COL WICKING: Shooting the messenger has become a preferred option ... regardless of the message

IT’S a funny thing, offence.

Even dictionaries have trouble pinning down what it is exactly, most defining it as “being annoyed by some perceived insult” and handily providing a bunch of synonyms that may contain the word “umbrage”, which is one of my favourites.

A long time ago, an angry reader chased me through the NT News carpark armed with an umbrella. She was umbraged beyond belief, although I can’t recall exactly why.

That happens from time to time in the cartooning business. You can’t please all the readers all the time but I can run pretty fast when I have to.

What’s harder to outrun, though, are the good intentions of governments.

The damned things are everywhere. Most of the time that’s a welcome thing, until they stray into areas beyond their level of expertise, like feelings. These days it seems everybody has been hurt by something or been seriously aggrieved in some way, possibly by a post on social media, or graffiti or, if you’re a vegan, a picture of a sausage.

In an effort to address this pressing issue, Australia is boldly striding towards Orwell’s 1984, possibly because we missed it when it was actually 1984.

Here, the Gunner Government is looking at “modernising” our existing antidiscrimination regime to make people nicer by law.

If you’re not nice you could face fines, be ordered to pay compensation and have to sell your dog for scientific experimentation to pay for it.

People of faith, it seems, are also in the firing line, propelling these proposed legislative changes into waters never before charted in modern Australia. Good intentions all around. Of course, the basic problem is that things like this are generally driven by a slightly skewed world view that presumes there is something deeply wrong with most of us and that something needs correcting.

Oddly, some Australians find that idea offensive, but that’s how it goes. Some ideas can offend just as well as a sausage can. And there’s the rub. Certain ideas are now seen as so offensive to civilised society that shooting the messenger has become a preferred option. And governments have made that much easier to do, regardless of the message.

Intentionally or not, we’ve managed to weaponise antidiscrimination laws to the point they have the potential to be used as a blunt instrument to stifle legitimate debate, effectively kill off some of the more difficult national conversations we need to have and suppress ideas seen as beyond the bounds of accepted thought. Increasingly, what’s acceptable and what’s not in this context is being defined by people hurling insults at other people on Twitter on behalf of other people who may or may not have been offended by something the other person wrote, drew or said.

The most bizarre aspect is that a lot of the hurlers believe their right to free speech is somehow more guaranteed than anyone else’s, even – gasp – the odd cartoonist.

Strangely, freely tossing around ideas and being able to talk about them without fear of retribution is the cornerstone of Western democracy.

It’s how we are supposed to do things. Our political masters, protected as they are by whichever Parliament they serve, seemingly can’t get their collective heads around this.

Maybe they’re too busy looking for offensive sausages on Twitter. Anyway, I will continue to do what I do and see how things play out, although I may start buying more Lotto tickets. You know, just in case.

î Col Wicking is a cartoonist for the NT News and Sunday Territorian