I am either free to speak, or I am not. I believe an adult should have the right to say anything, barring the standard permissible restrictions, such as incitement to violence, defamation and fraud. Beyond those limits, it comes down to what someone else deems permissible, and at that point freedom of speech becomes conditional, something that should be unacceptable in a free nation.
Those who now elevate “social harmony” above freedom of expression have the argument precisely backwards. It is not the citizen’s duty to surrender his liberty in order to preserve a harmony that the managerial class itself has allowed to erode. Having presided over immigration policies that weakened social consensus and diminished the common civic culture upon which a free society depends, they cannot reasonably demand restrictions on speech as the remedy for the divisions their own policies helped create.
There is something particularly insidious about the language of “social harmony”. It sounds benign. For instance who, after all, wishes for social disharmony? But as a political principle it contains a dangerous assumption: that harmony is an objective to be administered by the coercive organs of the state rather than the natural consequence of a reasonably cohesive society governed by common institutions, customs and laws.
Once that distinction is lost, almost any restriction can be justified in harmony’s name. An unpopular opinion becomes socially divisive. Criticism of immigration policy becomes “harmful” to community relations. Religious criticism becomes offensive. Actual violence against protected groups becomes a tool to enforce even harsher penalties and sanctions against unconnected political opponents. Discussion of differences between groups becomes wilfully dangerous. Eventually the question is no longer whether something is true, lawful or legitimately argued, but whether those charged with maintaining social order consider it conducive to harmony.
And the worst of it, who decides?
Increasingly, it is the same managerial apparatus that exercises growing influence elsewhere in modern democracy: bureaucracies, regulators, commissions, universities, NGOs, professional bodies and the expanding ecosystem of experts who derive authority not from election but from credential, position and institutional legitimacy.
This is the same constitutional problem discussed in The New Roundheads. Modern democracy increasingly struggles with the distinction between institutions that advise elected government and institutions that effectively govern it. Expertise is indispensable to a complex society, but expertise possesses no independent democratic sovereignty. The expert may advise Parliament; the administrator may execute Parliament’s laws; neither should acquire the authority to determine the boundaries of legitimate political thought.
The doctrine of social harmony provides an especially convenient mechanism through which that boundary can be blurred.
It transforms a political failure into an administrative problem.
For decades Western governments have undertaken profound social experiments: historically high levels of immigration, rapid demographic change, weakening attachment to national institutions, declining participation in traditional civic organisations and an increasingly fragmented public culture. One can support immigration while still recognising that the scale and pace of demographic change are legitimate matters for democratic argument. Indeed, they are precisely the kinds of questions a democracy must be capable of discussing openly.
If those policies contribute to declining social consensus, the proper response is political accountability. Governments should defend their decisions, alter them or face the electorate.
The managerial response is increasingly different. Instead of asking whether policy contributed to social fragmentation, it asks how the resulting tensions might be managed. The problem ceases to be the policy and becomes the citizen’s reaction to it.
This is an extraordinary inversion of democratic responsibility.
A government fails to maintain sufficient public confidence in immigration policy, yet criticism of immigration becomes a threat to cohesion. Institutions fail to sustain a shared civic culture, yet citizens are warned against language that might undermine social harmony. Governments permit divisions to deepen and then discover that the resulting divisions require greater regulation of public expression.
Failure thus becomes the justification for additional authority.
There is an obvious circularity to this. The less cohesive society becomes, the greater the claimed need to police speech in the interests of cohesion. And the more government intervenes to determine what may safely be said, the more citizens conclude that important questions are being managed rather than debated.
The result is not harmony. It is distrust.
A genuinely harmonious society does not require constant official supervision of political expression. It possesses enough confidence in its institutions and fellow citizens to tolerate disagreement. Democracy is necessarily argumentative. Elections divide people. Newspapers offend people. Political parties accuse one another of incompetence. Citizens ridicule governments, religions, ideologies and occasionally one another. This is not a defect in democratic government. It is evidence that democratic life exists.
The alternative is a peculiar form of managed democracy in which liberty survives only to the extent that its exercise does not inconvenience the objectives of those administering society. That is why freedom of expression matters most precisely when expression is disruptive, unpopular or offensive. There is little need for constitutional liberty to protect opinions that everyone already considers respectable.
And when poor policy reaches its inevitable conclusion, as we have seen with the recent Bondi Beach massacre, the natural tendency of those in power is to deflect criticism and blame their perceived political opponents, often those seeking to identify and address the root causes.
The proper response to a breakdown in social consensus is therefore not to narrow the boundaries of permissible speech. It is to rebuild the conditions that make a free society possible: democratic accountability, common citizenship, confidence in national institutions and a willingness by governments to acknowledge when policies have failed.
Social harmony may be desirable, but in a democracy it must never become a licence for the state to manufacture consensus. A free society does not achieve harmony by preventing its citizens from speaking about its divisions. It confronts those challenges openly and trusts citizens to judge the arguments for themselves.
