The High Court has spent more than three decades dancing around the question. Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act has survived political attempts at repeal, endless academic defence, and a series of lower-court skirmishes that never forced the ultimate constitutional reckoning. Now the facts have finally arrived in a form too plain to ignore. Pauline Hanson is signalling she will seek special leave. If the Court grants it, the case of Hanson v Faruqi will become the free-speech moment this country has postponed since the provision was enacted in 1995.

The exchange itself is almost embarrassingly simple. On the day Queen Elizabeth died, Senator Mehreen Faruqi posted that she could not mourn "the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples." Hanson replied that Faruqi's attitude appalled her, that the senator had taken every advantage Australia offered, and that she should pack her bags and "p*ss off back to Pakistan." One court after another has held that Hanson's words crossed the 18C threshold: they were reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate on the ground of race, colour or national or ethnic origin, and the statutory exemptions did not apply. The Full Federal Court accepted that the provision burdens political communication, yet concluded the burden is justified because inflammatory race speech might otherwise deter participation in democratic debate. Of course, the remarks about Britain being a "racist empire" was beneath comment, being standard Left/woke discourse now.

That justification is where the constitutional argument begins to collapse. The implied freedom of political communication exists to protect the conditions of representative government. It is not a licence for politeness. It is a recognition that citizens must be free to speak about the central questions of the polity even when the speech is crude, angry or wounding. Immigration, national identity, colonial history and the terms of belonging are no longer peripheral topics. They sit at the heart of every Western democracy wrestling with rapid demographic change. If the constitutional protection is weakest precisely when those questions are most contested, then the freedom is little more than a decorative doctrine reserved for safer ground.

The lower courts have tried to narrow the damage. They insist 18C catches only a "narrow range" of political speech and that the offence must be serious. Yet the practical effect is already visible. Political actors learn quickly which subjects invite litigation risk and which do not. The result is selective chill. One side of the argument about empire, race and migration is free to use maximal language; the other side must calibrate every reply against the possibility of a civil finding and a costs order. That asymmetry is not viewpoint-neutral, and the Full Court effectively conceded as much. The claim that silencing the harsher end of the spectrum somehow preserves democratic participation is an inversion of the usual liberal understanding. Democracies do not remain healthy by policing the emotional temperature of debate on their most difficult subjects.

There is no right not to be offended. That proposition was once uncontroversial among serious judges and lawyers. Jim Spigelman said it plainly years ago. George Brandis's remark about the right to be a bigot was widely mischaracterised; the point was never endorsement of bigotry but a reminder that the state has no business criminalising or civilly sanctioning political expression merely because it wounds. Section 18C converts that wound into a legal cause of action when race is the chosen ground. The High Court has never squarely decided whether Parliament may do so. The doctrine of the implied freedom has been elaborated in dozens of cases, yet this particular collision has been left unresolved. That silence cannot last if Hanson presses the appeal.

The prediction is not difficult once the stakes are stated clearly. The Court will not be asked to approve Hanson's language. It will be asked whether a law that singles out race-based political speech for special restriction because it is offensive is compatible with the Constitution's protection of political communication. If the answer is yes, the freedom shrinks at the exact point where representative government most needs it. If the answer is no, section 18C falls. After thirty years of evasion, that is the choice the High Court is being invited to make. The case is not about two senators trading insults. It is about whether Australians remain free to argue, sometimes harshly, about the character of their own country.

One Nation needs to stand up to the ethnic multicult elites and strive to have section 18C repealed, when they crowd parliament.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/08/my-prediction-18c-will-bite-the-dust/