In caving into censorious chattering-class pressure and ditching its plans to reform Section 18C, the Federal government has failed its own free-speech test.

George Brandis set the test when I met him at the political haunt of Machiavelli’s in Sydney in April to interview him for my online mag spiked. Lubricated with wine, the liberty-loving words of Voltaire and John Stuart Mill fizzing in his mind and falling from his mouth, Brandis told me that standing up for the free-speech rights of the hateful and the horrible was the ultimate test of a nation’s devotion to freedom.