The hard right derides it in the liberal-left as "virtue signalling" - pious flag-waving by the elites around such causes as refugees, multiculturalism, climate change, and entrenched sexism - designed to show its members exist on a higher moral plane.

So what is to be made of the Turnbull government's fanatical tinkering with the nation's racial offence laws? The expression of electoral urgency, of public clamour?

Hardly. Compare it to marriage equality, where there is wide support in the electorate and yet mulishness in Canberra.

Indeed, ordinary people, including many true conservatives, have been spectacularly unfussed by the prohibitions against offend, insult and humiliate on the basis of ethnicity, set out in section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act - especially in light of section 18D, which severely attenuates its sanctions anyway. But to the muscular reactionaries who have appropriated that conservative mantle, the law is itself offensive - a symbol of past obedience to leftist thought control.