UK writer and activist, Brendan O’Neil, editor of Spiked Online, in The Australian:
IMAGINE if there were a women’s rights organisation that said women should stay in the kitchen and leave the world of work to men.
Or a gay rights group that argued homosexuality was sinful. We would think that was weird, right?
Well, it is no more weird than having a human rights commission that has devoted itself not to the expansion of freedom but to the strangling of it, to the straitjacketing of liberty in the name of protecting people from offence and defending public morals.
Australia’s Human Rights Commission must be one of the worst cases of Orwellian doublespeak in the modern world.
… this vast bureaucratic outfit that is funded by government to the tune of $25 million a year does far more to thwart freedom than it does to promote it.
… Without the freedom to speak our minds, publish our ideas and hawk our ideologies, everything from the right to vote to artistic rights becomes meaningless, impossible even.
… in the debate about section 18C, in this key ideological clash over whether the state should have the authority to tell individuals what they can think and say, most of the HRC has come down on the side of the state control rather than the individual liberty.
