Calls to strip Grace Tame of her Australian of the Year award over her protest speech highlight a troubling slide towards political punishment and selective free speech.

The 2021 Australian of the Year winner Grace Tame attended a rally in Sydney on Monday and chanted, “From Gadigal to Gaza, globalise the intifada”. Tame was exercising her right to freedom of speech and what she said, to reasonable minds, is of no moment.

But Tame, a lived experience sexual abuse campaigner, has been abused by the hardliners in the Israel lobby, the Murdoch media, the populist One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, and the one time self-made champion of free speech, Liberal front bencher Tim Wilson.

Tame, say some of them, should be stripped of her Australian of the Year award.

But before we deal with the calls for her to be ‘punished’, which by the way is the latest in an increasingly McCarthyist climate when it comes to criticism of Israel, why is it that what she said is so offensive to a few?

The point of freedom of speech is, of course, that it does offend, and make some uncomfortable. The great American jurist William O Douglas got it right when he said in 1949 that “a function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it........

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