Labor calls on government to rule out substantive changes after Senate blocks amendments to Racial Discrimination Act

The government should seek a “fresh electoral mandate” to reform section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, according to the Liberal MP Ian Goodenough, who chaired the joint parliamentary committee on human rights that developed options to change it.

In a further sign of 18C change advocates regrouping, Senator James Paterson has said the failure to make substantive changes has made fresh reform calls “inevitable” when further test cases emerge.

Senate blocks government's changes to section 18C of Racial Discrimination Act Read more

Goodenough and Paterson made the comments after the Senate voted on Thursday night to block the government’s proposal to replace “offend, insult or humiliate” with “harass” in the provision banning racially discriminatory speech.

The Institute of Public Affairs, of which Paterson is a former deputy executive director, immediately called for the Coalition to take the changes to the next election.



On Friday the Senate passed the majority of the government’s proposed changes to complaints handling. Labor called for the government to rule out substantive changes but the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, did not rule out the government pushing the debate into the next election.

Goodenough said the government “should proceed with implementing the changes to the complaints handling process, monitor the situation, and at an appropriate time seek a fresh electoral mandate to amend section 18C”.

He said that reforming the Australian Human Rights Commission complaints handling process would “have a positive effect on striking out unmeritorious cases”.

“However, without amending the legislation complaints will still take some time to be assessed before it can be determined if they have merit and this process may still penalise respondents to unmeritorious complaints through negative publicity or having to prepare a case.”

Paterson said “changes to 18C will be inevitably revisited when the next [Queensland University of Technology] or Bill Leak case occurs”.

“Labor, the Greens and Nick Xenophon have ensured that will occur because they’ve prevented the parliament from fixing 18C.”

The Liberal MP Craig Kelly said further calls for reform would depend on “the effect of these new changes”.

“If we see another case like the QUT students, I think people will say these changes haven’t been effective. If there’s no further cases like that, the issue might die a natural death.”

Kelly said there would be a “substantial period of time” between procedural changes taking effect and the next election, during which time the government could assess whether they had stopped unmeritorious claims.

At a media conference on Friday the shadow minister for citizenship and multicultural Australia, Tony Burke, and the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, called on the government to rule out pursuing the substantive changes to section 18C defeated on Thursday night.

“We still need the government to now say they will no longer pursue this policy,” Burke said. Dreyfus added that it must “rule out returning to this ideological obsession”.

The 18C debate: how frequent are racial discrimination complaints? Read more

Liberal MPs who opposed changing 18C, including the New South Wales Liberals David Coleman, Julian Leeser and Craig Laundy, and the Victorians Julia Banks and Russell Broadbent, are likely to use the defeat of the changes on Thursday to argue they should be abandoned.

In an interview on Sky on Friday morning, Cormann said the government was committed to improving anti-vilification laws to improve the protection of freedom of speech.

“We’re disappointed the Senate hasn’t seen fit to strengthen anti-vilification laws … to deal with the serious issue of harassment.”

Asked earlier on ABC’s AM whether the government would continue to push the changes into the next election, Cormann said he would let the attorney general make statements about the future of the bill after the Senate dealt with changes in complaints handling.

On Friday afternoon the Senate passed the procedural elements of the bill, including introducing a mandatory accept/reject preliminary assessment of complaints by the Australian Human Rights Commission.

The Greens supported a new obligation for the AHRC president to notify people who are the subject of adverse allegations, after a government amendment that this process is not mandatory where not practical, addressing AHRC concerns.

Labor and the Greens successfully overturned a government amendments that would have applied new complaint handling procedures to existing complaints, which they argued amounted to a retrospective burden on the AHRC.