Signatories including academic Eva Cox said the balance between upholding freedom of speech while maintaining personal protections against racial discrimination had already been sufficiently established by the current Act.
The submission follows a Fairfax-Nielsen poll which found that the majority of voters were in the favour of the Act remaining as is.
The poll, published by Fairfax Media, found that 88 per cent of respondents believed it should remain unlawful to “offend, insult or humiliate” people based on their race.
Award winning author and activist Arnold Zable spoke of his personal experiences of discrimination as part of the submission.
“No matter how immune I have become to such hate and prejudice, it can still shake me to the core,” he said.
“This sense of violation and hate, this sense of humiliation and racism has for too long been experienced in particular by Aboriginal people.”
Listen: Arnold Zable speaks to Stephanie Anderson.
Author and journalist Bianca Nogrady also offered personal experiences.
“As someone whose family tree was brutally pruned during the Holocaust, I know that bigotry is not harmless,” she said.
In announcing the proposed changes last month, Mr Brandis said the amendments would preserve the existing protection against intimidation and create a new protection from racial vilification.
“This is an important reform and a key part of the Government’s freedom agenda,” he said.
“It sends a strong message about the kind of society that we want to live in where freedom of speech is able to flourish and racial vilification and intimidation are not tolerated.”
The SBS World News interactive on the history of the Racial Discrimination Act, including cases involving Andrew Bolt and Pauline Hanson, can be found online here.
