There is a peculiar kind of political courage in voting the wrong way for the right reasons. This week, Queensland's Labor opposition demonstrated exactly that, voting against hate speech legislation it had previously signalled it would support. The move carries genuine risk, yet it also reveals something important about the difference between capitulating on principle and standing firm on process.
The context matters.The legislation was introduced to crack down on antisemitism in the wake of the Bondi Beach terror attack.The laws would ban two phrases deemed antisemitic by the Government: "From the river to the sea" and "globalise the intifada". Most reasonable people across the political spectrum recognise the genuine harm antisemitic language causes. This is not a case of Labor defending the indefensible.
YetOpposition Leader Steven Miles on Monday said his party would vote for the wide-ranging legislation but held serious reservations. However, speaking to ABC Radio Brisbane yesterday, Mr Miles said Labor would now need to see the new proposed laws. What changed was not the substance of the government's case, but the government's behaviour.The Labor Opposition said they only saw the amendments, which specified the two phrases, on Wednesday afternoon. "The LNP made changes at the 11th hour and didn't even give our members the chance to review, consult or debate those changes," Mr Miles said.
This distinction is crucial. Labor's objection was not fundamentally to the aims of the legislation; it was to the manner in which the government wielded its overwhelming majority."David Crisafulli and the LNP also gagged debate, cutting short the conversation about these serious laws. It's an incredible abuse of their overwhelming majority in the parliament, an abuse we couldn't stand by," Miles said.
The irony is that this procedural heavy-handedness may have undermined the government's own objectives.The Queensland Government has made 11th-hour changes to its hate speech legislation, rolling back extraordinary proposed powers amid widespread criticism. Changes to the bill will mean the chants are specified in the legislation, and any new inclusions will require further legislation and face the scrutiny of parliament. Even this narrower version only came about because of pressure from civil liberties advocates, religious groups, and legal experts.
The genuine complexity here is worth acknowledging. How do democracies respond quickly to real harms without sacrificing the deliberation that legitimises law?Glenn Butcher said the Labor leader had written to the state government in December to offer bipartisan support to create proposed legislation in response to the Bondi Beach terror attack. He said the LNP government had rejected that offer. Labor offered collaboration; the government chose majoritarianism.
The practical effect is thatthe maximum penalty for breaching the proposed law is two years in jail, andit was supported by the Queensland Jewish Board of Deputies, which said the two phrases played a key role in incidents designed to intimidate Jewish people. The legislation passed regardless of Labor's objection.
What matters now is whether this matters at all. If the government's behaviour was genuinely an abuse of procedure, Labor was right to say so, regardless of whether the vote succeeded. If Labor was simply grandstanding about process to avoid answering harder questions about where the boundary between speech and hate speech should lie, that is another matter entirely. For voters and commentators alike, the answer depends on what Labor does next: whether it remains engaged in legislating these genuinely difficult questions, or retreats to opposition for opposition's sake.