As a boy, my father occasionally took me to a place where free speech wasn’t just a constitutional abstraction, but a vigorous, living exercise. This was Sydney’s Domain – another ‘Speakers’ Corner’ in one of the world’s oldest continuous democracies.

Beneath the Moreton Bay figs, the air was thick with rhetoric, humour and the occasional sharp-tongued interjection. Among the many speakers, I especially recall the communists. Standing on a high platform draped with the hammer and sickle, they preached the grim gospel of their ‘workers’ paradise’ where, seeking ‘medical attention’, they went to collect their ‘Moscow gold’. In their usually large audience, there were always a couple of big men in suits and hats taking notes – the watchful eyes of a state that understood the difference between a soapbox and a siege.

Speakers there exercised something yet to be discovered by the High Court lurking in the shadows of the Constitution: freedom of political communication. Years later, in Lange v. ABC (1997), despite my arguments on behalf of the Press Council, the High Court narrowed this down to a restriction on legislative and executive power rather than a local version of the US First Amendment. But to those in the Domain decades before, free speech essentially meant engaging in rigorous discourse. Slogans were not for chanting and intimidation – they were just graffiti that communists painted on walls hoping they would be seen from passing trains.

Recently, the descendants of those humourless communists – today’s hard-left and the Greens – have found common cause with radical Islamists, a foreign theocratic influence that draped the portrait of mass-murderer and terrorist, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over a sinister, judicially approved march across Sydney’s Harbour Bridge. This recalled the black-robed mullahs who in 1979 joined Iran’s communist Tudeh party in a Red-Black alliance which, because of Jimmy Carter’s unbelievable naïveté, moved  Iran to Moscow and Beijing’s Axis of Evil, making it the centre of world terrorism.

The crucial question for the Red-Black alliance who were allowed over the past two years to take over Australia’s main streets is this: ‘Why have you never taken the slightest interest whatsoever in the terrible plight of the cruelly persecuted Muslim Uighurs in communist China, or in the long and cruel suppression of the Iranian people?’ The answer is simple. It’s because their concern is not at all about human rights or democracy; it’s about power.

Antisemitism has been noticeably present in Australia over the last twenty years. According to Labor’s own Barry Cohen in 2004, it was already rampant in and tolerated by the Labor party. For the powerful NSW Right, this reflected their concern to keep key Sydney electorates, and for Labor’s hard-left, it is their badge, as it is across the West. This escalated significantly with the Opera House riot on 9 October 2023, marking the invasion of Israel by Iran’s proxy, Hamas, in an orgy of filmed violence, rape, and unbelievable cruelty, killing more Jews than at any time since the Holocaust. Following this, Labor governments tolerated the regular takeover of the main streets of Australia’s principal cities by the Red-Black alliance.

Unlike most of the Domain soapbox orators of my youth, this alliance has absolutely no interest in persuasion.

Instead, they weaponised the High Court’s narrow formulation of an implied constitutional freedom of political communication to justify 120 weeks of permanent disruption, paralysing commerce and normalising their ‘New Antisemitism’.

The crucial question is whether, after Bondi, Labor has reversed its toleration of antisemitism. Not at all, it seems, despite questionable hate laws and the invitation for the Israeli President’s visit. This has been exposed as a camouflage for PM Albanese’s desperate attempts to block a royal commission. The return of the Isis brides is, as Sydney’s Daily Telegraph (11/2) reports, ‘still OK’. As is their continuing abuse of the immigration power to bring in those determined to apply ancient hatreds here.

One Nation’s Pauline Hanson has long campaigned against this, and it is good to see that the new Liberal leader Angus Taylor intends to. Meanwhile, Chief Justice Stephen Gageler has also reminded us that the freedom of political communication found in the Constitution is a protection of the systemic process of representative government, not a licence for civil disobedience. (If that is changed unacceptably in some constitutional re-interpretation, One Nation almost alone offers the solution: citizen-initiated referendums.)

To restore the cities as they once were, three guardrails are needed:

First, a return to the nation’s Speakers’ Corners. While the right to speak is protected, the ‘right’ to block the streets aggressively chanting weaponised slogans is not. By providing a free, safe, and historically appropriate venue – in Sydney, the Domain – a state government fulfils its constitutional obligations. Any group that refuses the park in favour of the pavement is no longer exercising a right to free speech; their aim is to intimidate other citizens, starting with Jewish Australians.

Second, legislation like the User Pays Bill before the NSW parliament is essential. If the police ever again allow the Red-Black alliance the $40-million luxury of a CBD takeover, they, and not the taxpayer, should foot the bill. Why should only conservatives have to pay for police protection? Why should the taxpayer be the involuntary benefactor of its own disruption?

Third, we must sheet home the fact that intimidation, whether through the portrait of the ‘Lead Mullah’ of a terrorist-exporting regime or the chanting of vile slogans, is not ‘political communication’ intended to inform the Australian voter. This conduct does not serve the ‘informed choice’ of the people; it undermines the very constitutional structure it claims to invoke.

Those detectives in hats in Sydney’s Domain understood something modern leaders have forgotten: a democracy that tolerates the glorification of foreign tyranny and the harassment of its own citizens is a democracy in retreat. The Bondi massacre and the Opera House riot were the results of twenty years of Labor’s indecent toleration of antisemitism. It is time to fold up the high platforms of the extremists and send the Red-Black alliance back to the soapboxes of the Domain.

Free speech belongs in the prescribed park. The streets belong to the people.