In a stunning blow to freedom of expression in Australia, the President of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission, Mr John von Doussa, QC, today declared that a letter to the editor written by Associate Professor Andrew Fraser and published in the Parramatta Sun on 6 July 2006 was an unlawful breach of s 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

In that letter Professor Fraser observed that "[e]xperience practically everywhere in the world tells us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of other social problems."

The letter was the subject of a complaint submitted on behalf of Mr Safi Hareer, General Secretary of the Sudanese Darfurian Union, by George Newhouse of Newhouse Lawyers, with the assistance of David D Knoll, President of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies and Ms Anna Katzmann, SC.

No complaint has been received by the HREOC in relation to the article by the editor of the Parramatta Sun, Charles Boag, also in the ly 2006 issue. In that opinion piece, Mr Boag categorically asserted that "the violence in America's deep south... was caused by whites." To emphasize his anti-white message, Mr Boag went on to accuse "white settlers" of committing "murder and mayhem on a great scale in Australia."

Apparently, in contemporary Australia, people of white, European ancestry can be identified routinely as the root of all evil while it is forbidden for whites ever to mention publicly the social pathologies associated with black Africans, even if they are well-known to any informed person and openly acknowledged by reasonable black people themselves.

The President of the HREOC has just endorsed that double standard. Along with his two submissions to the Commission, Professor Fraser provided, inter alia, an article by a black journalist thoroughly disgusted by the behaviour of African-Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans last year. Leighton Levy wrote that "I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem."

The President of the HREOC also disregarded the rest of the copious evidence provided by Professor Fraser detailing the nature and scope of the crime, violence and other social problems associated not just with the black African diaspora in the West but with the post-colonial societies of sub-Saharan Africa itself.

The upshot of the Human Rights Commission decision is clear. Whenever any person of black African ancestry declares that he has been "offended, insulted, humiliated or intimidated" by the public mention of such unsavoury truths, the freedom of white Australians to speak openly and freely about black African immigration in particular and non-white immigrants generally will be suppressed.

The Commission has also flatly rejected Professor Fraser's submission that his Letter was not unlawful because, under s18D of the RDA, it was a "statement, publication, discussion or debate made or held for [a] genuine academic ...purpose or any other genuine purpose in the public interest; or... a fair comment on any... matter of public interest if the comment is an expression of genuine belief held by the person making the comment."

For all practical purposes, the decision of the Commission has rendered nugatory, the assurances of the politicians who assured Australians that the passage of the racial vilification laws would not threaten our historic liberties.

Even before the Commission's decision, Deakin University had refused to publish a peer-reviewed article by Professor Fraser on the subject of race and immigration while Macquarie University has forbidden him to teach in any subject area.

The freedom of academics to dissent from the official policy of transforming Australia into a colony of the Third World is now officially dead and buried - unless patriotic Australian rally to resist this blatant assault on their ancestral freedoms.

Indeed, on a personal level, the Commission's decision is more worrying still to Professor Fraser. The Commission's proposed resolution of this matter echoes the methodology employed during the show trials in Stalinist Russia where defendants were compelled to confess their thought crimes and beg public forgiveness.

Newhouse Lawyers demanded that Professor Fraser "should cause to be published at his expense an advertisement in the Parramatta Sun (of a size no smaller than the Letter and no less prominent) acknowledging that he engaged in unlawful conduct by means of the Letter and Comments, unreservedly apologising for the hurt thereby caused to the Sudanese people who live in the Parramatta-Blacktown area, promising not to repeat such conduct and retracting on the public record all of the imputations."

Mr von Doussa has invited Professor Fraser to submit to this neo-Stalinist ritual of self-abasement.

Professor Fraser will not accept that invitation. But, in all likelihood, that will not be the end of the matter. It can be assumed that, if this "conciliation" proposal is rejected, Newhouse Lawyers will pursue Professor Fraser into the Federal Court, in an effort to ruin him financially by winning an order of costs against him.



Andrew Fraser
Associate Professor
Department of Public Law
Macquarie University
Sydney, NSW
AUSTRALIA 2109