The Lazy Politics of Speech Control
The Bipartisan Instinct to Solve Social Ills by Removing Freedoms
Jess Wilson, the Victorian Opposition Leader—if she can still meaningfully be called an opposition—has declared that Australia does not have strong enough speech regulations to protect minority groups.
Speaking at the Future Victoria Summit on Wednesday, the Victorian Liberal leader said, “We don’t have strong enough laws when it comes to hate speech. We don’t have strong enough protections when it comes to minorities in this state. And I was proud to stand up and put forward a plan to combat hate and to combat the very type of hate speech that makes it harder for these communities to live in this state.”
So whether you vote Liberal or Labor, it seems you basically end up in the same place. The branding changes, the authoritarian instinct does not. The reflex is regulation, regulation, and then more regulation. The delusion infecting the political mind, regardless of the party, is that more law equals fewer freedoms equals more social harmony.
At this point, political persuasion appears to have been abandoned altogether. The world is complicated, culture is messy, and instead of doing the hard work of leadership, of making arguments, building consensus, and strengthening communities, the answer is simply to legislate. If a problem exists, regulate it. If regulation doesn’t work, regulate harder.
Just think about the logic here. You can eliminate offensive speech by making speech illegal. The more words you ban, the less offensive speech you will hear. Problem solved! And while we’re at it, let’s eliminate dangerous driving by banning cars. Fewer cars, fewer accidents. Or end obesity by rationing food. If the only metric is whether the problem becomes less visible, authoritarianism will always look efficient.
But that certainly isn’t leadership. Anyone with power can suppress social problems by removing freedoms. That’s easy. The hard part is actually governing free people without treating them like liabilities to be managed.
In a “free society,” laws exist to protect the rights of the innocent, not to erode those rights in the name of emotional risk management. The right to speak freely—even badly, even foolishly, even offensively—is a pillar of democratic life. Once the state assumes the authority to police speech not because it directly incites violence, but because it makes someone’s life “harder,” the boundary becomes endlessly vague. “Harder” is subjective. “Hate” is relative. And power once expanded in the name of safety is rarely surrendered.
Perhaps what’s most remarkable in all of this is the obvious fact that our politicians have absolutely no confidence in citizens, in open debate, in the resilience of truth. A healthy political culture trusts that good ideas can withstand bad ones. It trusts that citizens are capable of discernment. When that confidence disappears, regulation and endless legislation attempts to fill the void and plug the holes.
A competent leader, however, understands that freedom carries risk. It always has. People will say cruel things. They will say foolish things. The government’s role is to punish genuine crimes like credible threats, violence, and harassment—not to referee subjective offence or sanitise public discourse until only approved opinions remain.
If the response to social tension—often tension aggravated by reckless state policy in the first place—is to narrow the boundaries of lawful speech, that isn’t good leadership. It’s intellectual impotency. It’s the political equivalent of closing your eyes and declaring the problem solved because you can no longer see it.
Curtailing liberty to compensate for cultural conflict is not strength. It is an admission that you do not know how to lead a free people.
The moment leaders decide that social harmony requires fewer rights and quieter citizens, they reveal something far more troubling than “social tension.” They reveal their own distrust of the people they claim to represent.
If governing requires steadily shrinking the boundaries of lawful speech, then the flaw is not in the public.
It is in those who cannot imagine leading them without also controlling them.