Fear after Bondi is putting free speech on trial

There are three dangers with the current direction, the first being our attempt to solve a cultural and moral problem with law. Our laws already prohibit incitement to violence, threats, harassment and criminal conspiracy. What is now being proposed goes well beyond that. It extends to the regulation of any expression that is offensive, distressing, or morally repugnant, but that is not itself violent or inciting violence.

This is not an argument for tolerating incitement to violence, whether it appears in slogans, chants, or online propaganda. But it is an argument for resisting the temptation to treat all offensive or inflammatory speech as if it were incitement.

Advocates for new laws argue that they will be applied only to extremist speech. In practice, the state will be asked to decide which ideas are tolerable, which beliefs are acceptable and which moral claims are too dangerous to be spoken aloud.

Slogans that celebrate violence or deliberately intimidate minorities are morally repugnant and socially corrosive. Some may already fall within existing prohibitions and should be dealt with accordingly.

But the proper response to hateful ideas is moral condemnation, institutional responsibility and civic resistance – not the steady expansion of criminal law into the regulation of belief, identity and offence. Indeed, we are now seeing in universities, festivals, and public institutions precisely the kind of civic negotiation that plural societies require.

The second danger is that restricting freedom is always a one-way ratchet. Once a society grants the state the authority to police expression for reasons other than direct harm or violence, that authority does not remain narrowly confined. This ratchet does not require bad faith or authoritarian intent. It is driven by political incentives and legal precedent.

The third and most significant danger is that restrictions on freedom of speech in the name of protection from harm or offence can easily result in a drift towards a de facto restoration of blasphemy. When “hate speech” is defined not by incitement to violence but by offence to identity, belief or community, the law inevitably begins to protect belief systems rather than people.

Criticism of doctrines, traditions, or practices becomes legally risky because it can be framed as hostility towards the group associated with them. This is functionally indistinguishable from blasphemy law.

Whether the protected belief is religious, ideological, or cultural, the structure is the same: certain ideas become insulated from robust criticism. Religious doctrines, moral traditions, social norms, and political ideologies become legally privileged — not because they are true, but because they are deeply held. And that is fatal because it turns a plural society into a fragile one.

But the version of multiculturalism implicit in these reforms is one of mutual restraint enforced by law, not mutual tolerance. It assumes that harmony requires silence and that stability requires insulation from offence. This will not build a stable society but a brittle one.

Social trust is created by cultural negotiation, moral argument, institutional fairness and shared civic norms, not coercion. When the state replaces that process with legal prohibition, it does not resolve conflict. It merely drives it underground, where it becomes more resentful, more polarised, and more dangerous.

Instead of rushing to add new laws to an already swollen statute book, we should enforce rigorously and without hesitation the laws already in place against violence, threats, harassment, and criminal conspiracy.

If we lose freedom of speech, we will not have preserved our way of life. We will have dismantled it ourselves — methodically, legally, and in the name of progress.

Photo by KATRIN BOLOVTSOVA