Australian lawmakers have banned the performance of the Nazi salute in public and outlawed the display or sale of Nazi hate symbols such as the swastika in landmark legislation that went into effect in the country Monday. The new laws also make the act of glorifying OR praising acts of terrorism a criminal offense.
The crime of publicly performing the Nazi salute or displaying the Nazi swastika is punishable by up to 12 months in prison, according to the Reuters news agency.
Mark Dreyfus, Australia’s Attorney-General, said in a press release Monday that the laws — the first of their kind in the country — sent “a clear message: there is no place in Australia for acts and symbols that glorify the horrors of the Holocaust and terrorist acts.”
I seem to recall that when southern states wanted to prosecute Martin Luther King, Jr for “hate speech” on the theory that his calls for equality amounted to anti-white racism, the way SCOTUS dealt with that was by punting on the question of what hate speech is or isn’t.
By taking the ‘hate speech’ stick away from states, the high court effectively ruled that Nazis had the right to rallies under the rubric of free speech. It was this optimistic dithering on the court’s part (surely, the way forward is free speech and everybody will use that in good faith right?) that is part of why the US’s stance on hate speech diverged from that of Europe and the commonwealth