George Brandis says it is “deplorable” deniers are being excluded from the climate change debate and people who say the science is settled are ignorant and medieval.



The attorney general called the leader of the opposition in the Senate, Penny Wong, the “high priestess of political correctness” and said he did not regret his comment that everyone has the right to be a bigot in an interview with the online magazine Spiked.

He said one of the main motivators for his passionate defence of free speech has been the “deplorable” way climate change has been debated and he was “really shocked by the sheer authoritarianism of those who would have excluded from the debate the point of view of people who were climate-change deniers”.

“One side [has] the orthodoxy on its side and delegitimises the views of those who disagree, rather than engaging with them intellectually and showing them why they are wrong,” he said.

He referred to Wong as standing up in the Senate and saying the science is settled as an example of climate change believers trying to shut down the debate.

“In other words, ‘I am not even going to engage in a debate with you.’ It was ignorant, it was medieval, the approach of these true believers in climate change,” he said.

Brandis said he was not a climate change denier and was on the side that believed in anthropogenic global warming and believed something ought to be done about it.

He said his comment in a Senate debate that “people have the right to be bigots” was in line with Voltaire’s philosophy and he did not regret making the point.

“Because if you are going to defend freedom of speech, you have to defend the right of people to say things you would devote your political life to opposing. Your good faith is tested by whether or not you would defend the right to free speech of people with whom you profoundly disagree. That’s the test,” he said.

Brandis is the driving force behind the government’s plan to change section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act which makes it illegal to offend, insult, intimidate and humiliate based on someone’s race.

He wants to remove the words offend, insult and humiliate and make it illegal to vilify someone based on their race or intimidate them so they fear physical harm.

“The moment you establish the state as the arbiter of what might be said, you establish the state as the arbiter of what might be thought, and you are right in the territory that George Orwell foreshadowed,” he said.

Brandis said there had been an inversion in the past few decade where the left had moved towards arguing for censorship and the right had moved away from it.

He said most of the great social causes since the second world war such as women’s liberation and gay liberation had been led by the left but now it wanted to control opinion.

“The left has abandoned the discourse of liberation … because they have a new construct which is all to do with power relationships in society,” he said.

“They are so concerned with rearranging power relationships, so as to disempower the empowered and elevate the disempowered, that they are prepared in the service of that end to sacrifice liberty. Nowadays, they regard liberty as the defence mechanism of the empowered.”

He also defended the columns of Andrew Bolt which saw him charged under the act, saying the judge partook in “political censorship” when Bolt was found to have breached the act in writing about light-skinned Aboriginal people.