We currently have very harsh and direct suppression of freedom of speech legislated in Australia and there is almost nothing said about it.

I refer to the Tasmanian law that came into effect about a year ago which makes it an offence to express opposition to abortion within 150m of a place where abortions are done.

The penalty for doing so is up to almost $10 000 in fines and a year in jail.

I was arrested twice last year when standing within 150m of abortion clinics in Hobart. On the first occasion I held a sign that read on the front, “Everyone has the right to life, Article 3, Universal Declaration of Human Rights” and on the back, “Every child has the right to life, Article 6, UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.” I also had an enlarged photo of an 8-week-old preborn baby.

On the second occasion I held a sign that read on the front, “Should human rights apply to all human beings?” and on the back. “Are unborn babies human beings?” Again I had the photo.

For that I could have gone to jail for a year.

As it happened, the police waited until the last minute before the trial to say that they would offer no evidence against me. Thus the law remains in place.

Whatever one's views about abortion may be, how can not all thinking citizens be greatly concerned about the terrible precedent that this law creates? Where is the Australian Human Rights Commission when you need it?

Yes, "we need an incredibly robust principle of free speech".

Interesting essay. Pity that she refers to the highly partisan Mark Steyn to "prove" her point about the presumed "rising tide of political correctness".
And what could be more politically correct than the Centre For Public Christianity.
Speaking of Hollywood, all of the mainstream production companies refused to have anything to do with Mel Gibson's sado-masochistic snuff/splatter film The Passion. Perhaps rightly so considering how monstrously violent it was, even by Hollywood standards. Even more so because it was supposedly supposed to be a "religious" film in which the "hero" representing every individual living-breathing-feeling human being and humankind altogether was systematically beaten to death.
No doubt the dreadfully sane politically correct folks at Public Christianity thought the film was a more than wonderful evocation of the "good news" of Jesus' brutal murder.
This Marxist review of the film deconstructs all of the usual politically correct tropes promoted by the usual right-wing and/or so called "conservative" suspects - those that are regularly featured in The Spectator.
http://www.logosjournal.com/hammer_kellner

Furthermore it is highly unlikely that the film The Life of Brian with its comic send-up of all the usual christian make-believe pieties could be produced in this time and place. Imagine the howls of protest that such a film would provoke in the USA where the the forces of christian fascism are becoming more strident and powerful every day. The kind of theocratic fascism described by Chris Hedges in his book American Fascists, and as featured in sites such as theocracy watch.

Yes and well argued; always providing, we aren't allowed to express racial and or religious vilification or hate speech, or trample on the rights of any minority; particularly those attending an abortion clinic, for what for all the protesters know, might be a life saving procedure!

Nor should kids be asked to sacrifice the rest of their lives and their finest prospects, for the product of incest or rape!

There is a time and a place to vent your personal views on virtually any subject, just not outside the windows of a medical clinic!

Nor are we put here to judge or be someone else's conscience; but particularly when the man in the mirror tells us, we're not perfect ourselves, by any fair comparison!

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Somewhere it is written, if we but had our sins written on our own foreheads, we'd have very little to say about others.

Freedom to speak or out all others?

By all means, always providing that doesn't include trampling over their personal rights, one of which is the inviolable right to privacy, or the expression of their natural gender bias!

Freedom of speech is never an argument for implacable absolutism, but rather the fair-minded application of, the right to voice an opinion!

Always providing we're open to having that opinion changed by the voice of reason and logic's rites.

Expressing an opinion should always remain a right, always providing we don't descend to the point where opinion is presented as fact, or that anyone can own the facts!
Rhrosty.

JP you should be locked up, How insensitive to stand near any clinic and hassle the people using them, You have no right and I'd personally probably smack you in the mouth, You think these ladies wanna be there ? most don't but work/home/society pressures them to this point.
You make me sick

Thanks for an interesting article and to the commenters for some interesting perspectives.

The subject is close to my own heart, as anyone who has read my ramblings here would know. It seems to me that an expectation of freedom to speak one's mind is fundamental to a strong social fabric, but that there are some concomitant responsibilities that it carries.

Those responsibilities fall on the listener to the speech even more than the utterer in many cases. After all, if you don't want to hear what I have to say, then I can't make you do so and conversely, if you are determined to be offended at something I didn't intend that way, then once again there's not much I can do about it.

To a very large extent our society, along with the US and Britain, has become very much driven by the idea of the right to be offended trumping that of the right to speak freely with a quite nasty effect on open discussion. On this site, for example, which GY runs as a bastion of free speech with very liberal moderation, many are unwilling to use their names for fear of the consequence of someone choosing to take offence. R0bert cited this particular reason on another thread and Jay of Melbourne has done the same.

On the other hand, the utterer has the responsibility to try to express contentious ideas in ways that avoid unreasonably offending. Once again referring to this site, there are some here who hide behind anonymity to write things that are deliberately calculated to be offensive, for unfathomable reasons of their own. There have been reams written about this particular psychopathy, including in the press today.

Unfortunately, in this age of the internet, there are some other sites, such as The Conversation, or Whirlpool, to name a couple of the more prominent, where comments are very routinely deleted and whole discussions closed to comment simply because of confected outrage from a vocal minority. The result is a very badly skewed public debate and a mockery made of free speech.

I agree 100% with Aussieboy. This JP character has been at it before, defiling the sacred right of freedom of speech as a cover for bullying harassment on behalf of a "church" that has bullied and harassed en masse since it was set up by a tyrant 17 centuries ago. If these "right to life" warriors were dinkum about the right to life they would have been conspicuous as opponents, not supporters and perpetrators, of endless wars of conquest and suppression.