When Senator George Brandis said that we have a right to be a bigot, he was in one sense right. He did not (I assume) mean that it is right to be a bigot, but that in liberal society we ought all to have freedom of conscience - that is, we have a right to think whatever we like no matter how horrible it is. So Bill Shorten's and many others' attacks on him involved either misunderstanding or deliberately misinterpreting his comments in the Senate on Monday night.

Where Brandis is wrong, or at least unjustifiably selective, is on what follows from this right. In his attempt to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, Brandis is using this ''right to be a bigot'' to allow people who have bigoted views to express them in speech. This is the common justification of free speech: freedom of conscience is meaningless without being able to act on it in some way.

Attorney-General George Brandis in Parliament. Credit:Andrew Meares

So far so good. The problem, and I'm certainly not the first person to say this, is that while we think conscience should be entirely free, actions that we take on behalf of our conscience are an entirely different matter. These actions affect other people, and thus their interests need also to be considered before giving carte blanche to free speech.

Of course, and here Brandis is also right, mere offence is not normally sufficient to limit one's free speech. But it is here that Brandis is on some very shaky ground and appears to have been particularly selective in reading from his well-known library of political theory. There are two types of arguments that resist Brandis' insistence that if you are a bigot you have a right to say whatever you think in the public sphere.