A lot of the conversation surrounding One Nation, positive and negative, has been focused upon its immigration policy – as it should be. I have written about how One Nation can take a step forward on this front by framing their policy not merely in terms of lowering the intake, but by prioritising migrants from Western countries. And I stand by the view that immigration should be One Nation’s top priority, as it is the top priority of its voter base.
This article, however, makes the case for what One Nation’s second priority should be, which should also be the second priority of the movement in general – free speech.
Like immigration, free speech is an existential issue for the Australian right-wing. It isn’t simply that we care about it as an issue, it’s that if we fail to win on it we will become incapable of winning on anything else within a generation.
If the uniparty gets away with importing enough third worlders to reduce Whites to a minority, patriots will be permanently democratically outnumbered. And if the uniparty gets away with making patriotic speech and political organising illegal, patriots will be permanently policed out of public life and the political process.
One Nation’s free speech policy as published on its website is excellent, and commits to repealing all laws and abolishing all government bodies that restrict it, and pushes for a referendum to enshrine freedom of speech in our constitution.
Unfortunately though, we don’t hear this commitment reiterated from Pauline Hanson or One Nation’s other elected representatives in such absolute terms. And on the rare occasion they do talk about free speech, they usually just talk about 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. Of course 18C needs to be repealed, but it is not a piece of legislation that is even used all that frequently, and is surpassed in seriousness by the myriad “racial vilification” laws passed at the state level in recent years enshrining “hate speech” offences into the criminal code.
One Nation did take a stand initially against the most egregious attack on free speech of them all – the “hate group” law passed at the beginning of this year, which some experts have warned could be used by a Labor Government to ban One Nation itself. This hasn’t been walked back, but it also hasn’t been reiterated by anyone publicly representing the party for several months now.
Meanwhile, the website’s promise of a free speech referendum is never articulated. Often when I tell people it’s a policy on their website they are pleasantly surprised to discover this, but it begs the question why the party haven’t been publicising their stance.
This is a strategic mistake which they need to rectify for several reasons.
First of all, and most obviously, free speech is popular. A 2023 study found that 47% of Australians believe the law should impose no restrictions on public speech, whereas only 44% thought some legal restrictions were necessary sometimes. One Nation can separate itself from the uniparty and appeal to the sane half of the country who value free speech by emphasising this, including 45% of Labor voters and 50% of Coalition voters by the same 2023 numbers.
Secondly, One Nation needs a signature issue for state politics. At the federal level, obviously immigration is One Nation’s signature issue, but state governments have no control over immigration. The issue of free speech, especially when contrasted with multiculturalism, can give One Nation a way to differentiate itself from the uniparty at state level.
This is especially true in Victoria and New South Wales, where Labor governments with the support of their Liberal uniparty colleagues have just spent the last three years passing an extensive array of unpopular speech restrictions without precedent in Australian history, with New South Wales’ Premier Chris Minns explicitly justifying this on the grounds that Australia could no longer have free speech in order to “protect” the “multicultural community”.
This is not just a way for One Nation to empower its base and take pro-free speech votes off Labor, but also to take votes off a Liberal Party that has consistently voted with Labor to pass these laws against its own proclaimed principles and the will of its (increasingly now former) voter base.
In recent weeks One Nation has been largely playing defence, facing a barrage of attacks from the mainstream media. And in politics the best defence is offence. It’s time to put Labor (and the Liberals) on the backfoot, by forcing them to defend their opposition to free speech to the Australian people. They know this is unpopular, which is why during election cycles they avoid talking about it, so One Nation needs to make them talk about it.
Free speech is one of the few issues the entire right-wing is unified on, and one of the most divisive issues within the left. Our pro-free speech moral frame is robust, but theirs is incredibly weak. Leftist politicians and activists often feel the need to engage in doublespeak, saying they support free speech while simultaneously supporting censorship and hate speech restrictions, precisely because they lack moral confidence in their own position. Forcing them to defend this incoherence puts them on the backfoot and in a position of rhetorical weakness – we need to stop letting them off the hook.
Force Labor politicians and the mainstream media to explicitly state their opposition to free speech as much as possible. The more they do so, the more mainstream Australia will turn against them.
One Nation must rebuke Labor for behaving like a communist regime, seeking to censor the internet and jail dissidents and political opponents. It needs to make it clear to voters that it is the only option on the ballot to restoring freedom of speech in Australia. It needs to sell the idea that it is the only realistic vehicle by which the rights and freedoms the Anzacs fought for can be restored, and might even be the last chance the Australian people have to take back our democracy before it’s too late.
Make them come out and equate free speech with “racism”, and force them to delegitimise their own moral framing in the eyes of the public.
If One Nation does this, the right-wing base who remain largely sceptical towards it will have no choice but to rally behind it for upcoming elections. If the only significant things a future One Nation government does is slash immigration, repeal hate speech laws, and hold a free speech referendum, voting One Nation will have been more than worthwhile in my estimation – it will have saved Australia from sliding into irreversible tyranny.
Header image: Mehreen Faruqi, who successfully sued Pauline Hanson for racial vilification under 18C for telling her to “piss off back to Pakistan” (Australian Parliament).
