Last week, the Fair Work Commission forbade unionists from saying mean things about contractors undercutting sacked workers at the Carlton and United Breweries site in Abbotsford, Melbourne.

Specifically, the commission’s order prohibited certain union officials from “call[ing] out … using offensive or insulting names including ‘scab’, ‘dog’, ‘fuckwit’, ‘cunt’ [or] ‘rat’” to those now labouring at the brewery in place of staff locked out some months ago.

In recent times, we’ve heard a great deal about the importance of being able to to insult and offend whomsoever we choose, with Cory Bernardi managing to coral almost every Coalition backbench senator behind his crusade to protect that glorious liberty from the Racial Discrimination Act.

“This sort of taking offence at everything has gone too far within our society,” Eric Abetz told the press, as he signed his name to Bernardi’s motion.

You’d think, then, that the senators would be aghast about the nanny state imposing its delicate sensibilities in, of all places, a brewery, especially through a ban far more direct and immediate than any order yet enforced through the RDA.

Let’s remember, while Andrew Bolt might have been dragged to court under the legislation, the guilty finding against him didn’t result in jail or a fine. His columns weren’t declared illegal, they weren’t withdrawn and Bolt wasn’t even made to apologise.

A few sentences were appended clarifying factually incorrect claims. That was it.

Gallileo, he ain’t.

Everyone knows that, had a judge decreed that Bolt couldn’t write or say particular words, white conservative tears would have flowed into a deluge of Biblical proportions, a great ocean of salty outrage and self-pity.

But that hypocrisy’s typical of the so-called free speech debate in Australia, where there’s almost an inverse proportion between the severity of censorship and the degree of outrage of the so-called libertarians.

You could not find, for instance, a more draconian violation of speech rights than that underpinning the offshore detention of asylum seekers. The immigration department flatly refuses to release basic information about its activities; journalists lack access to camps in which staff face two years jail for speaking out about what they see; refugees remain detained for years without charge in isolated facilities with little contact with the outside world.

Yet, almost without exception, the senators campaigning for freedom enthusiastically support a refugee policy that couldn’t exist without censorship.

There’s an especial irony to the indifference shown by the free speech warriors to the CUB case, since the ban imposed on the word “scab” actually illustrates a genuine problem with the sorts of legislation that our freedom senators hate.

The legal system (almost by definition) simultaneously abstracts and individualises behaviour it seeks to criminalise, stripping it from the context from which it derives meaning. As a result, there’s a long history of measures passed by those seeking to deter racism or sexism and then being hijacked by the privileged to use against the oppressed (much as David Leyonhjelm’s seeking to do with his stunt prosecution of Fairfax).

We can see something similar taking place in Abbottsford, where the commission’s ruling derives from amendments introduced into the Fair Work Act by the Gillard government in 2013 to combat workplace bullying.

As workplace relations minister Bill Shorten championed the changes, saying they’d help combat toxic work environments.

Instead, as the Australian Financial Review notes, the laws have given bosses an important new weapon against trade unions. The article cites employment lawyer Stephen Jauncey, who thinks employers could now use the amendments to combat “community protests” – even if strikers aren’t involved and the protests don’t involve obstructions, assault or trespass. Industrial relations barrister Stuart Wood, QC, seems equally bullish.

“There’s a need for quick, effective and cheap remedies [to end pickets] and this is a good example of someone being creative and innovative in achieving that,” he says.

How did measures intended to protect workers become a weapon against them?

Again, the problem’s one of context.

The Fair Work Commission describes “belittling or humiliating comments” as an example of bullying.

Is it belittling to call someone a scab? The novelist Jack London certainly thought so. He wrote:

After God had finished the rattlesnake, the toad, the vampire, He had some awful substance left with which He made a scab. A scab is a two-legged animal with a cork-screw soul, a water-logged brain, a combination backbone of jelly and glue. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles. When a scab comes down the street, men turn their backs and angels weep in heaven, and the Devil shuts the gates of Hell to keep him out. No man has a right to scab so long as there is a pool of water to drown his carcass in, or a rope long enough to hang his body with.

Not exactly a compliment, then.

But in another passage, London explained why scabs had earned such opprobrium.

To strike at a man’s food and shelter is to strike at his life, and in a society organized on a tooth-and-nail basis, such an act … [is] menacing and terrible. It is for this reason that a laborer is so fiercely hostile to another laborer who offers to work for less pay or longer hours … To sell his day’s work for two dollars instead of two dollars and a half means that he, his wife, and his children will not have so good a roof over their heads, such warm clothes on their backs, such substantial food in their stomachs.

That’s a pretty good summation of what’s taking place in Abbottsford, where 55 workers have been sacked – and then invited to apply for their old jobs on terms that, in some cases, amount to pay cut of 65%.

In the face of union protests, a contract company called Programmed has engaged temporary employees to keep the brewery operating. Those individuals are behaving precisely as London describes: they’re driving down others’ wages and conditions for their own benefit.

No doubt it’s unpleasant (even humiliating) for the contractors to hear themselves described as “scabs” (or “dogs”, “fuckwits”, etc). But the truth doesn’t change according to how someone feels about it.

The Fair Work Act defines “bullying” as behaviour that’s “unreasonable”. Is it unreasonable to dissuade strikebreakers from destroying hard-won awards? Certainly, CUB management thinks so but one suspects that most of us, if we were confronting the prospect of either unemployment or a massive pay cut, would form a different opinion.

But the legislation doesn’t make such distinctions, enabling a contractor seeking to pulverise working conditions to get an order restraining the union in the name of “health and safety”.

There’s one other point worth noting about the CUB case. In comments to the Financial Review, ETU state secretary Troy Gray explains that “this dispute is not going to turn on whether you can call a ‘scab’ a ‘scab’.”

In the real world, censorship cases are almost never solely to do with censorship. It’s far more common that the people being silenced are menaced in a variety of other ways as well.

The detainees in Nauru and Manus Island, for instance, want to have their voices heard. But much more than that, they want to be resettled.

In the same way, the unionists at Abbottsford are being censored. But, as Troy Gray says, that’s only a minor part of what’s at stake.

Again, the comparison with Bernardi and his ilk could not be greater. Could you imagine the yelps of anguish and outrage were the wages of all parliament’s senators were suddenly cut by, oh I don’t know, 65%?

But, of course, that’s not on the agenda. For the campaign against section 18C is being pushed by the most privileged people in the nation, a crew who invoke high principles only to obscure how little skin they have in the game.