Is much as I dislike the iconography of hate I don’t know if such things are effective. They get media attention and their followers think they are martyrs and it feels like virtue signalling and easy options. Also I think the mandatory part was pushed by the conservatives whose leader seeks to benefit from the votes of these people so that tells you what you need to know about the likely effectiveness.
We need to have a serious adult public discussion about fascism, why people want it and what the consequences are because it tends to be catastrophic for everyone, not least the people who gave it power. Our lives aren’t perfect but they are way too good to euthanase our society in pursuit of hideous intolerance.
The leader of the opposition’s mask keeps slipping and the media refuses to examine the issue seriously. The party of Bob Menzies always represented a set of values in opposition to the progress of the Australian working class but they were still generally committed to a democratic and moderately liberal Australia which provided a voice for the many self-employed, small business owner types and others who shared their values. They were never generally more or less bigotted than the ALP or Australian public of the time to my knowledge. In the old days the ALP strongly supported White Australia as a form of labour protectionism and they still have a strongly religious conservative branch. It was never a cartoonish dichotomy between the sides.
While I would say I am generally center left now I have voted for Liberal and National parties in specific elections based on local issues or representation. Choice is good and once we lose our commitment to the rule of law and pluralistic democratic values we lose that choice and people will need to fight to get it back at great cost.
The import of Trumpism and the bigotted dogwhistling pushing the boundaries from the leader of a major party needs to be discussed seriously and unfortunately it won’t be in our current media and tech environment and that concerns me greatly. I helped bring 3 great kids into this world in a bountiful and mostly united country full of hope and opportunity. There were big challenges ahead in the form of climate change but I thought we would have made some headway on those by now and there was progress on other issues. Western democracy turning to the fascism which our forebeears helped defeat wasn’t on my bingo card.
Western democracy turning to the fascism which our forebeears helped defeat wasn’t on my bingo card.
The most annoying thing is the commies 100 years ago being right about this lmao. I certainly had to revisit some of my assumptions when a lot of leftist theory predicted the declines we’ve been seeing.
But what if you are the richest man in the world and you only did a roman salute to send your heart out.
Then visit Australia and do it again 😈
mandatory minimum sentencing is a completely fucked up knee jerk reaction. The government does sweet FA to tackle Nazis because half of Parliament is sympathetic to them, then decide to earn some quick PR by interferring with the court system and lending legitimacy to an extremely blunt instrument primarily used to lock up indigenous kids.
edit: no actually fuck this. Anti hate speech laws were only really updated for this shit a year ago (tells ya something huh), there literally hasn’t been time to test if the courts are just throwing Nazis back out onto the street with a slap on the wrist. Gaol is basically never good and the idea of punishing someone disproportionately as a warning to others is completely unjust. MMS is largely used in Australia to fuck up children and Aboriginal Aussies, the police still have to actually charge people and since they’re sympathic to fascism laws get applied unjustly.
LGBT people face vilification like actual eugenics enforced by the state until last year for trans people in NSW, murder by cops until quite recently that was never investigate, expulsion from private schools (students recently protected I think, teachers not) but faith groups get immunity to existing hate speech laws. The government doing this is in favour of completely ludicrous and fashy anti protest laws, and directs an increasingly militarised police state to spend most of their effort fabricating evidence against climate protestors while intelligence agencies scream into the void about a rising tide of fascism.
Mins himself (large pusher for this from nsw) is an enthusiastic supporter of ethnic cleansing in occupied Palestine. This is not an anti fascist measure from any sort of coherent platform. It is a stupid kneejerk reaction that will do nothing to actually stop facist (remember, they are very good at dog whistles) from a government that has no interest in stemming the tide of fascism.
Bullshit totalitarian cruelty doesn’t start being good because it’s used against people you hate sometimes, that just legitimises bullshit totalitarian cruelty and provides cover. Fuck this law, fuck this government.
Mandatory jail, as opposed to voluntary jail?
As opposed to suspendable (if that’s a word).
Ohh that makes sense, thanks.
The court gets less room to decide on a sentence
LMAO!
Weird. Our US government would consider it anti-semitic not to use a nazi salute twice on stage in front of millions of people. I wonder which government is serious about protecting their Jewish citizens?
Our US government would consider it anti-semitic not to use a nazi salute twice on stage in front of millions of people.
I was almost going to mention Musk’s gesture as an example of how context dictates meaning, but removed it from my comment. Glad to see that someone else mentioned it though - that gesture can be only understood as a Nazi salute and as support to Nazism, nothing else.
[I’m neither from Australia nor USA, but it’s clear that Australia got it right. Musk and his puppet, on the other hand…]
Depending on how this is implemented*, that sounds sensible.
*the key here is that context should be always taken into account when interpreting symbols.
Nobody’s been brave enough to hail a taxi since this was introduced. Taxis are going out of business.
I’m sorry but why is this so heavily upvoted?
Anit-semitism and any other form of hate speech is abhorrent, but imprisonment for a gesture is absolutely dystopian.
American standards of freedom of speech are not universal.
Paradox of tolerance. At this point in history it’s important to draw hard lines. It will be up to police enforcement and since generally police are sympathetic to white nationalism, i don’t think it will be used outside of public displays of clear intention.
Have hard lines like this ever worked throughout history, though? It’s not like the people who originally came up with the concept of free speech didn’t think of this exact case. But they believed it was more important for the people to deal with speech they don’t like themselves (within the bounds of the law, of course) than for a government to silence speech.
I see a problem with inauthentic behaviour online, using bots to artificially amplify hate speech to make it seem more prominent than it actually is. But I think having 100 people tolerate 1 hateful asshat’s speech is the definition of democracy. That doesn’t mean harassment is legal. That doesn’t mean assault or murder or jim crow laws should be tolerated. The worst case is the hate catches on and spreads democratically, and that sucks, but if it happens I guess that’s the society we live in for now, and hopefully it’s just a phase. But if a government artificially silences hate speech, you’re just asking for that to come back and bite you later. Now all those people who would have simply been hateful now also distrust the system they live in, and will seek to dismantle it and replace it with a hateful one.
IMO this is exactly why Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. Thinking that we can live in a society that is systematically devoid of hate is attractive, but it’s a Nirvana Fallacy and is destined to fail. This isn’t new ground we’re treading.
It is a form of hatespeech and Americans just watched a political figure do it twice on live tv so we are sensitive to it rn. We cannot tolerate intolerance in a tolerant society.
Personally I would prefer if we just hit these people
This instance doesn’t have downvotes, and a lot of people upvote the article to boost visibility, not necessarily because they agree with whatever or whoever the article is about.
I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info.
Punishing Nazis for attempting to rally support from the wider public is dystopian? I definitely don’t want to live in your perfect society.
Yes, stripping somebody of their freedom for using a hand gesture is dystopian. Maybe consider that you thinking otherwise makes you a radical on the other side of the spectrum.
There’s a reason fascism is becoming more popular across the globe and it’s accelerated by these overreactions. It feeds into right wing narratives and pushes people on the fence into becoming radical right more than just letting these idiots babble their bullshit and be seen for the fools they are.
Sorry, are you really saying that a Nazi salute is a simple gesture and not overt hate speech against racialized groups? That a Nazi rally in a public place is totally cool and a reasonable expression of political ideology in a democratic society?
That is not a centrist position, it’s a pro-Nazi position. Nazis are not acceptable in public. If a Nazi wants to salute up and down the street, they should be prepared for people to take it as it is (an act of hate speech). In some countries that’s not a crime, but it sure is in my country and, soon, Australia too.
I’m not disagreeing that a Nazi salute is hate speech. Im disagreeing that it’s a sensible course of action to give the government the power to put a human being in a cage for doing it.
Using racial slurs is also hate speech, should a person be imprisoned for using the n-word?
Where it becomes punishable via government intervention to me should be a direct threat of violence on a group of people or call to action to do so.
I’m trying to comprehend what the intended outcome of this type of punishment is anyway. Out of sight, out of mind I guess?
I think that this is shortsighted. Imagine a scenario in which a person might use a Nazi salute in public: it is unlikely that it would be used by a single person just out doing their normal routine. Consider the recent context of Elon Musk, who was at a very large political gathering and was expecting people to respond in kind with their own salutes.
Do you want more visible Nazis? They show up when you summon them. They don’t go away when you outlaw their symbols, but they do find it less appealing to promote themselves online or have rallies to recruit more would-be Nazis. I understand your hesitance to let the state do these things, it’s a large part of the reason why I don’t believe in capital punishment. But if the state doesn’t have the power to stop this peacefully, the next step (no matter what “side” is doing it) is violence.
The comparison to saying slurs is just not equivalent whatsoever.
The appropriate comparison is to hate speech – speech which is never tolerable. The kinds of things I wouldn’t say in this comment. Some racial slurs might qualify, in my opinion, but it would be particular phrases using them and not necessarily the slur itself. The N word is obviously not hate speech when certain people say it, otherwise lots of rap music would be illegal. But there are certainly hate speech phrases that use it that are just as bad as a Nazi salute.
Freedom of speech, like any tolerance, needs to have limits and this is a very reasonable one.
