An Open Letter to Brian Wightman

Dear Tasmanian Attorney-General Wightman,
Recently I posted about my concerns about a proposed amendment to the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act (Anti-Discrimination Change Requires More Scrutiny).  This amendment, ostensibly designed to control bullying, appears to go much further and potentially have a major impact on various forms of political speech in Tasmania.  I've now seen the Hansard transcript of the debate in which Elise Archer (Liberal, Denison), Michael Ferguson (Liberal, Bass), Brian Wightman (Labor, Bass) and briefly Kim Booth (Green, Bass) spoke (the amendment passed on party lines), and I've posted all the relevant excerpts up on Google Docs for anyone interested. It's notable that Ms Archer not only raised the same concern I raised about the lack of a proper free-speech exemption for the new Section 17, but also quoted from a long letter by the Hobart Community Legal Service Inc raising many concerns about the proposed change.

(As there have been problems for Liberal lawyers who interact with shady characters recently, I advise that I did not have any accidental coffees with Ms Archer prior to her quoting me.  Indeed, I did not know that she had seen the piece at all!)

I'm going to make some comments about my view of your speech and what I think it says about your political views, and then at the end I'm going to ask you a question.  And I'll ask it now too:  if your amendment is passed by the Legislative Council, will this open letter still be legal?  I ask this because nothing you have said so far has reassured me that it will be.  But I think that everything I say in it consists of the sorts of things that people should be allowed to say - and that it should be totally clear that people will be allowed to say.  It isn't.

Of course, I agree that the amendment, if passed by the LegCo, does not simply ban all communication someone finds offensive, and some of the criticisms may have overestimated the impact in this regard.  A person must be offended, humiliated, intimidated, insulted or ridiculed on the basis of their political or religious views or some other attribute, and it must be the case that a "reasonable person"  "would have anticipated that the other person would be offended, humiliated, intimidated, insulted or ridiculed." 

But that's just not nearly as big an obstacle as you think it is, and I don't think you have any real idea of why.  Take this from your speech for instance: