Richard Flanagan, Heresies, and Freedom in Australia

Australians love the government’s fist around their leash and in their mouth

When I was at law school they loved talking about the Communist Party case, when in 1951 the High Court struck down the Australian government’s attempt to ban the Australian Communist Party. It represents much about the legal profession’s conception of itself: on the right side of history, standing for freedom.

It took me a long time to see it was bullshit.

Today before the same High Court (same in a Ship of Theseus sort of way — if you replace all the judges is it still the same court?), the same Australian government (Ship of Theseus…) is trying to ban the White Australia Party. It’s comically brazen, given the precedent in 1951.

Where are my former law professors? Why aren’t they burning their bras at smoking ceremonies? Well, communists they can understand. They’re like the zany cousins of the Victorian Bar Association.¹ But White Australia? Ew.

The White Australia Party is a motley crew of untermenschen and surprisingly articulate and charismatic young men. They don’t care for (((my kind))) and I don’t support them for obvious reasons, but count me as a boring old free speech guy. They are also a symptom of real cultural challenges. Their silly little black getup and frog-marching-through-Adelaide schtick is far less consequential than modern Australia’s schizophrenic derision and amnesia towards its British past. The White Australia policy essentially birthed Federation. It was during the period of this policy that Australians fought in their most consequential wars. It was under the auspices of this immigration policy that Australia transitioned from the 19th century to modernity. Despite its faults, it was not an oppressive period. A country is not oppressive to peoples it keeps out. It was a formative and incredibly generative period of Australian history.

During this time, Australia was not bad to its Jews. History books tut-tut at how Australia’s Jewish Governor General Isaac Isaacs was permitted into its exclusive clubs only during the period of his term. But he was appointed Governor General! Australia sent its largest contingent of men to fight ever up until then under the command of a Jew, John Monash. He was ultimately heralded as WWI’s greatest general on any side, and one whom the British king knighted on the battlefield. During Australia’s tumultuous post-WWI years, when proto-fascist groups were reacting to the threat of communism and difficult economic conditions for returned servicemen, some even turned to Monash — a Jew — to head an Australian dictatorship. He refused, but their hearts were never in it anyway.

So even at the white hot centre of White Australia, when there were many battle-hardened white Australian men fomenting discontent amidst economic turmoil, there was never any real threat to Australian democracy or to Australian security. So why on earth are we talking about a bunch of clowns in black outfits in Adelaide for? Obviously, being against immigration is not fascist. Acknowledging — and taking pride in — Australia’s British heritage to Australian culture is not fascist. Resisting institutional paganisation is not fascist. Demanding freedom of speech and association is not fascist. When former prime minister Paul Keating said this, he too was not a fascist:

multiculturalism has combined with the lingering Britishness of the place to circumvent the emergence of a singularly Australian identity to replace the old imperial one

It’s okay to not support just anyone coming here. That’s what a country and borders are all about. We don’t have to be all things. We can be our own thing.

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Sydney just hosted the Festival of Dangerous Ideas. Boomers and their favourite catamites gathering to applaud one another for being dangerous. About as dangerous as dentures. The intellectual ferment of bingo night at nan’s nursing home.² Here are some ideas for an actual Festival of Dangerous Ideas. We should start one, call it the Festival of Extremely Safe Ideas (the point is not to agree with such ideas… oh, forget it):

• The White Australia policy was Good Actually

• An Aboriginal Nation in the Northern Territory?

• Establishing a Caliphate in Western Sydney

• The Case for Greater Israel

• Annexing New Zealand

• Catholicism in Australia Was a Mistake

• Queensland Should Invade New Guinea (Again)

• Reduce the Franchise?

Wouldn’t that actually be fun? But I digress.

So at this Festival of Dangerous Ideas (don’t forget your orthopedic shoes), I was pleased to see the boomer generation that fought for freedom of speech and association against the tyranny of the Menzies government rail against the political suppression of the White Australia Party and arbitrary detention of its leaders. The boomers are finally vindicated: the government is oppressive. They have the cleanest opportunity to fight for freedom in 70 years, and boy did they make themselves heard.

Just kidding!

Not a peep. It’s only oppression when it’s trying to prevent a communist takeover.³ It’s free speech when it’s communists and hate speech when it’s fascists. It’s science when it’s climate change, and misinformation when it’s “cost of living, energy prices and reliability, jobs, regional impacts, biodiversity and environmental impacts, whether Australia’s action matters”.

You aren’t in favour of hate speech are you, anon? You’re not one of those misinformation peddlers are you? Watch out, Australia’s eSafety Auntie is watching. The Tealwaffen are ready to drag you away in hemp manacles.

So at this Festival of Dangerous Ideas (lol), esteemed Australian author Richard Flanagan, whose books I’ve enjoyed, did in fact warn about creeping authoritarianism and its threat to free speech. He spoke about Australia’s Israel lobby.

This is not a post about Israel.

One really annoying thing about his speech is that I agree that many of the recommendations by the Special Envoy’s Plan to Combat Antisemitism are silly. More cooperation with the eSafety Commissioner? More mandated training and education? Tying government funding to antisemitic conduct? The thing is, when you set up an antisemitism envoy you will get these kinds of recommendations. It’s like asking a barber if you need a haircut. It will generate these recommendations by definition. It will hardly say we need less censorship. These things are an endless one-way ratchet.

Australian institutions were not built for ethnic voting blocs. The Anglo mind is ill-suited to swatting off ethno-narcissism. The sweet Anglo soul is unprepared for the insane ethnic politics they’ve imported over recent decades. They wanted fun food and exotic wives and they’ll get ancient blood feuds of sub-ethnicities they never knew existed.

When Flanagan resists the urge to see Jew hatred under every bed, I also agree with him. I agree that Australia’s got a pretty good track record on the Jews. I send my boy on the train by himself sometimes, kippah and tzitzit and all. (Although I wouldn’t do that in western Sydney because, well, you know why.) A school mother was appalled when she learned this. She sees a potential terrorist behind every street light. I think we coddle kids too much these days, and that she’s being ridiculous. But then again, I would have thought the idea of a massacre of Jews at Bondi beach was utterly ridiculous. And this woman’s kids were shot at there. Her brother murdered. So which one of us is being ridiculous?⁴

Flanagan said Australians are not antisemitic, it’s the guns. I agree Australians are not antisemitic. Most Australians have never met a Jew, couldn’t care less about the Jews, think of Jews as much as they think of Kurds or Circassians or African pygmies (currently enslaved by Bantu btw). And why should they? I can also forgive Flanagan for thinking it’s the guns. He’s Tasmanian. Just like every day is Kristallnacht for Jews, every day is Port Arthur for this Tasmanian begotten by a man who fought for Australia in WWII, tormented by the firebombing and nuking of entire Japanese cities, an heir to a dark convict past. But it’s not the guns. We had guns in this country for two hundred years and no massacres of the Jews.⁵

What changed?

Flanagan says it’s Israel. Israel’s monstrous genocide. I refuse to make this post about Israel. But I will note that since the half a million Sudanese massacred by Arab militias, we’ve had zero massacres of Arabs in this country. When millions of Syrians died in a brutal civil war, we had no threats against Alawites in this country (there are 20 - 40k Alawites in Australia!), or any other Syrian ethnic faction. When Arabs flew planes into the Twin Towers, or blew up young concert goers in Manchester, or tortured an old Jewish lady in Paris, or massacred Jewish school children in Toulouse, or schemed to blow up planes in Australia, or…. anyway, just refer to the wiki list — there were no massacres of Arabs in Australia. In the wake of the October 7 massacres in Israel, Jews have not been stalking Arabs in Australia. The idea itself is laughable.

And what on earth do men and women and children on a beach celebrating Hannukah have to do with Israel anyway?

Even I don’t think these shooters are such animals that they lack all agency. That their shared faith with people dying in Gaza makes their murder of men and women and children on a beach in Sydney comprehensible. That such conduct would be expected of such people.

In Australia today, Jewish events cannot be broadcast on social media. My kids go to school behind high walls and armed guards. There are police stationed out front of the synagogue we walk to every week. This is not because Australians are clamouring for Jew blood. The reason these security measures are necessary is that it only takes one. One nutter to send a message to the Zionists. The terrible truth is that terror threats pose vastly asymmetric costs. They have an attack advantage. Defending against a single potential attack imposes massive costs on large numbers of people. The question should not be are we adequately protecting potential targets, but why are there terror threats in the first place.

Australia’s intelligence chief recently divulged that 70% of ASIO’s workload is consumed by Islamic extremism. 70%! He and other technocrats love to talk about the white supremacist threat, as a kind of balancing act. Wait until they learn about per capita. My favourite is when they opine on this or that interpretation of Islam. White boy tafsir. Give ‘em some ta'wil on the latest hadith, kafir.

Remove the terror risk with this one easy trick…

Banning protests or chants like ‘From the river to the sea’ is ridiculous. Of course it’s obscene to have police patrolling what people can and can’t say. Of course it’s an evil thing to chant. But why are there such chants in the first place.

On 9 October 2023, a procession wound through Sydney’s centre to the Opera House. Police texted CBD office workers encouraging Jews to leave as they could not guarantee their safety. There had been no Israeli response at this point. There were only hundreds of massacred Jews far away. And there were people in Sydney celebrating, police and Jews vacating the public space, Sydney’s most iconic places occupied by people reveling in the death of Jews, chanting against Jews.

This is all the information you need. This was the single most clarifying moment in my political consciousness. Are you with or against these people? Are you with or against people who celebrate the murder of revelers and civilians, old and young, men and women and children in the Israeli desert?

Were these people dancing at the Opera House to death really Australian in any meaningful sense of the word?

This is not an Australian problem. People in Ballarat and Frankston and Glenunga and Hornsby and Alice Springs and Launceston and Kalgoorlie do not have an opinion on Jews. They do not celebrate the massacre of Jews, or anyone else.

Australians do not carry ISIS flags, preach death to infidels, welcome ISIS brides back into their homes, threaten Jewish patients in hospitals, or carry Hezbollah flags (although very Australian politicians will have no compunction about marching in front of Ayatollah portraits — odd!). We have built an entire security apparatus and erected ridiculously cumbersome and expensive and depressing defensive measures around public events and Jewish schools to avoid the fact we have imported a minority with a propensity to manufacture individuals who just hate Australia, hate the West, and hate the Jews.

The Australian government passed sweeping laws in response to a jihadist terror attack against Jews, and deployed them against white nationalists. A law prompted by a real threat deployed against a politically convenient one. It is effectively illegal to support the policy settings of Australia’s founding immigration policy, a 70 year long immigration policy that meaningfully defined this country to the present. Whether you agree with the policy or not is not the point — the ability to support it it is surely one of the most basic prerogatives of a free society. It’s a disgraceful state of affairs. Besides, what do our politicians have against Beautiful Balts anyway?

Richard Flanagan is right about government overreach. But Australians have never loved freedom like our American friends. We have always been more censorious, more reverential to authority, happy to be ruled by the velvet fist of a strong administrative state. The Israel lobby’s overreach is but one small strand in a deeply Australian tradition of government control. From 2025, there is a mandatory minimum of 12 months' jail for public Nazi salute/symbol display. The Racial Discrimination Act makes it unlawful to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" on racial grounds. A court recently found it illegal for the leader of a political party to tell another politician to go back to Pakistan. Illegal!

We have the most plaintiff-friendly defamation laws in the common-law world. Since 2018 the government can compel tech companies to build capabilities to defeat encryption. The eSafety Commissioner can demand social media platforms remove content globally. The only place in the world where cycling helmets are mandatory. Melbourne had over 260 days of lockdown, the longest of any city in the world. We love being told what to do.

Flanagan is somehow most worried about the Israel lobby. Bless his heart, he does not see the father-son duo of the Bondi massacre as part of Australia’s social fabric. Neither should we. So what were they doing here?

Flanagan’s recent book Heresies is remarkably short of them. It is a pamphlet of militant progressive orthodoxy. In it, Flanagan is animated about climate change and corporations and the Voice.⁶ It’s a throwback to my university days, I’d completely forgotten these people exist. A place where all the evil in this land can be laid at the feet of the Murdoch press. He even accuses Elon Musk of making a Nazi salute. Bluesky is that way brother. Is it heretical to just say dumb things? To be fair, Flanagan is expressly critical of the turn to identity-worship among the Australian literati, and the leftist mobs that hounded the likes of Lionel Shriver.

Flanagan occasionally writes as though it were an act of bravery (“I know in saying this publicly I will in turn be targeted by News Corp”). He writes as though Australian writers are speaking truth to power, that the government quivers in fear at their words. What I don’t think he understands, what eviscerates these self-important delusions, is that nobody gives a shit. Australians just don’t care. That’s great Richard. Did you catch the game last night?

There was one moment in Heresies that made me gasp. An utterance that might genuinely be called heretical. Flanagan is scathing of former prime minister Scott Morrison’s “happy-clappy” faith (his words). Flanagan asks whether the Pentecostal belief in the Rapture disqualifies Morrison from office.

If Morrison is genuine in such beliefs, is he in any way a fit person to lead our country at this time of crisis that his religion sees as a joyous moment? Either he is sincere in his faith or he is sincere in his oath to office, but he cannot be both.

Flanagan writes about his admiration for Salman Rushdie, and the ghastly security apparatus that trails him. Flanagan praises Rushdie for his courage, including for standing up for the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre.

It is absolutely astonishing that Flanagan can write in favour of a writer who has been stalked by deranged Islamists for decades, who needs to be trailed by security through even the west — through European capitals, and New York City, and Australian cities, who had his eye stabbed out by a Muslim attacker decades into a fatwa, and Flanagan won’t mention Muslims (except several times as victims). The ASIO chief is saying 70% of Australia’s security services are occupied with the threat by Islamists. Mobs are braying for the blood of Jews on the steps of the Opera House. Jews are massacred on Sydney’s most popular beach. And Richard Flanagan reserves his wrath for Jillian Segal’s ham-fisted report? He is not loath to critique a man for his faith. He is very happy to mock Morrison’s “happy-clappy” Christianity. He is happy to even disqualify the man from government for his Pentecostal faith. He is a tough guy when he criticises Zionists and Pentecostals. Zionists and Pentecostals are not going to hunt him across the ends of the earth and stab out his eyes for his words.

There is a role for the likes of Flanagan to shine a light on suffering wherever they see it — in Australian detention centres, in Gaza — even though he need not face the harsh trade offs and impossible choices that gave rise to such tragedies. Flanagan is no heretic firebrand. He’s just another progressive with all heart and no responsibility. But worst of all, he’s a coward. At least Christopher Hitchens had the balls to dish it out to Christians, Jews, and Muslims.

1. I don’t follow it closely, but my favourite tidbit about the nutso legal fraternity in Victoria is how the Victorian Bar Association polled its members on whether it should take a stance on the Voice. It allowed 3 options:

1. Not to take a position

2. The Voice is an initiative that would “enhance” Australia’s system of government

3. Abstain

So you get a vote: Stalin or no one!

2. The website acknowledges the Gadigal people. Put aside the metaphysics of a land acknowledgment on a website. There were around 50 Gadigal people in Sydney on British arrival — what were they “custodians” of exactly? Why has the modern state frozen this poor band into amber and fashioned them into an idol of a new theology?

3. Egon Kisch, a Czechoslovakian communist, was famously given a dictation test in Scottish Gaelic to prevent his entry. When he was released, he ended up speaking to a crowd of 20,000 people in the Domain! 20,000 at a communist rally in Sydney. There were, in fact, reds under the bed.

4. Only a few weeks ago, a random man drove past this mother and her nine-year-old boy, walking home from their synagogue, and yelled FREE PALESTINE at them. Perhaps I am too cavalier about Australian society.

5. Although we did have a couple blokes — Mulla Abdullah and Gool Badsha Mahomed — shoot up a picnic of random Australians in 1915 on behalf of the Ottoman Empire. Also not the guns — we were on the wrong side of a holy war then too apparently. The Battle of Broken Hill.

6. I have so much more to say about Flanagan’s view of aboriginal culture as being essential to Australian civilisation and his total rejection of Britishness. He is perhaps the apotheosis of this trend. I recognise almost nothing of the Australia he advocates for. I hope to write about it another time.