David Marr: Don't use the Lindt Cafe seige to justify new laws

David Marr in The Sydney siege should not be used to justify draconian new anti-terrorism laws expresses the opinion we don't need new laws to deal with the likes of Man Haron Monis.

Australia was not changed in the early hours of this morning. But it may be changed if these terrible events in Sydney are used to drive another agenda altogether: the criminalisation of the press and the needless extension of surveillance into the lives of all of us all in the name of fighting terrorism.

John Stuart Mill said a bit more about the right to free speech

Peter Brent in Yes but what would Mill say? notes that many people like to quote John Stuart Mill when arguing about free speech. However, he notes that these people tend to be selective in their quotes.

These Libertarians are wont to quote centuries old European philosophers, with John Stuart Mill probably the favourite, on how speech should be unbridled. Sometimes it looks like the results of a Google search.

And that’s a game we can all play. How about this from JS Mill:

“there are many acts which, being directly injurious only to the agents themselves, ought not to be legally interdicted, but which, if done publicly, are a violation of good manners and, coming thus within the category of offenses against others, may rightly be prohibited.”

Brent also writes:

Jeremy Bentham, who JS Mill was (at least initially) a disciple of, reckoned all that earlier stuff about “natural rights” and men being “born free” was the biggest load of rubbish—"rhetorical nonsense”, he called it, and “nonsense upon stilts” and “[a]bsurd and miserable nonsense!”

Now I’m even less of a Mill expert than I am a Bentham one, but I’m quite sure he also believed that human rights do not come out of the earth and rocks, but are indeed “decided”, or at least identified, by someone, or some people. Such as his good self.

....

There is no absolute right to free speech in any society, and I’m not just referring to defamation laws. If someone stood outside your property for 18 hours a day, week after week, yelling abuse at you and your family, I’m pretty sure you could get the coppers to move them on.

It wasn't Voltaire after all

John Birmingham in Reassuring lies don't belong in climate debate points out that it wasn't Voltaire who made the famous statement "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” but:

Evelyn Hall, writing under the pseudonym S. G. Tallentyre (because who wants to listen to a woman, right?) in a 1906 biography, The Friends of Voltaire.

George Brandis is wrong, consensus on climate change is not an attack on free speech

In a recent interview George Brandis criticised the consensus view on climate change as an attack on free speech, citing John Stuart Mill in support. In Brandis misses the finer points of free speech Henry Martyn Lloyd argues that Brandis is wrong.

Brandis seems to think that it is necessary that debate continue until those in error come to accept their error. Mill had no such requirement and nor should he.

For Mill there is nothing in principle that prevents the forming of a consensus view on any matter, scientific, religious, or political. In fact, Mill held that the ideal of knowledge is true consensus. Ensuring liberty of thought and discussion does not prevent consensus, rather the opposite, the ideal of discussion is convergence on truth even though this convergence will always be incomplete and must never become dogmatic.