‘Australia – love it and leave it’ says my t-shirt. The good news is that kindly sponsors are flying me back to London first class. The bad news is that it’s Qantas first class. Its front cabins on the A380 have been designed by people who think that passengers do not want – or should not be allowed – to look out of windows. It is one of the minor joys of my peripatetic life to spot my family home as we ascend over Woodford Bay, to marvel at the ochre sash around the blue mountains, to look down in awe, as we climb to 30,000 feet, at the primeval, mysterious patterns of the Australian desert. Not to mention descending as dawn breaks over Windsor Castle, 23 hours later. Why Qantas should deny these delights to its first class passengers I have never understood. I downgrade myself to Qantas business class, which is, well, first class – without the Rick Perry tasting menu, but with views.

Australia has, since 9/11, passed more anti-terrorism laws than any other country. (This statement, which I made on Q&A recently, has been put through an ABC ‘fact-check’ test – a new hazard for off-the-cuff commentators, who must now speak with footnotes at the ready). The latest tranche not only grants police and spooks immunity from civil wrongs and criminal offences (other than murder and rape) committed in the course of ‘special intelligence operations’, but the iniquitous Section 35P threatens journalists and whistleblowers with up to ten years in prison for exposing any misbehaviour. Give secret policemen too much power and they are sure to abuse it, like the Scotland Yard squad that was ordered to spy on environmental protesters. Not only did they infiltrate them, they impregnated them. The Metropolitan police is now being sued for child maintenance. Last week $750,000 was awarded to one woman for the emotional shock of discovering that her lover (who had disappeared undercover after attending their child’s birth) was a married police officer, who had just been doing his duty under the covers. This misbehaviour, finally exposed by the Guardian, could not be exposed by the media if it happened here. Under the new ‘Foreign Fighter’ laws, we will not be told about ASIO’s secret ‘intelligence’ operations – such as hacking the cellphone of the Indonesian President’s wife or bugging the Timor Leste cabinet office under the cover of an aid programme. Our media must at all times maintain the belief that Australian Intelligence is intelligent.

My friend and neighbour Barry Humphries (a Hill’s hoist separates our homes in North London) thinks that Australians have lost their sense of humour over the Barry Spurr emails. This would be true, if the emails were in any way humourous. Some may have been mis-typed – maybe Spurr meant to call the Chancellor an ‘appealing minx’ rather than an ‘appalling minx’, and rather than ‘abo- loving Prime Minister’ perhaps he meant to type ‘Abott-loving Prime Minister’ – which would at least make a certain sense. As a trustee of an overseas foundation which tries to raise money for Sydney University, publicity about fruitcake professors does not help. The emails were not confidential (nothing in them about health or wealth) and were not private – they were sent on a university account. The university has suspended Spurr while it investigates (as any educational body would suspend, pending enquiry, a senior executive who sent apparently racist emails on its account) so there is no free speech issue – yet. If, as we must hope, the inquiry finds that Spurr has merely been playing an ‘esoteric game’ with a friend, he should forthwith be restored to the Wallace Theatre to lecture on T.S. Eliot (a task in my day that was assigned to Howard Jacobson). And even if it turns out that he is at the centre of a cabal of loony right professors for whom Quadrant is not enough, and who are secretly plotting the downfall of our dangerously radical PM, then I think that laughter is the best punishment.University students may not agree – they are increasingly reluctant, these days, to tolerate the intolerant. My 21 year-old daughter, a student President at London University, is constantly banning racists, genocide deniers and transgender-phobics from campus. I remind her of Voltaire, which serves only to infuriate. ‘Why should we, as a union of students, give our platform to cruel and stupid people, with plenty of other media outlets, whose object is to make the lives of some of our members more frightened and miserable?’ When I was her age, as Student Council President at Sydney, I was always quoting Voltaire – especially in defence of the student newspaper Honi Soit and its editor, accused of aiding the enemy by promoting the case for the Vietcong. His name, as I recall, was Keith Windshuttle.

A case that really does involve free speech is that of the young librarian who in some felonious way misused a computer in order to release the information that the PM’s daughter had been given a scholarship by a Liberal Party donor. The offence is not triable by jury (it should be: juries are prone to acquit genuine whistleblowers) and there is no public interest defence, so she had no alternative but to plead guilty. As a judge, I was never a soft touch when sentencing (I would have given Pistorious ten years) but this young woman, with no convictions other than a wish for truth in politics and who made no money from her act of conscience, does not deserve a prison sentence and probably did not deserve to be prosecuted at all. Under European human rights charter, journalists’ sources are protected precisely because, if they are not, some information of public importance will not see the light of day. This was Lachlan Murdoch’s point in his attack on Section 35P: it’s a pity his newspapers trashed the idea of a Charter of Rights with a free speech guarantee, and put their faith in Mr Brandis instead.