When ‘my rights’ take over free speech in the public arena

Ella Chanel, a former adviser to Matthew Guy, is taking the Victorian Liberal Party to the Human Rights Commission, alleging multiple racial microaggressions in the party’s head office. Tim Anderson, the Sydney University political economy lecturer unfairly sacked for circulating comparisons of Israel and the Nazis, has lost his claim for damages arising from the “hurt and humiliation” suffered because of the university’s unjust move. And on Sunday, independent Senator Lidia Thorpe announced she will lodge a complaint with the Human Rights Commission against the Greens for alleged racist incidents while she was a senator for the party.

That’s just this week. These come a month or so after the announcements by Sydney MLA Alex Greenwich and Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi that they would be going after One Nation’s Mark Latham and Pauline Hanson, respectively, for some tweets and a bit of follow-up, alleged to be libellous and vilifying.

On both right and left, ever more exploratory and possibly tendentious forms of legal appeal are becoming standard.

For the rest, it shows the continuing collapse of any notion of a separation between the public sphere and the state, and one which people suspicious of the state on both sides seem eager to enforce. The whole process is obviously counterproductive to the political movements and traditions these people are part of, but they’re doing it anyway. By being an increasingly common last resort, it is breeding cynicism, wearing away any notion of actual politics and making state action the dominant form of social exchange, but they do it anyway. 

Chanel, of African descent, has been an adviser to federal and state Liberal outfits for more than a decade. Her complaint, judging by The Age’s report (which could have omissions), doesn’t seem to allege explicit racist abuse, but rather that a series of events — being left out of meetings, not being notified of things, being treated rudely — were racially directed in nature. In the Victorian Liberal Party? A hellmix of private school prefects’ rooms and happy-clappies? One could well believe it. One could also believe that it was factional or personal.

Inviting the Human Rights Commission in for this sort of thing is a really interesting type of liberalism where the state is asked to inspect and interpret the minutiae of daily encounters. It’s only one staffer, but the fact that even one fairly experienced staffer is doing it suggests that the political culture that sustains liberalism is breaking down at the highest level. If that culture was still functional, it should be unthinkable for that to occur to their political party.

In the case of Anderson, he had an absolute right and necessity to sue Sydney University to be reinstated. His sacking was one of the worst examples of university administrations curtailing what should be the almost unlimited right of humanities teachers to raise challenging issues and arguments that might make their students uncomfortable. And to a degree, the way in which the system is set up might make claiming “hurt and humiliation” the only route to full compensation.

But ehhh… neither is a good look, nor would it have been a good precedent if it was established. The complaint that the university used to sack Anderson — that he had shown a graphic that combined the Israeli flag and the Nazi swastika — was one of those teaching events increasingly being used by students to make complaints of being subjected to traumatising and shocking images. That’s part of an increasingly common Zionist movement tactic — especially on campuses — of using the language of trauma and harm to one’s subjectivity to attack anti-imperialist teaching and the BDS movement.

But hell, they’re right. If you’re from a Holocaust survivor family, or simply a somewhat sensitive person, such images would hurt. They might traumatise. But keeping the university as a place where an anti-imperialist discourse can be made openly, and unhedged, necessitates absolutely minimising the language of hurt and humiliation as a consideration in public life. We need to be able to say robust things and assume a robustness of our opponents when we say them, and to enforce the demand that people have to hear things they don’t want to.

Thorpe’s general announcement that she might be taking the Greens to the Human Rights Commission for racism while she was a member of the party appears contradictory. Once again, one can understand there might be all sorts of irritating hypocrisies within the Greens. But Thorpe mounted a stated resistance to reciting her oath of office in its current form to question the legitimacy of state sovereignty — which I thought was a great move, taken to the limits of what one could do while still taking office. She is now talking about inviting an arm of that state in to go over the affairs of a private organisation that Thorpe joined voluntarily and left voluntarily.

Does a critic of the state have no right to call on the powers of the state? Of course not. Blak sovereignty movementists still have a right to call the fire brigade. But extending the powers of the state by inviting it into the heart of a political party further legitimises the right of the state to set ideological standards. It further establishes that the law can determine what things are and are not authorised to be said, and frame certain non-criminal actions — like giving someone the silent treatment — as “judgeable” from the level of sovereignty.

This is not something that anyone involved with organisations who want the right to say radical things should encourage. It’s further licensing the state to reach into organisations, examine emails, texts, minutes of meetings, etc, and if you’ve already backed that principle, it’s difficult to do anything much when it happens to you except squawk in protest. Resistance to such measures becomes politically meaningful only when it comes from a position of consistency, not just individual outrage that it happened to you.

The case of the Greens surely establishes that. Two weeks after Faruqi sicced the commission onto Hanson for a tweet — one that implicitly argued that immigrants to a country who have a hatred for the popular institutions of that country might want to return to the place from whence they came (an arguable and general statement, applicable to anyone) — the Greens may now be the target of a similar sort of action.

Round and round it all goes. The faster it goes, the more any form of critical and radical questioning politics will be wholly undermined by the hypocrisy of its elite representatives in pursuit of their individual redress. Eventually academics like Anderson will get a complaint based on student feels. Politicians will increasingly be pinged by a disgruntled ex-staffer, and the capacity to be political will be weakened with each further round.

Where does it end? You can look to America to see. It’s the Ron DeSantis movement, which entirely re-energised the right by using the language and politics of the cultural left to mount an attack against progressive politics overall.

By going to war against the curriculum and library catalogues based on notions of trauma and hurt to white students who thought they were being blamed for slavery, DeSantis gave the left nothing to reply with — and used its arguments for his legitimacy.

The left had already given away the notion of a robust public sphere, and the inconsequence of “being offended”, and so all it could burble out was that white offence and potential hurt weren’t the same as Black or other offence, hurt and trauma. That’s true enough, but it’s a messy and complex thing to argue, and the underlying principle has been established.

Whatever the frustrations and temptations, radical and critical political forces and movements always lose in the long, or even middle run, when they draw in the state on their “side”.