Australia’s human rights commissioner says holding people to account for what they say during the same-sex marriage postal survey campaign will be “really important”, and parliament needed to strike the right balance between protecting freedom of speech and protecting against the most harmful language.
Edward Santow has already seen some campaign material that had bothered him, but will not say if it had come from the yes or no camp. He welcomed the government’s plan to pass legislation setting the ground rules for the survey.
“Clearly, the law has a role to play – especially prohibiting language that is so hateful it incites violence or other serious harm,” he told the ABC on Friday. “I was really heartened to hear that all of Australia’s major political parties support having a really respectful debate.”
The high court ruled on Thursday that the Turnbull government’s same-sex marriage postal vote was lawful, clearing the way for the Australian Bureau of Statistics to send voting forms to 16 million Australians.
The acting special minister of state, Mathias Cormann, said the government would “move swiftly” to enact a new law to set ground rules for the campaign, with negotiations taking place with Labor and the Greens over the weekend and the bill brought to parliament next week.
Labor and the Greens said they would ask the Turnbull government to legislate the “strongest possible” protections against vilification in the same-sex marriage postal survey.
But Cormann hosed down suggestions of more extensive “truth-in-advertising” type protections, saying the government would “seek to align the protections” with requirements for ordinary elections.
He said authorisations of campaign materials were important, “so that everyone can clearly identify who is responsible for particular communication”.
“There are, in the Electoral Act, provisions that deal with misleading and deceptive conduct, but that has been interpreted by the high court in the past relating to misleading and deceptive communication that would essentially get the voter to fill out the ballot paper in an erroneous way,” he said on Thursday.
Santow said the government obviously had to work out the details, but holding people to account for what they said was really important.
“I guess [what] the Human Rights Commission is most concerned about is speech that has very serious harmful effects and so I think that’s where the greatest attention should be applied,” he said.
“Otherwise, I think we need to rely on our strong sense of liberal democracy to make sure the debate is respectful. The law has an important role to play here, but it can only go so far. We need to ensure that people take some personal responsibility for what they say.
“If we’re relying on some kind of court case to play out, the courts just don’t move quickly enough to regulate every possible example of inaccurate speech, or speech that might be harmful but [does not] rise to the threshold of serious harm.”
Santow said he did not believe same-sex marriage and religious freedom were mutually exclusive, and religious freedoms would not be impinged if same sex marriage became a reality.
