Multiculturalism and Free Speech

By Andrew Stuttaford

Saturday, December 27, 2025

 

In the wake of Australia’s Bondi Beach massacre, Chris Minns, the Premier of New South Wales, had, among other things, this to say:

 

I acknowledge that we don’t have the same free speech rules that they have in the United States and I make no apologies for that, we have got a responsibility to knit together our community, that comes from different races and religions.

 

A “community” that needs censorship to keep it going is not, in any positive sense of the word, a community.

 

Note also the “no apologies” language used to justify the coercion that is censorship. “We,” argues Minns, “have a responsibility.” And by “we,” he means the state. There is, it seems, little that is organic about this state-crafted pseudo-community.

 

As the Daily Telegraph’s Sean Thomas relates, this is not the first time that Minns has defended censorship. For example, in March, he declared that:

 

I’ve fully said from the beginning that we don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community.

 

“Hold together?” This “multicultural community” sounds rather fragile.

 

Thomas observes that the U.S., a country filled with people of differing cultural backgrounds, appears to be doing pretty well, and yet it is “the land of free speech.” There is, I reckon, a good argument that constitutionally protected free speech, which has the effect of accustoming people to live with different views, is one reason that has occurred.

 

No matter, the Australians, the Europeans, and the Brits are doing multiculturalism their way, despite its evident failure, a failure that has been going on, as Thomas observes, for a long while. Years ago, “politicians as mainstream as David Cameron and Angela Merkel admitted” that this was the case. And so they did. For example, in 2011, Merkel commented that the attempt to make multiculturalism work in Germany had “failed, totally.”

 

Writing about such admissions at the time, I asked what Cameron, Sarkozy, and Merkel would “actually do” to put things right. My guess was “nothing,” something that, most notably in Merkel’s case, was to prove far too optimistic. Indeed, as a pioneer of online censorship, the Merkel of 2025 would probably want to see the Merkel of 2011 in trouble with the police for her remarks.

 

The pace of multiculturalism’s failure has picked up since the halcyon days of 2011. And for its evangelists, that’s awkward.

 

Thomas:

 

For many in the West, particularly within the liberal elite, multiculturalism has become a secular religion, a credo for the credulous. You can see it in Minns’s news conferences: he looks like a shiny-eyed preacher trying to steady a congregation at a moment of doubt.

 

And what do religions do when threatened? They invoke heresy. You cannot say words that question the faith. Anyone who does must be punished, denounced, gagged…That is why free speech is dying in the UK as it is in Australia. When they look at us, our rulers do not see voters, they see millions of potential unbelievers, who must be menaced into silence.

 

Those wanting to understand the growing fight between the U.S. and the EU (and the Brussels wannabees in Britain) over online censorship could do worse than start with those words.