Sun columnist Kelvin MacKenzie suspended from the newspaper, April 14, 2017. Lewis Whyld/Press Association. All rights reserved.The Sun publishes an article comparing a black Everton player to a gorilla. While the reporter denies that his piece could be seen as racist, The Sun issues an apology. How might the law deal with this situation? Was the original article racist, defamatory, ignorant or simply fair comment?
“Is Australia Racist?”
Just a little earlier, this issue had been debated, if that's not too strong a word for the discussions that took place, in Australia. A committee of the Australian Senate considered options for revising the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA), while a publicly-owned broadcaster, SBS, ran a series under the heading “Is Australia Racist?” and another Murdoch paper, The Australian had provoked outrage by publishing a cartoon by Bill Leak, a favourite of the Right, depicting a police officer handing an indigenous teenager over to the boy's father while telling him to keep the boy under control. The father responds “Okay. What's his name?”
The RDA had been introduced by the reforming and ill-fated Whitlam Labor Government in 1975 to embody the spirit of the UN's International Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination, which came into force in 1969 and which the RDA ratified, and particularly its insistence that “there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere.” Along with SBS, the RDA is one of the few Whitlam legacies to have survived more or less unscathed into the twenty-first century, although it was, in fact, strengthened by another Labor Government's 1995 Racial Hatred Act which laid down procedures for dealing with allegations of racial discrimination and added sections 18C & D, the latter specifying a number of exemptions to the provisions of the former.
