as dark AF crowd. This is less because the tweet was anti-gay, but because it made visible and “abject” what we all agree not to talk about. To associate with Latham is to risk contamination.

In the case of Faruqi, it is hard to see where the 18C-ready vilification lies. If Faruqi was Swedish, Hanson would presumably have told her to go back to Sweden. The tweet was a simple argument that in choosing to move to a new country, you should accept its dominant values. I don’t agree with it, but it seems a fair argument to make. I think if James Morrow believes Australia to be the socialist hellhole he makes it out to be, he should piss off back to the US and see if News Corp will pay for health insurance half as good as Medicare here. It’s a wholly reasonable argument.

Separately, Greenwich and Faruqi are helping their beleaguered targets turn tweets of squalid frustration into a free speech issue. Working together, they are going to revive One Nation from the outside, allowing Hanson and Latham to bury their differences over Latham’s tweet and turn this into a major battle over civil society and the “woke” state. You had to be pretty hardcore to support Latham after his nasty pub-joke tweet, as a glance at its replies showed. But using progressive lawfare to attack a single tweet, later deleted, as constituting harassment is a genuine attack on the capacity to have some sort of public sphere that is not crisscrossed by the state’s supervision of speech. 

The contradictions of this are multiple. Left and progressive politics rely on a broad separation between the state and the public sphere, and as great a pluralism of beliefs as possible. If it was a specific racial slur Hanson had directed at Faruqi, sure, there might be a political-moral case for a legal response.

But what sort of chilling effect on broader speech does such lawfare have? For example, the streets of inner-city Melbourne are currently filled with Aboriginal flag stickers saying “Immigration is another invasion”. A minority opinion, or focus, of one Blak sovereignty faction, possibly (or even a false flag)? A legitimate argument from an anti-colonialist perspective? But by Faruqi’s standard, this is surely hate speech too.

Greenwich’s political case has even less merit. Since 1978, the movement around Mardi Gras and Pride addressed, among other things, the right to say what hitherto couldn’t be said. Then, as Mardi Gras became mainstream, one focus became the right to have a legal street march in which, inter alia, men dressed like leather dogs mimic piss play on each other, in front of anyone who happened to come downtown. Let’s face it, some of the stuff in Mardi Gras over the years has been deeply offensive to many, many people, and in a shared public place. I’ve got no problem with a state-authorised main street bacchanal one day a year, but surely supporting it is an implicit commitment to the idea that the public sphere should be a place of robust expression unhindered by the law?

Take Benjamin Law’s tweet during the same-sex marriage plebiscite: “Sometimes find myself wondering if I’d hate-fuck all the anti-gay MPs in parliament if it meant they got the homophobia out of their system”. That was funny, but the implicit imagery was rape-adjacent, though progressives squirmed to find ways to say it wasn’t. (Law specified that “Hate fucking is a Gen Y term that refers to consensual sex with someone disagreeable”.) But surely its implication, that conservative MPs were really repressed bi-men who could be liberated by Australia’s favourite manic pixie dream boy, is libellous, offensive and harassing all at once. Also, as I said, very funny. Do you want to live in a world where no one can tell a joke like that? 

No? Then stop trying to control public-private spaces like Twitter, short of acting against directed threats and explicitly violent ruminations. Progressives spent 40 years trying to free speech, and are now trying to lock it up because they have achieved a measure of cultural-institutional power. But if you’re going to do that sort of cynical flip, you better have all the power — and progressives, you’ve got nothing like that.

The example of Florida and Ron DeSantis shows what happens when you can’t seal the deal. The removal of books dealing with the US’s racist history has been legitimated on the grounds that some of their more sweeping claims might cause trauma and offence in white children reading them. What can be said against that, if you have already weakened the notion of a robust public sphere with the indefinite extension of the idea of offence? We don’t protect a pluralist, robust public sphere to help the right, which can look after itself. We do it to make a critical, questioning, challenging politics possible. 

What’s most contradictory about this is that both tweets were the product of the frustration and defeat of the right. Hanson has lost One Nation’s swing position on the crossbench because of the Greens’ increased numbers, independent Senator David Pocock, and the JLT Thelma and Louise double-act. Latham, who thought he might be the great revivalist of One Nation, couldn’t increase its numbers, while Greenwich consolidated the progressive independent hold on central Sydney. Let Latham do himself more damage uninterrupted.

Both Faruqi and Greenwich will legitimate an absurd level of legal interference in free speech, which they will come to regret — while handing the right a rallying point. I mean, you won Alex. You’re number 1. But then so is Barbra Streisand. Would you like to see an aerial photo of her house?

Were Faruqi and Greenwich right to take legal action, or are they doing more harm than good? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.