This Will Make You Laugh Till You Cry
THE SUNDAY AGE
Saturday May 6, 1995
IT HAS been one of those weeks when a chap didn't know whether to laugh or cry.
I mean, what is the appropriate reaction to this headline: ``Thieves grab $4.5m of Packer's gold"? I confess: I laughed. So did the cartoonists. And Andrew Denton. It was one of the funniest events of the week.
Is there something the matter with us? A man has an incredible fortune stolen from his office and we laugh. A serious crime has been committed and we cheer for the burglar. Is this the right way to behave?
How about this story? ``A Jewish man was awarded $2000 yesterday for being subjected to abusive language by Aboriginal Legal Service officers . . ." Now that strikes me as being genuinely funny.
I was particularly amused by the things the Aborigines are alleged to have said about the Jewish man, Mr Phillips. ``. . . You can't learn anything from that Jewish c..." and ``Don't listen to that white c...".
At one stage in the hearing before the New South Wales Equal Opportunity Tribunal, the chairman of the Aboriginal Legal Service, Mr Paul Coe, walked out and said: ``Stick this up your white arses" . .
. I don't know what ``this" was the procedure itself, I suppose.
Anyway, it made me laugh.
But the best chuckle in the story comes from the Legal Service's defence that the language used was common for Aborigines and, if people were upset by it, then they shouldn't work for Aboriginal organisations. More or less, the argument used by the Collingwood official in defending the alleged ``black bastard" call on the footy field: ``We always talk like that . . ." I accept that as an adequate defence in both cases. The proper response to crude and insulting repartee is more crude and insulting repartee.
I wonder what would have happened if Mr Phillips had answered back along the lines of: ``Don't speak to me like that, you black bastard .
. .?" Which is the way we used to handle these personal frictions in the days before the EO Thought Police took over the management of our interpersonal relations. And if you didn't stand up for yourself and give as good as you got, then you were a sook. You were laughed at.
Mr Phillips got $2000 for being subjected to abusive language, but he lost on his racial discrimination claims. I suppose that the tribunal simply couldn't reconcile itself to the final absurdity of finding a bunch of Aborigines guilty of racial discrimination against a Jew. That might have caused so much mirth the tribunal itself would not have survived the hilarity.
Then the Victorian Government, not to be upstaged in the comedy stakes, introduces a bill into Parliament that will make it a criminal offence to discriminate against plain people. Now, as one who stands to gain from this legislation I do not find this at all funny. From now on, if I apply for a job and it goes to a better-looking person then I will be taking my grievance to the Equal Opportunity Star Chamber.
When the Spaniards first heard of Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition, they probably split their sides laughing. Well, he wiped the smirks off their faces. Likewise the idea of hunting down witches must have seemed very droll to the sensible people of the time, but the joke soon turned sour. So my mirth at the next story was tempered with apprehension.
``Melbourne University has appointed an adviser to deal with complaints of (sexual) harassment via the computer, and the Equal Opportunity Commission has warned employers that their policies on harassment must keep abreast of the information super-highway."
There is a problem. Messages and pictures can be posted on the e- mail system anonymously. No worries. ``Ms Ryan (the Equal Opportunity Commission's manager of information and education) said that, even if a complainant could not identify the source of a computer message, employers were vicariously liable . . ."
Vicariously liable? I laughed till I cried. Not since the heyday of the Inquisition has one person been held ``vicariously liable" for the thoughts and words of another person.
When vicarious responsibility is accepted as some sort of legal norm, you would have to be seriously deranged to employ other people, no matter how correctly colored, gendered and ugly they might be.
This is no laughing matter.
© 1995 THE SUNDAY AGE