Victorian Liberal moderate Russell Broadbent says the government doesn’t need to amend 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act if it overhauls processes ensuring vexatious complaints are thrown out at an earlier stage.
Broadbent, who is a member of the federal parliament’s joint human rights committee which ran a recent inquiry into 18C, told Guardian Australia on Monday: “Changes to the RDA should be about process, not about the wording of the section.”
Broadbent’s public intervention, insisting that process changes are sufficient to address the major criticisms of how the RDA works in practice, comes ahead of formal government consideration of the contentious issue this week.
The prime minister on Monday declined to share a view about whether be believed the RDA should be overhauled, or whether the government would be better placed adjusting procedures administered by the Australian Human Rights Commission.
Turnbull at the beginning of the month signalled quite clearly that he was open to legislative change, but on Monday, with consideration imminent, he was much more circumspect.
The prime minister said the only relevant view at this juncture was the government view. He said the response to the rolling 18C controversy would be “the collective response of the government.”
Moderates inside the government are maintaining their efforts to spearhead an internal case that any reform should be kept at the level of process, rather than changing section 18C of the RDA, which would alienate key ethnic and religious communities, and cause the government significant political pain in marginal seats in the major cities.
Moderates argue that if processes were overhauled in line with recent recommendations from the human rights committee, then controversial cases, like the now infamous QUT case, would never have reached court.
But the right faction has intensified efforts to push for legislative change, and some government figures believe the right has consolidated its position internally over the past couple of weeks.
The proposal being pushed by the right would see the words “offend” and “insult” removed from the law, to be replaced by “harass”.
The legislative overhaul would sit alongside a new test in the law which would be in line with a recent recommendation from the human rights committee.
Under this proposal, the relevant test in the law would be changed from the current wording – a “reasonable member of the relevant group” to “the reasonable member of the Australian community”.
With the government sharply divided on the issue, Turnbull sent a reference to the joint parliamentary human rights committee late last year in the hope the committee would produce a reform template that the various factions inside the government could live with.
The committee failed to reach a consensus, and therefore stopped short of making a concrete recommendation to overhaul 18C, emphasising changes to process instead.
The human rights committee report, rather than closing the controversial issue down, triggered a renewed bout of government in-fighting that the prime minister and cabinet are likely to attempt to shut down as soon as this week by producing a settled position.
