When the state begins prosecuting politicians for "inflammatory rhetoric," it does not stop at the fringes. The precedent does not politely confine itself to populists or One Nation. It metastasises, as all discretionary speech powers do, toward whoever next offends the prevailing moral consensus of the bureaucratic, media, and academic class. Today the target is Pauline Hanson. Tomorrow it could be any voice questioning the pace, scale, or consequences of demographic change.
The recent referral of Senator Hanson to the Australian Federal Police under the Albanese government's freshly expanded federal hate-speech regime is not an aberration. It is the predictable first major demonstration of what critics, including The Topher Project, have warned was the real purpose of these laws all along.
The Structural Reality: Laws Are Enforced by Humans, Not Angels
Every statute vesting subjective power in police, prosecutors, and courts depends on interpretation. "Hatred," "vilification," "incitement" — these are not objective phenomena like broken bones or stolen property. They are filtered through the worldview of the enforcer. In contemporary Australia that worldview is overwhelmingly shaped by institutions that have championed rapid, large-scale immigration and official multiculturalism for decades.
The result is not random. It is asymmetric. The Topher Project's recent analysis (see their episode "There is nothing they will not do to fend off One Nation") lays it out plainly: the laws were rushed through in the wake of the Bondi Beach atrocity, publicly cheered by the same political establishment now distancing itself with the classic "let the authorities decide" manoeuvre. Albanese's government, with Coalition support in key votes, created the machinery. Hanson's blunt commentary on Muslim integration and radicalisation was always going to test it.
This is what Topher Field correctly labels "tyranny by law" — the use of ostensibly neutral statutes to conduct political warfare against rising electoral threats. One Nation's polling strength in multiple states makes the timing impossible to ignore.
The Millian Critique: Offence is Not Harm
John Stuart Mill's harm principle remains the clearest liberal benchmark: speech may be restricted only when it directly incites tangible harm to specific individuals. Mere offence, statistical generalisation, theological critique, or policy alarm — even when expressed bluntly — does not qualify. Race-hate laws abandon this distinction. They criminalise the emotional reaction of a "reasonable person" in a protected identity group, turning subjective feelings into state power.
The conceptual flaw is fatal. What one community experiences as "hate," another sees as urgent truth-telling about crime statistics, grooming scandals, parallel societies, or terrorism risks. Reasonable people disagree violently on these questions precisely because the data and lived experience are not evenly distributed. To hand the referee's whistle to one side of that disagreement is to rig the game.
Europe's Warning — Already Ignored
Look across the Atlantic and the North Sea. Britain, Germany, France, Sweden, the Netherlands: every jurisdiction with broad hate-speech statutes has seen them deployed overwhelmingly against critics of mass immigration and Islamisation. Tommy Robinson, Geert Wilders, Marine Le Pen's associates, countless journalists and academics — investigated, fined, imprisoned, or barred from politics. Meanwhile, open celebrations of "decolonisation," calls to "smash whiteness," or street rhetoric from certain migrant communities that would be instantly prosecuted if reversed, rarely attract the same zeal.
Australia is not immune. Federal and state racial vilification cases since the 1990s show the same pattern: no successful actions against Left-wing or minority-group rhetoric targeting "Anglo," "white," "colonial," or "Nordic" Australians, no matter how venomous or violent the language. The machinery exists to chill one direction of debate far more effectively than the other.
Selective Enforcement is the Feature, Not the Bug
Supporters insist the laws are "content-neutral." Enforcement statistics and high-profile cases tell a different story. The mere existence of uncertainty — will this tweet, interview, or Senate speech trigger a referral? — produces the most efficient censorship possible: self-censorship. Journalists soften copy. Academics qualify findings. Politicians choose safer topics. The Overton Window shrinks without a single conviction being recorded.
The Hanson referral sends the signal loud and clear. A senator expressing concerns about integration and radicalisation — concerns shared by millions of ordinary Australians according to repeated polling — now faces potential criminal scrutiny. Contrast that with the near-total impunity enjoyed by those who frame demographic transformation in explicitly celebratory or replacementist terms. The asymmetry is not accidental; it is the logical outcome of who holds cultural power in the institutions that staff enforcement agencies.
The Deeper Purpose: Managing the Consequences of Undemocratic Change
Here is the uncomfortable truth few in Canberra will utter. Australia's multicultural transformation was never subjected to a national referendum on immigration levels or cultural continuity. It was advanced through elite consensus across both major parties, bureaucratic inertia, and legal instruments like the Racial Discrimination Act. When the resulting social tensions — residential segregation, welfare strain, crime disparities, terrorism risks, parallel legal norms — inevitably surface in democratic politics, the same elites reach for speech restrictions rather than policy correction.
Hate-speech laws, in this reading, are not primarily about stopping violence. They are about keeping the lid on a pressure cooker whose contents were loaded without broad public consent. They function as political weapons to preserve a demographic and cultural settlement that large and growing sections of the electorate now openly question. The Topher Project's case is compelling precisely because it connects the legislative dots: post-Bondi urgency provided cover for powers that had been waiting for a politically convenient moment.
Power, Once Granted, Expands
Legal philosopher after legal philosopher — from Mill to Hayek to modern free-speech scholars — has warned that speech regulation is uniquely dangerous because it controls the very mechanism by which policy is contested. Once the precedent is set that a federal politician can be referred to police for criticising a protected group's integration record, the boundaries will shift with the political winds. A future Coalition government might target different rhetoric. A more radical Labor or Greens administration might broaden the protected categories further. The machinery does not care about your team; it cares about preserving whatever consensus currently holds institutional power.
The High Court's implied freedom of political communication exists for exactly this reason: to prevent the state from disabling the democratic conversation that legitimises its own authority. Laws that chill core debates about immigration, identity, and national character sit in obvious tension with that constitutional principle.
A Better Path
A decent society does not need to tolerate genuine incitement to violence — existing laws against threats, assault, and terrorism already cover that. What it must tolerate, if it wishes to remain a liberal democracy, is robust, even offensive, argument about the most consequential policy choice a nation makes: who it allows to join it and on what terms.
Counter bad speech with better speech. Win arguments with data, history, lived experience, and democratic majorities. Do not outsource the referee role to police and prosecutors whose cultural priors are not neutral. Repeal or severely narrow these discretionary hate-speech provisions before the precedent hardens into permanent machinery of control.
The referral of Pauline Hanson is not about protecting Muslims from violence. It is about protecting the political class from accountability on one of the defining issues of our era. If Australians allow this precedent to stand unchallenged, they should not be surprised when tomorrow's target is someone whose views they actually share.
The law, once weaponised against democratic dissent, does not remain neutral. It becomes the instrument of whoever holds the state at that moment — and the rest of us lose the ability to speak the truth as we see it.
That is not protection. That is control.
And it must be resisted while resistance is still legal.