Conservative voices, once again, are plotting to save us from the yoke that is oppressing our freedoms. “18C” is the magic password for entry into a dark campaign in search of a cause without a meaning.

Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act is here to stay, so you wonder why this clutch of Senate crossbenchers, interplanetary Liberals and associated claqueurs in the Murdoch press continue to bang their heads against the wall in an exercise of stupefying pointlessness.

The removal of the provision that makes actionable those expressions that offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate on the basis of someone’s race, colour, national or ethnic origin has become a talisman, as important as climate denialism, opposition to marriage equality, and the virtues of negative gearing.

It would be intriguing to know just what free speech has been bottled up, desperate for escape. What is it, precisely, that people are constrained from saying? Most of the words and artworks about which complaints are made (“angry white male”, newspaper cartoons, etc.) are defensible under the same law that its opponents wish to tear down.

Maybe, if we turn to Maxine Beneba Clarke and her book The Hate Race we can get an idea of the sort of speech that is bursting to be free. Here she is wheeling her five month-old baby along the street in Melbourne’s East Bentleigh, when a white ute draws alongside, from which pours the following free speech:

Go on, fuck off. You make me sick, you fucken black slut. Go drown your kid. You should go drown your fucken kid. Fuck off will you.

There was more of the same: “Fuck off blackie. Why don’t you just piss off? Bitch. Go the fuck back to where you came from, back to your own fucken country, nigger.”

Inexplicably, Beneba Clarke chose to take offence at this burst of free expression when, according to libertarian senator David Leyonhjelm, none was given. He told the ABC’s Insiders program on 7 August:

Free speech is free speech. There’s no qualification to it ... If you want to take offence, that’s your choice. You have the choice of choosing another feeling. Offence is always taken, not given.

Fortunately, John Howard is on hand to remind us, “We are not a racist country and I wish people would stop reaching for that adjective whenever they want to ... isolate somebody who they do not agree with.”

What has happened is that section 18C has been repackaged and now is being sold as having a general clamp on free speech, whereas its actual design was to curtail speech that specifically threatens the delicate fabric of a multi-cultural society – speech that goes to the heart of someone’s racial or ethnic identity.

Senator-elect Malcolm Roberts, for instance, equates racist hate speech with being called “short ... fat ... a Queenslander ... a cane toad”.

Maybe that’s understandable coming from someone who thinks that section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act was introduced by Julia Gillard to “nobble” Andrew Bolt, and has to be repealed because it is inhibiting “honest” discussion about tax and banking.

In fact, section 18C was introduced by the Keating government in 1995, well before Gillard was in parliament and even before Andrew Bolt was a celebrity journalist.

The historical context is that the denial of human rights, pogroms, the Holocaust and wave after wave of mistreatment were never specifically directed at the fat, bald or stupid.

There is also evidence that the anti-18C brigade have only a phoney attachment to the notion of free speech. Here are a few examples of some limited defence of free speech:

David Leyonhjelm

Leyonhjelm defended the right of Wicked Campers to drive around with slogans like, “A wife: an attachment you screw on the bed to get the housework done”. The senator said: “You need to be a particularly wowserish type of person to not find them funny.”

However, his unqualified support for free speech struck a hurdle when the Chaser team pulled up outside his home with a van daubed with the slogan: “The best thing about oral sex from David Leyonhjelm – 5 minutes of silence.”

Maybe he didn’t get the joke, telling the Chaser team, with his trademark charm, to “fuck off” and threatening to call the police.

Women’s rights activist Melinda Tankard Reist tweeted a picture of one the van’s slogan, adding “@DavidLeyonhjelm thinks this is funny #dontvoteforhim”.

In a breakthrough moment for free speech Leyonhjelm replied: “If you are unable to understand the concept of free speech, you ought to STFU [shut the fuck up].”

And this from the man who says there should be “no qualifications” to free speech.

Chris Back

Chris Back is a Liberal senator from Western Australia who supports the repeal of section 18C. The IPA has listed him as one of its free speech heroes. However, he’s not so keen on free speech when it comes to the public’s right to know about cruelty to animals, particularly in the live cattle and sheep export trade.

His private member’s “ag-gag” bill sought to restrict citizens’ rights to publish footage of animals being abused, requiring this distressing material to be handed to the authorities without delay. In other words, a restriction on the sort of revelations broadcast by Four Corners.

George Brandis

The attorney general, George Brandis, was one of the leading proponents of the repeal of 18C and drafted amending legislation so that we would have more room to express our inner bigot. He has since toed the government line and says an amendment is “not on the table”. Yet while he was pushing this odd free speech barrow people may have found it “passing strange”, to use one of the attorney general’s favourite expressions, to know he had wanted a book critical of his hero, Sir Robert Menzies, removed from a school library and he wrote a paper calling for defamation remedies to include injunctions against media publications.

One Nation

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party also sees 18C standing in the way of free speech for ordinary Australians. However, Pauline Hanson successfully applied to the Queensland courts to ban the broadcast of a satirical song called “Backdoor Man”, revealing that in her mind freedom of expression is a selective commodity.

A book published in her name, Pauline Hanson – The Truth, made a number of ludicrous claims, including that Aboriginal women ate their babies. When a racial vilification case was brought against the book, it was defended under the RDA exemption for publishers acting reasonably and in good faith.

Bob Day

Senator Bob Day is in the front line of attacks on 18C yet Family First, his political party, is wedded to some pretty repressive views about freedom of expression. When the Labor government’s internet filtering project was under discussion in 2008, Family First wanted X-rated and refused classification material banned for everyone – including adults.

James Paterson

James Paterson, a Liberal senator from Victoria, is also selective about what information should be in the public domain. When a big-wig at the Institute for Public Affairs, he refused to discuss with this reporter the institute’s staffing arrangements. He even said that “no comment” was “off the record”. Free speech is all very well as long as you’re not free speaking about the IPA’s internal affairs.

Ultimately, reform and strengthening of the section 18D exemptions might have been a more constructive way to approach the issue, rather than sloppy, lazy and unhinged assaults on the race hate provision itself.

Serious improvements to free speech are well overdue. While the fraudulent war on 18C has been under way there has been no focus on the real inhibitors to freedom of speech: defamation law, disclosure penalties under the Border Force Act, the ever-increasing flow of suppression and take-down orders issued by the courts, penalties for protesting, the lamentable state of FOI and whistleblower protections, even criminal sedition laws.

All of those restrictions are nothing compared to the freedom to be able to scream “ape” at an Aboriginal football player.