In our late democratic culture, where rights come cheap and easy, one could be forgiven for thinking our freedoms work like toggle switches.

Political leaders like to promote the idea that as times get tough, we can shut off a few freedoms here and there, as if, when times get easier, we can simply flick a few back on.

This week, the ‘off’ switch is flickering again, as the Albanese government threatens to entrench its censorship regime by tightening laws governing social media content.

We know that laws are more often passed than repealed, but the Albanese government would like you to forget that fact as they snatch away centuries of shared civilisational labour – no pun intended – in constructing the public square.

Albanese’s September 8 press release, My Feed, My Way, presents content, including the news and current affairs consumed on social media by almost half of all Australians, as a set of toggle-on, toggle-off preferences. My Feed, My Way deceptively hints at curation, not censorship. Preferencing what information we see is presented as an arbitrary task of choice and selection.

But free speech is not an arbitrary preference. It is the high-water mark of Western cultural development, a common-good article of faith premised on trust in civilisational self-understanding and devotion to self-governance.

Neither Albanese, his communications minister, Annika Wells (of Ooshie fame), or any other member of his government shows any civilisational self-understanding surrounding censorship and free speech. On self-governance, they are outright hostile.

Democratic Athens pioneered the airing of opinion in public with the twin concepts of isegoria – the equal right to speak before the public, and Parrhesia – the right to speak frankly, even on controversial topics. The Athenians still punished speech they deemed unacceptable, but they allowed it to be heard in the first place.

When Athens’ most famous resident, Socrates, was sentenced to death in 399 BCE, he had at least first been able to disseminate his views. His magnificent intellect reached the public over three decades spent conversing amongst the people, most conspicuously with intelligent young men.

Eventually, his methods, if not his views, were found too radical for the establishment of the day. He was prosecuted and executed, but not before his wisdom, propagated through speech, escaped into all of civilised history. Athens’ practices had laid the foundation stones of the public square.

In 1215, Magna Carta, the agreement struck between King John and his rebel barons, enshrined the individual’s protection against arbitrary rule. It subjected the governor to the same law as the governed.

Magna Carta’s lesson is the virtue of restraining government power. What the state may desire can change through the exercise of due process, but it cannot be arbitrary.

Magna Carta bound King John to honour proportional penalties and restricted him from making arbitrary, opinion-driven judgements. In its spirit, no Australian government should be able to delegate sweeping powers to impose civil penalties on already heavily regulated industries.

But that is exactly what e-Safety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, will be handed under the Digital Duty of Care legislation. What’s worse, the government’s formulation for qualifying offences as not just illegal, but merely ‘seriously harmful’, sets up a perfect storm for arbitrary, subjective adjudication.

Rule-by-the-opinion-of-the-eSafety-Commissioner could scarcely have been dreamt of by the barons of Runnymede, but it would have given them nightmares, nonetheless.

When, in 1644, amidst the English Civil War, Parliament imposed a new print-licensing system tantamount to a government censor, John Milton responded with his Areopagitica. Milton’s pamphlet, written in invocation of the Ancient Greek court, lays out the civilisational necessity of free speech.

Milton argued that the pursuit of moral virtue required people to analyse and discern good from evil through reasoning, and that opinion needed free and public airing to achieve this virtuous end. As he said, ‘Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.’

In 1689, the English recognised the wisdom inherent in Milton’s position. The English Bill of Rights enshrined parliamentary privilege, with the objective of facilitating free and open debate on the most important issues of national concern.

There is little chance that the ending of the slave trade, the emancipation of children from factory work, or the spread of public education would have eventuated absent a culture and practice of free speech inside and outside the English Parliament.

The Empire which grew through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries to span the globe prospered on the back of a real contest of ideas, brought forth by the enshrinement of freedom of speech.

From Milton’s 17th Century encounter with intellectual liberty (to think and say freely) flows Adam Smith’s 18th Century economic liberty (to trade freely), and John Stuart Mill’s 19th Century personal liberty (to behave freely).

One wonders what all three men would make of Communications Minister Annika Wells’ insistence that even gaming platforms and messaging services would be included under the censor’s remit. In Labor’s dystopia, policing public speech is not enough. The inclusion of messaging services suggests the government wants in on policing commercial imperatives and private expressions, as well.

For the American founders, the question of free speech needed revisiting after the Constitution of 1787 created an immensely powerful central government with the capacity to stifle free expression and crack down on religious dissent.

James Madison, the document’s principal author, at first did not see the need for a Bill of Rights to further protect citizens’ freedoms. Pressure from Anti-Federalists eventually persuaded him. In his diary notes, he records his belated recognition of the need both to prove the new order’s devotion to liberty and to further restrain its capacity to impinge upon it. He drafted the Constitution’s First Amendment, enshrining protections for freedom of speech, the press, assembly and petition.

As the synthesiser of a two-millennia-long free-speech tradition, Madison recognised that arbitrary singular rule was not the only threat to the individual’s voice in the public square. Whilst the King, the legislature or the court could act as tyrant, so too could an impassioned democratic majority impose itself on a weaker minority.

Madison’s Federalist co-traveller, Alexander Hamilton, with an eye to the fallen republics of Greece and Rome, described the danger as ‘the tempestuous waves of sedition and party-rage’.

Madison and Hamilton foresaw the day when democratic citizens, confronted with an animating threat or discomforting bias, would lend majority support to restrictions on their fellow citizens’ freedoms.

As students of Western political history, neither Hamilton nor Madison would have been surprised to see majority support for various forms of censorship of the modern public square reflected in mainstream Australian polling. They understood that democratic majorities, no less than kings and governments, could be swept up by passion, prejudice and temporary delusion.

For this reason, they sought to elevate freedom of speech and freedom of the press beyond the ordinary reach of legislation, entrenching them as fundamental rights against government itself.

Madison and Hamilton would have wanted to stop an 18th Century politician from banning the publication of a pamphlet, but they would also have wanted to stop a frightened public 250 years later from voting themselves into internet censorship.

But that is where we are. Australia has voted, if not for the legislation, then for a political party that dangles extreme cases as emotive bait, contorts the evident ‘harms’, and then seeks a democratic mandate for its grave acts of societal self-harm. Where they receive no mandate, they find a backdoor, sneaking general prescriptions in under the rhetorical cover of particular considerations for under-age consumers.

So stands our ruling Australian regime in 2026, contemplating sublime questions of free speech and censorship. They meddle in a profound civilisational achievement few, if any of them, are capable of understanding, let alone stewarding.

At best, they are architects entrusted with the extension of a great temple, but so ignorant of its structure that every attempt at improvement weakens the foundations. At worst, they know exactly which walls are load-bearing and begin knocking them down deliberately, confident that they can profit from the sale of the ugly edifice they’ll build on its rubble.

Sir Robert Menzies, in his 1954 Man to Man, Australia Today broadcast, canvassed the hostility encountered in airing a well-informed but still controversial opinion in favour of resuming trade with Japan in the aftermath of the second world war. In the preliminary part of that address, he remarked that, ‘Knowledge is good; but wisdom is better. To be educated … [is to have] understood duty and the rights of others.’

Menzies’ miseducated successors are not remotely prepared for the task at hand.

Ben Crocker is Deputy Executive Director of the Institute for Public Affairs