Why the Proposed RDA Reforms Were Lost
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Abbott government’s plan to amend sections 18C and 18D – the race hate laws – of the RDA ignited fierce public debate and came to nought. Beneath the politicking and the cut and thrust of the public debate lay three more enduring factors explaining why the government’s proposed reforms of the RDA were a lost cause publicly and, as happened in this case, politically. First, in challenging the state regulation of citizen relations at all, the classical libertarian position of Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson and his former employer, the Institute of Public Affairs, was always unlikely to resonate much in Australia, which some have called a ‘Benthamite society’. Second, Attorney-General George Brandis’ more moderate, civil libertarian stance also faced a ‘perception’ difficulty in that his insistence on the need to ‘balance’ freedom of speech and protection against the incitement to racial hatred is precisely what the RDA’s racial vilification provisions had been designed to achieve and, for some sixteen years, had been generally applauded for achieving. Third, for ethnic minorities the anti-vilification provisions have immense symbolic as well as practical significance. As Australian multiculturalism is largely about non-discrimination and common citizenship rights, their sense of acceptance and belonging is largely tied to the legal protections against discrimination. This contrasts with the Canadian situation, where repeal in 2013 of a race hate provision in the Canadian Human Rights Act scarcely excited minorities, whose sense of belonging is sustained by a much more extensive conception and inclusive practice of multiculturalism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.030 | 0.064 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.021 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.016 | 0.026 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.017 | 0.006 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".