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Tag: bromberg

Persistence

September 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Over the last weekend I thought I would give up writing this blog. It has been an interesting couple of years. Some 1200 posts, half a million words.

This Winter has been difficult. Constant personal issues involving health and family for the last five years have begun to drain my emotional energy – and it does take emotional energy to force yourself to sit down and think, I mean really think, and then write, about the issues of the day. 

The real problem has been time. There are fewer tourists, and local people have less money to spend. This has meant working longer hours to try to cover the costs of staying in business. And I do need some time just to switch off and relax, and some time for family and friends.

Maintaining Qohel was beginning to look like a very low priority.

But after yesterday’s Federal Court decision, it is increasingly important to persist, and to insist on the importance of free speech.

I find many of Tim Lambert’s blog posts offensive, both because of his personal attacks on people he disagrees with and because of his determined resistence to facts. But I still link to him, and would be very disturbed if it was seriously suggested bloggers who hold his views or write in the way he does should be forced to modify their thinking.

Democracies work because people are informed. They come to be informed through considering a variety of viewpoints and theories. Free speech is essential to effective democracy. The fewer restrictions on free speech, the better a democracy will work.

Even David Irving and Mahmoud Imanutjob have the right to speak. They cannot insist on any right to force us to listen. But forcing people to hear particular views and only those views is only a short step behind the silencing of others.

Democracy and freedom of speech are incompatible with an imagined right not to be offended. Attempts to establish such a right, and especially to give that right to particular groups, will create, and always has created, obstacles to the exchange of facts and ideas, and just as importantly, will create divisions and resentments which undermine respect and trust.

Andrew Bolt Guilty – And They’re Coming For You Next

September 28, 2011 / / 8 Comments

Somehow, in the shambolic mess of Justice Bromberg’s mind, a person who says that race should make no difference, and that people should be rewarded and assisted according to their abilities and needs, is guilty of racial discrimination.

Somehow, in the blinkered hollow of Justice Bromberg’s mind, people who claim extra rights and privileges on the basis of race, which they claim to be free to determine without reference to any racial characteristics whatever, are entitled to those privileges, and any questioning of this is insulting, intimidating, discriminatory and inflammatory.

God help us.

Being Who We Are Part Two

April 6, 2011 / / 1 Comment

Just a few brief thoughts.

One:

It seems to me quite clear, at the risk of incurring judicial wrath, that Justice Bromberg would very much like to find against Andrew Bolt and the Herald and Weekly Times.

There have been a few comments and questions from the bench which indicate this. For example, his remark that “It (freedom of speech) is not an unqualified right. Never has been.”

No one had said it was. Certainly Andrew’s team had made no such claim. So why make this comment?

I could be quite wrong. Justice Bromberg may genuinely intend to put aside any feelings or political values he may have or espouse, and make his judgement solely on the basis of relevant legislation and precedent.

But at very least, it is unwise for a justice, during the course of a trial, to make gratuitous remarks which could beconstrued as indicating a bias.

Two:

It is simply nonsense to suggest that public discussion of another person’s ethnicity is out of bounds because it is necessarily racial vilification.

Say I was to discover that my maternal grandmother had been a member of the Ngapuhi tribe. One of my adopted sisters is a Ngapuhi woman, and my family had lived in Northland for a long time before coming to Australia, so this is not beyond the realms of possibility.

Say I then decided on this basis that I was a Maori. I would expect some pretty merciless mocking from my mates.

If I decided to return to NZ and to claim benefits or awards on the basis of being a Ngapuhi man, I would expect that this claim would be scrutinised.

I would also expect to be able to show the basis on which my claim was made. I would not feel insulted by requests to do this.

Even I did feel insulted, that would say more about my own conceit than anything else.

There is no right under law not to be offended.

Three:

Underlying the complaint in the Bolt case, and, it seems to me in some of Justice Bromberg’s remarks, is the assumption that race is less about race than it is about identity, community and culture. Some of the comments from the complainants go as far as suggesting that anyone who does not hold this new view of race is ipso facto a racist or eugenicist.

There may be instances where it is helpful to take culture and identity into account when race is being determined.

But that is different from saying that culture, identity, community are what matter, and that actual racial background and inheritance do not. A person who is ethnically Han Chinese is still ethnically Chinese even if she was born in Australia and knows nothing of Chinese culture or language.

I would be happy to see some public discussion of this. But it would be extraordinary if people who still thought that race was primarily about race found themselves in trouble with the law because they held and expressed that opinion.

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