Telegraph: Free speech will have to go to preserve multiculturalism

One Australian politician has said the quiet part out loud

TELEGRAPH ARTICLE

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/12/23/senior-politician-just-said-quiet-part-out-loud-free-speech/

Free speech will have to go to preserve multiculturalism

One Australian politician has said the quiet part out loud

Sean Thomas 23 December 2025

It’s not often the Premier of New South Wales says something that changes the political debate in the UK and elsewhere, but so it is this week. Following the awful carnage on Bondi Beach, NSW Premier Chris Minns gave a press conference about new legal restrictions on speech, and said this:

“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.”

Nor was this a one off, he has said exactly this before, several times – perhaps most pithily in March when he phrased it thus: “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.”

This is such a startling admission that I confess, when I first heard it, that I did that meme where the guy blinks twice in bemused surprise. Because, of course, what Premier Minns came right out and said is what many people across the “free-speaking” Western world have suspected for a long time.

The powers-that-be in Australia, the UK, and the EU believe you can have multiculturalism, and you can have free speech, but not both. And since multiculturalism must always come first, it is free speech that must yield, wither and ultimately die.

Before we come to that startling revelation, however, we need to address Minns’s references to America, because they are quite bizarre. America is, of course, a very multicultural country. Indeed, it is arguably the epitome of the multicultural country. They have a phrase for it, the “American melting pot”. They wrote on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” And they really mean it – at least most of the time.

Meanwhile, America is also the land of free speech. It is their First Amendment to their sacred Constitution. And they really mean that as well. So what was Minns broadly hinting at in his news conferences? What is it about the mix of multiculturalism and free speech in America that is so toxic it must not be reproduced elsewhere?

Perhaps Minns feels that America is in some ways a failed state. If so, I have news for the Premier of New South Wales. I’ve spent several months in the USA over the last two years, from the poorest states, Mississippi and Kentucky, to the richest, California and Connecticut. And for all its many problems – guns, drugs, political divisions – the USA has a cultural energy and scientific dynamism that makes Australia look like a dismal backwater, and an opulence and wealth that would make any European wince in envy, except perhaps the Swiss.

That established, let’s move on to the second, more sinister implication of Minns’s words, which constitute a remarkable if inadvertent admission. Liberal politicians across the West, excluding the USA, believe free speech and multiculturalism cannot coexist. Why? They claim it is to prevent apocalyptic racism as races intermingle, but again America shows this is nonsense.

No, what alarms Minns and his kin in London and Brussels is that multiculturalism, the idea that different races, creeds and cultures can live happily and peaceably in the same place, is a sadly failing project. Yes, it was a noble idea, but it is not working as hoped. Years ago politicians as mainstream as David Cameron and Angela Merkel admitted this, in exactly these words, though they probably would not now. What’s more, the failures of multiculturalism seem to be getting worse and spreading, as Bondi grimly illustrates.

But this is where the irresistible force of fact – the failings of multiculturalism – meets the immovable object of faith. 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 with Online Safety Acts, and maybe given 18 months in jail for am anti immigration post viewed 33 times. 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.

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