Liberal societies like to think of themselves as uniquely capable of confronting historical injustice. Australia, in particular, prides itself on having legal frameworks — such as the UN-inspired Racial Discrimination Act 1975 — designed to prevent racial harm, promote dignity, and protect minorities from abuse. But embedded within this moral architecture is a profound and uncomfortable paradox, one that rarely gets examined honestly: what happens when a group claims it is facing genocide, yet the law constrains the language through which that claim must be made?
Some Aboriginal activists argue that the Australian state — historically and continuing into the present — has engaged in genocidal practices: not necessarily mass killing, but cultural destruction, forced assimilation, removal of children, and the erosion of collective identity. It is arguable that the demographic war against first Anglo-Saxon Australians, and now white Australia itself, fits the genocide narrative. Importantly, these claims are not eccentric inventions. Under international law, genocide includes acts intended to destroy a group "as such," including non-physical forms of destruction. Whether one ultimately agrees with the claim or not, it is a claim that sits squarely within recognized legal and moral categories.
Here is where the tension arises.
The Racial Discrimination Act seeks to limit speech that is reasonably likely to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" on the basis of race. Its purpose is noble: to prevent racial hostility and social fracture. But the Act is also premised on a distinctly liberal assumption — that harmful speech can be separated from legitimate political debate, and that the latter can usually be conducted in measured, civil terms.
That assumption begins to fail when the subject of debate is not policy about a group, but the group's very survival.
If a people sincerely believe they are being erased — culturally, demographically, politically — their language is unlikely to be calm, balanced, or politely hedged. Existential threats rarely produce parliamentary tones. Yet the law, indifferent to existential stakes, evaluates speech primarily by its effect on listeners, not by the desperation that animates it. In such circumstances, a statute designed to prevent racial harm can begin, paradoxically, to function as a mechanism of silencing.
This is not merely a hypothetical concern. Liberal legal systems are structurally more comfortable regulating speech than hearing desperation. They reward moderation, procedural restraint, and careful phrasing. But genocide discourse — by its nature — resists moderation. It insists on urgency. It refuses euphemism. It demands to be heard precisely because silence is understood as complicity.
To be clear, this does not mean that any invocation of genocide should grant unlimited license to vilify others or abandon moral restraint. A society cannot allow every group to racialise conflict and justify dehumanisation simply by claiming existential threat. Some limits are necessary. But the line the law draws — between attacking "the state" (generally permitted) and attacking "groups" (generally restricted) — is thinner and more fragile than liberal theory admits. When a state is the dominant expression of a majority culture, that distinction becomes morally strained.
Australian courts have often navigated this terrain through discretion rather than doctrine, relying on exemptions for fair comment, public interest, or political communication. Indigenous protest has usually been protected — not because the law logically resolves the paradox, but because judges intuitively sense its danger. That is reassuring, but it is also revealing. The system works here not by principle, but by restraint.
The deeper problem remains unresolved. Liberal law is excellent at managing coexistence; it is far less adept at confronting claims of annihilation. Anti-racism frameworks assume that speech itself is a primary harm and that limiting it can be a remedy. Genocide frameworks assume the opposite: that silence is the harm, and speech — however uncomfortable — is the last line of defence.
These frameworks collide, and no amount of good intentions dissolves the collision.
The Racial Discrimination Act is tragically flawed. It was designed to stabilise plural societies, not to adjudicate claims of existential destruction from within them. When such claims arise, the law strains, and its moral confidence falters.
If there is a lesson here, it is not that we should abandon protections against racial vilification. It is that we should be honest about their limits. A society that congratulates itself on its commitment to justice must be willing to hear accusations that unsettle it — even when those accusations are expressed in language that makes us uncomfortable.
If anti-racism becomes a framework that can only tolerate polite suffering, then it risks betraying the very people it was meant to protect. And if we cannot even discuss that possibility — openly, carefully, and without fear — then one is forced to ask a far more troubling question:
If we can't talk about this, why talk about anything at all? And that leads us to censored Australia today, which has moved by the Fabian means of gradualism, to becoming an oppressive totalitarian Leftist regime.