The cost of Free speech in Australia

Bureaucratic harassment of Forensic psychiatrist Donald Grant particularly troublesome

Des Houghton

The right to free speech is in danger of being, trampled as unelected, overzealous bureaucrats aim to silence dissenting voices and opinions

PAULINE Hanson, Germaine Greer, a spy known only as K and distinguished Brisbane doctor Donald Grant today find themselves to be strange bedfellows. All have incurred the wrath of unelected, overzealous bureaucrats who don't want you to hear what they have to say.

To my mind their right to free speech was trampled. If we had a bigger bed we could invite Drew Pavlou and Peter Ridd to join the Order of Strange Bedfellows. Pavlou, a philosophy student, was disciplined by the University of Queensland for supporting Hong Kong activists against friends of the Chinese Communist Party in campus demos. It's been a public relations disaster for UQ with accusations it has grovelled to Beijing for commercial gain.

Professor Ridd is fighting an ongoing legal battle with James Cook University after calling out what he said was bad science surrounding climate change and the Great Barrier Reef. The university went to extraordinary lengths to silence and punish him.

Boffins at several universities in the UK have gone so far as to ban Germaine Greer because they don't happen to like her views on transgender politics. Whether or not we agree with Greer, Ridd or Pavlou is largely irrelevant to the fundamental right of free speech. A free society tolerates dissenting voices.

Psychiatrist Donald Grant's case is especially troubling because he is a distinguished doctor whose writings have been praised by judges and fellow psychiatrists for shining a light into the dark world of violence committed by the mentally ill, His book, Killer Instinct: Having a Mind for Murder (MUP) sparked instant controversy.

Margaret McMurdo, a past president of the Court of Appeal, said Grant's book provided a valuable insight into forensic psychiatry and the legal system "including difficulties in predicting dangerousness". "Who hasn't wondered if given a particular set of circumstances or mental illness, they might be driven to kill another?" she said.

"Forensic psychiatrist Donald Grant, whose reports I read with confidence during my 26 years as a judge, explores that and other big questions, such as who is capable of rehabilitation, who has rehabilitated, and who is beyond redemption."

Grant has been interviewing killers for 40 years to determine whether they are fit enough to stand trial. I was shocked when The Courier-Mail reported recently that a complaint referred by Queensland Health may (or may not) see Grant facing charges of professional misconduct. His valuable book may be suppressed.

I'm wondering who the hell gave the incompetent health department the power to censor books. How dare they? With elective surgery waiting lists among the worst in the nation, the health chiefs should be concentrating their efforts elsewhere. Grant is a genuine expert whose opinions should be circulated by Queensland Health, not censored.

The book necessarily contains lurid details of crimes. In writing it, Grant has done exactly what journalists do every day. In fact Grant quotes from The Courier-Mail interviews with victims' families in some chapters. His book featured a sadomasochistic cross-dresser who brutally raped and murdered a 21-year-old girl, a mother who hid an infant's body in a washing machine and the loving wife who cut her husband's throat from ear to ear.

Grant told me in an exclusive interview two years ago he did not set out to sensationalise the cases. He simply sought to "increase our understanding of why violence and murder happens". The facts in themselves are shocking, he told me. "I haven't exaggerated or sought to create sensation in any way."

A complaint against Grant was driven by Sonia Anderson about a passage on the strangulation murder of her daughter Bianca, a decade ago. However, in my view Grant did not act unethically. The details of the case were already on the public record.

A free speech battle of a different sort is being played out in the intelligence community. Lawyer Bernard Collaery is being prosecuted for revealing national secrets; specifically, that Australia bugged East Timor's government building in 2004 to gain advantage in crucial oil and gas negotiations. He faces two years in jail.

Details of the case were smothered when Attorney-General Christian Porter used his national security powers to have the hearing held behind closed doors. Collaery, rightly, is critical of the secrecy. "I want to defend myself in public," he said. "That's the hallmark of our democracy, a public trial. I'm charged with conspiring with Witness K, my client, who I interviewed in the same way I have for 40, nearly 50 years."

Witness K is a former senior ASIS intelligence officer-turned whistleblower who led the bugging operations in Dili. Criminal charges against Collaery and K were filed by the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions in June 2018. We may never know what happens.

Not all censorship comes from governments or the courts. Self-censorship by the media is perhaps the most disdainful. Pauline Hanson was dumped from her regular spot on by Nine's Today Show for saying people in a COVID-19 lockdown Melbourne apartments were drug addicts and alcoholics not too concerned with social distancing. In response, Nine news director Darren Wick adopted a lecturing tone.

I thought he sounded like a social worker. "We don't shy away from diverse opinions and robust debate on the Today Show," he said. "But this morning's accusations from Pauline Hanson were ill-informed and divisive. At a time of uncertainty in this national and global health crisis, Australians have to be united and supportive of one another. We need to get through this together," he said

Infuriating as Hanson can be she was partly right. Daniel Andrews, the Victorian premier, confirmed that some in the apartments had alcohol and drug problems. So the head of a major news network got away with censoring a federal politician on flimsy grounds. That, to me, was not an insignificant breach of free speech and betrayal of journalism.

From the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of 11 July, 2020