RDA changes: second Liberal sponsors bill to allow people 'right to offend'

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/25/hate-speech-second-liberal-sponsors-move-to-allow-people-to-offend

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A second Liberal senator has co-sponsored the new push to amend section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act to allow people to offend or insult based on race.

The proposed bill removes the words “offend” and “insult” from the act so it is only unlawful to “humiliate” or “intimidate” based on race and comes after the government abandoned its plans to amend 18C last month as it announced national security reforms.

The bill was introduced to the Senate by the Family First senator, Bob Day, who revealed that Liberal senator Dean Smith has joined his party colleague, Cory Bernardi, and the Liberal Democratic senator, David Leyonhjelm, in sponsoring it.

It is not known how many members of the government could support the bill.

The opposition leader, Bill Shorten, called on the prime minister to “pull Bernardi into line” and force him to drop his co-sponsorship of the new RDA bill.

“Senator Bernardi reopening a proposition to water down protections against hate speech in Australia at this time is dramatically unhelpful to maintaining calm,” he told reporters in Canberra.

“We know that we can’t defeat terrorism by military action alone, that terrorism wins when hatred and intolerance spread their wings. We cannot at this time be talking about watering down protections against hate speech when what we’re trying to do is defeat the hateful ideology that we see in domestic terrorism and the international events in northern Iraq and Syria.”

The acting prime minister, Warren Truss, said it was not the government proposing the changes.

“That commitment [not to proceed with changes] remains in place and that demonstrates our wish to encourage all Australians to live in tolerance with one another”, he said during Question Time.

“We need to respect one another’s views. We need to acknowledge that there are people in this country who have different views from others and that should be respected also and some of those may not necessarily be mainstream views.”