In The Silence of the Lambs, the most disturbing moments are not the screams. They are the moments when everything goes quiet.

That silence is what Australians should be paying attention to now.

Not because Australians tolerate antisemitism – we do not. Not because hatred should ever be excused – it should not. And not because the law should be weak against violence, threats, or incitement – it already is not.

The concern is deeper and more structural. Laws are being rushed through Parliament that quietly weaken procedural fairness, dilute due process, and shift the role of courts away from their long-standing function as guardians of justice. These safeguards were once the bulwarks of Australian democracy. They are not being dismantled overnight. Instead, they are slowly slipping as executive power expands into areas deliberately reserved for independent courts.

This is not an accusation of sudden tyranny. It is a warning about institutional drift.

The rule of law is not a slogan. It is a discipline. The constitutional tradition Australia inherited has always drawn a clear line between political power and legal judgment. More than a century ago, the great constitutional scholar, A.V. Dicey, explained that no person can be lawfully punished except for a distinct breach of law established before the ordinary courts of the land. That principle is simple, but it is decisive. It exists because power is dangerous when it is unchecked.

When serious legal consequences flow from ministerial declaration rather than judicial determination, the rule of law weakens, even if the intentions are sincere. Power ceases to be restrained by proof and process and begins to operate by opinion.

Australia has already confronted this danger once before. In 1950, the Menzies government attempted to ban the Communist Party. The law allowed the Executive to declare organisations and individuals a threat to national security. Once declared, penalties followed automatically. The High Court struck the law down in Australian Communist Party v Commonwealth in 1951.

Justice Fullagar explained the constitutional flaw with enduring clarity:

‘A power to make laws with respect to lighthouses, he said, does not authorise the making of a law with respect to anything which is, in the opinion of the lawmaker, a lighthouse.’

In plain English, government cannot just declare something to be what it wants it to be and then punish people for it. Calling something dangerous or extreme does not make it so in law. Only courts can decide that, after a fair process.

That case remains one of Australia’s clearest warnings against executive overreach disguised as necessity.

Procedural fairness is often dismissed as red tape, but it is, in fact, protection. It means that a person knows the case against them, is given a genuine opportunity to respond, and has their fate decided by an independent court. It exists because unchecked power corrodes justice.

When laws reverse that order, allowing executive decisions to trigger consequences first and leaving courts to review later, fairness stops being the foundation and becomes an afterthought. The High Court has warned against this repeatedly. In Williams v Commonwealth (No 2), Justice Gordon reaffirmed that no law may give a person other than a court the power to decide conclusively issues on which the law’s validity depends. Once courts are sidelined, justice depends less on law and more on who holds office, this case is a chilling warning on executive drift.

Free speech plays a similar protective role. It does not exist to protect comfort or politeness. It exists so that governments can be challenged, criticised, and corrected. Australia does not have an express constitutional right to free speech, but the High Court has made clear that freedom of political communication is essential to representative government.

When speech is restricted by vague definitions, perceived impact, or political pressure, people do not test the limits in court. They simply stop speaking. Silence spreads. As Justice Louis Brandeis once warned, fear breeds repression, repression breeds hate, and hate menaces stable government. Australia’s legal system is different from America’s, but human behaviour is not.

Behind all of this lies a deeper structural problem: the rise of what can only be described as a political cartel. A political cartel exists when major parties stop acting as genuine competitors and instead protect shared power by controlling parliamentary process. This is not about ideology. It is about how laws are made.

In a healthy democracy, debate is open, scrutiny is robust, and dissent is expected. In a cartelised Parliament, legislation is labelled urgent, debate is cut short, committees are compressed, and public input is sidelined. Parliament still meets and votes are still taken, but outcomes are largely decided before debate finishes. That is not democracy working faster; it is democracy being managed.

Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the use of Standing Order 142. This procedure generally exists or reserved for emergency: genuine national emergencies. If enemy forces were off the coast, if missiles were being launched, or if Australians faced imminent death and destruction, bypassing ordinary debate might be justified. But none of that exists here.

There is no emergency. There is no imminent national threat to rush the laws in the (omnibus) Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026. Yet Standing Order 142 is being used anyway. This is not efficiency; it is procedural abuse. When emergency procedures are used without emergency conditions, Parliament stops deliberating and starts fast-tracking executive outcomes without proper oversight. That is how democratic systems slide – not with tanks, but with timetables and socially constructed emergencies.

The Bondi tragedy was horrific. It deserves compassion, not exploitation. Australia already has strong laws dealing with terrorism, racial hatred, threats, intimidation, and misuse of online communications. A noticeable exclusion remains the Australia Christian communities, who are not mentioned, moreover, none of those leaders appear to have stood up?

There is no constitutional emergency that justifies stripping away safeguards built over generations. History shows that powers claimed as temporary are rarely surrendered later.

In the end, history shows there are always two paths. One is compliance: staying quiet, trusting power, and hoping it is used kindly. The other is lawful resistance: insisting on debate, defending process, and demanding that courts – not ministers – decide guilt.

A democracy does not belong to the government of the day. It does not belong to political parties, ideologies, or activist causes. It belongs to the people. The authority of the courts depends on one principle above all others: that they remain independent of political power and anchored to law, not preference. Courts do not exist to advance agendas. They exist to apply the law without fear or favour.

This is not about defending hate. It is about defending procedural fairness, due process, and the simple idea that no one should ever be judge in their own cause.

When justice is declared instead of decided, the lambs do not scream. They fall silent.

And silence is exactly how power grows.

That silence, however, is not neutral. In a constitutional democracy, silence is a choice – and it carries consequences. As citizens, each of us carries a shared responsibility to protect the Constitution, Australia’s institutions, and the social cohesion that depends on fair process, open debate, and equal justice under law. Those protections do not defend themselves. They endure only when they are understood, exercised, and insisted upon.

The coming months may prove decisive. Australia may be approaching a constitutional moment – not marked by force or spectacle, but by something quieter and more dangerous: the erosion of parliamentary and institutional legitimacy through complacency, procedural abuse, and the normalisation of executive power without genuine emergency. If allowed to continue, this drift risks becoming the first serious challenge to the credibility of our democratic institutions.

History offers a final warning. The German pastor Martin Niemöller reflected, after the catastrophe of totalitarianism, that oppression did not arrive all at once. It advanced because people assumed each step did not concern them, until there was no one left to speak.

Australia is not there. But the lesson is not about the past – it is about eternal vigilance.

Let us not place ourselves in a position where complacency and ignorance lead us down a path of quiet servitude, where power grows unchecked, debate shrinks, and liberty is surrendered not by force, but by neglect and ignorance.

Democracy rarely collapses in a single dramatic moment. More often, it erodes quietly – when good people conclude that silence is safer than responsibility, and compliance easier than conscience. That risk is now plainly visible in the trajectory of the Combatting Antisemitism, Hate and Extremism Bill 2026, since broken into two smaller bills, which bear the hallmarks of a Commonwealth-level gag order imposed not on criminals, but on the population at large.

When governments respond to tragedy by expanding speech, criminal codes, and firearms controls rather than enforcing existing laws, they shift the boundary between a free society and a managed one. Such measures do not merely target hatred or extremism; they recalibrate what citizens may lawfully say, question, or criticise – often under vague and elastic standards that chill legitimate expression.

A free society cannot outsource its moral courage to the legislature, nor can it afford laws that trade open discourse for the illusion of safety. Silence in the face of overreach is not neutrality; it is acquiescence. And acquiescence, once normalised, is how democratic freedoms are lost – not all at once, but one justified restriction at a time, oh yes … all for your good.