ONE of the tribulations of journalism are “”nutters”. They telephone you and hound you with lunatic theories or obsessions based on the flimsiest link with an article in that day’s paper.
Telecom and Voltaire between them, however, have provided a solution. Voltaire is attributed with saying: “”I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” Telecom’s role, on the other hand, is more prosaic. It has sold me a telephonist’s headset.
You see, hanging up on “”nutters” is no good; it does not deter them. They just ring again. Rather than attempting to silence people, it is far better to let them have their say. So I just put the headset on and let the “”nutters” prattle away while my two hands are free to continue work at the keyboard on something else. I occasionally mutter a “”yes, yes, of course, certainly” every time the meaningless buzzing noise in my ears stops, or occasionally I may put the headset aside to get some files from the library while the “”nutter” prattles on.
I commend this approach to the Minister for Immigration and to the Speaker of our own Little House on the Limestone Prairie: let them have their say, and nobody will take much notice. As soon as you try to ban them, however, you give them widespread attention and credibility they do not deserve.
The Minister for Immigration, you recall, banned the British “”historian” David (?) Irving from coming to Australia to spout his nonsense about the Holocaust. The Speaker, Roberta McRae, you may not recall because it has received less attention, prevented Dennis Stevenson from putting something on the Assembly notice paper and later, can you believe, expunged from Hansard, his speech alluding to the same matter.
On May 13, Stevenson put on the notice paper a notice of motion seeking an inquiry into the fitness of a named very senior ACT public servant, hinting at sexual harassment and breaches of a section of the Crimes Act on use of telephones.
Later that day the Deputy Speaker, Wayne Berry, moved to have the notice removed from the notice paper. Stevenson was not even permitted to speak against this motion. It was passed 15-1. Berry said the notice was an abuse of Stevenson’s position as an elected representative.
Several days later, Stevenson used a trick of putting the same matter during debate on the Radiation Bill in the form of an amendment. It spoke of the named public servant having admitted “”bluntly sexually propositioning a junior member of the ACT public service and he is also alleged to have sexually assaulted a Member of this Assembly and has made abusive telephone calls which contravene Section 85ZE of the Crimes Act”.
McRae decided to cut that part of Stevenson’s speech out of the Hansard _ like some Stalinist editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia.
“”As Speaker, I have a responsibility to ensure that no objectionable material is included in the record of the debates of the Assembly,” she said. She then uttered the following platitudinous, contradictory, hypocritical drivel: “”Freedom of speech in this Assembly is a very valuable right and one that should be protected”.
What, I ask, does “”objectionable” mean? And how can Hansard be a “”record” of Assembly debates if it is in fact sanitised to contain only things Roberta McRae deems unobjectionable.
We all know that Dennis Stevenson can spout the most extraordinary (and ordinary) rubbish at times. And, indeed, some of it is objectionable to many people in the community, but it is for them to hear it and, if they choose, dismiss it. It is not for the Speaker to do that for them. Stevenson is a properly elected Member of the Assembly and the electors are entitled to know what he says in the House.
Aside from this, McRae’s decision has elevated Stevenson’s conduct into a freedom-of-speech debate: a status it does not deserve. It has also given needless food for gossips, the suspicious and speculators who might wonder how powerful is this public servant that 15 MLAs are prepared to vote to get his name off the notice paper and that the Speaker is prepared to interfere with Hansard to achieve the same effect.
A couple of other legal issues arise. First, would it be a breach of parliamentary privilege to report verbatim that which was expunged? (In the old Soviet Union, of course, that was settled with seven years in the Gulag.) Second, would you get privilege in a defamation action if you reported word-for-word what was said in the Assembly even though the Speaker changed the record? Perhaps next time, it would be worth testing these questions.