Media
That fateful call
Prince Charles … on his recent visit to Tasmania
A family left behind by the apparent suicide of a London nurse, following a prank phone call from 2DayFM, is yet to receive any counselling from the hospital where she worked.
British MP Kieth Vaz visited the home of Jacintha Saldanha over the weekend, saying her husband and two teenage children have been left “shocked and bewildered” by her death – but had been offered little by way of support.
2DayFM presenters Mel Greig and Michael Christian, who have been given counselling because of their “fragile” mental state, said they were “shattered” by Mrs Saldanha’s death in an interview with A Current Affair last night.
Mr Vaz told BBC Radio 4 he would like to see Mrs Saldanha’s grieving family get the same level of support from King Edward VII’s Hospital in London.
“They are devastated by what has happened, they are shocked and they are bewildered. What is necessary is a focus on their needs,” the MP said.
“The hospital has sent them a letter which I have seen, but I am a little surprised that nobody has made the journey to Bristol to sit with them and offer the counselling they need.
“More support needs to be given. I’ve spoken to the chairman of the hospital. There is a need to demonstrate that support.”
• Related: Defending the right to offend …
ABC chairman and former top jurist Jim Spigelman has warned that a planned overhaul of discrimination law will impose unprecedented restrictions on free speech, including making it unlawful to offend people, leaving the nation isolated from international norms.
The Gillard government’s planned consolidation of all federal discrimination laws would significantly redraw the line between permissible and unlawful speech and open the way for the banning of publications, said Mr Spigelman, the immediate past chief justice of NSW.
If the government’s draft bill were enacted, discrimination in all areas would be affected by provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act that were used last year against newspaper columnist Andrew Bolt so that merely offending people would amount to unlawful discrimination.
“I am not aware of any international human rights instrument or national anti-discrimination statute in another liberal democracy that extends to conduct which is merely offensive,” Mr Spigelman said.
“We would be pretty much on our own in declaring conduct which does no more than offend to be unlawful. The freedom to offend is an integral component of freedom of speech. There is no right not to be offended.”
Mr Spigelman’s warning, contained in a human rights day oration for the Australian Human Rights Commission, is in line with longstanding criticism from the federal opposition and civil libertarians that some of the provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act go too far by imposing liability for statements that merely offend and insult.
Bolt, who wrote a series of articles about fair-skinned Aborigines, was found to have engaged in racial vilification after the Federal Court applied section 18C of the act, which imposes liability for statements that offend, humiliate, insult or intimidate on the basis of race.
Mr Spigelman told an audience in Sydney yesterday that none of the nation’s treaty obligations required any person or group to be protected from being offended.
“We are, however, obliged to protect freedom of speech,” he said. “We should take care not to put ourselves in a position where others could reasonably assert that we are in breach of our international treaty obligations to protect freedom of speech.”
The government’s proposed changes would mean that liability for speech that offended would be extended beyond the subject of race to cover statements about age, gender and disability.
The scheme would reverse the onus of proof so that those accused of discrimination would bear the onus of proving their innocence after their accusers provided prima facie evidence of wrongdoing.