Harper Nielsen is a nine-year-old child attending Kenmore South state school in Queensland and the present subject of an extraordinary bullying campaign from prominent Australian adults in politics and the media.

The Year 4 student has refused to stand to sing Australia’s national anthem as instructed by her teachers, on the grounds that the anthem erases 50,000 years of Aboriginal history by claiming the nation is “young and free”.

She’s right. It does.

The song was written in 1878, within paradigms both of British jingoism and the brutal colonial fiction of “terra nullius” that claimed – handily for the British imperialist project – Australia was an empty land.

Since it officially replaced our former national anthem – God Save the Queen, for shame – in 1984, we’ve managed to gently edit away unrepresentative lines like “from England soil and Fatherland, Scotia and Erin fair, let all combine with heart and hand to advance Australia fair” and some most impolite stuff about slaughtering foreigners.

Gone, too, is the song’s once-insistent repetition that the only people who lived here were men.

But no text is divorced from its roots; the informing period of its creation meted out Australian “fairness” by stealing land from First Nations people, and – as the nine year old knows – we live in those impacts today.

Yet the small child is learning – in the most public way – that affirming your principles, stating your case, citing the facts and making a symbolic gesture of resistance incites rage and condemnation from those whose sense of status and authority depends on uninterrupted rituals of mindless obedience.

The school’s website claims its education priorities include fostering “independence, respect for others, cooperation”, but Nielsen’s empathy and solidarity with Indigenous Australians has resulted in threats of suspension and orders to submit an apology that she will not sign.

Reports of this reached Alan Jones, conservative radio stalwart, who made an “incensed” public condemnation of the child’s “defiance”, displaying the same conviction in his own moral infallibility that recently found him facing a consumer boycott for saying the n-word on radio and losing millions of dollars in a defamation case for accusing an innocent family of being “murderers”, in which he defended himself curiously unencumbered by evidence.

Jones’ guest – an ex-politician in legal proceedings of his own – joined in, accusing the nine-year-old of “behavioural problems”, wistfully yearning for the return of reform schools and insisting she should be “kicked out” of Kenmore South.

Inspired, Senator Pauline Hanson grabbed a pitchfork and joined Jones’ mob, threatening violent punishments of her own. “I’d tell you what, I’d give her a kick up the backside,” said an actual adult Australian senator about a little kid.

TV show host Karl Stefanovic disappointingly added his own voice to the chorus – the child should “go somewhere else” than a state school it is her civic birthright to attend. Reliably awful, Queensland shadow education minister, Jarrod Bleijie, somehow decided the nine year old “disrespects our country and our veterans” for desiring an Australia with an honest history, “and suspension should follow if she continues to act like a brat”.

Their incessant, yawping demands for 'free speech' and 'individual rights' fall silent the moment anyone else exercises any.

The whole episode is shocking, but it provides a crucial and timely illumination of a contemporary truth that’s critically undiscussed. And it’s not really anything to do with standing or sitting for the anthem – children whose families have religious beliefs that resist the glorification of statehood have been sitting out the anthem for years.

Yes, responding to Bleijie provokes the need for the necessary, ongoing reminder that citizens do not fight and die for flags and songs, but for embattled communities of people who stir their most profound feelings of sympathy, empathy and common humanity.

Yes, revisiting the politics of the anthem reminds us that our national identity demands an ongoing interrogation of the symbols we use to define ourselves, because where and how we hold those conversations tell us far more about who we are and what we value than the symbols do.

And yes, it is beyond gross that the right’s culture war has become so panicky and weak that adults are willing to abuse the power of their platforms to wage war on a single child.

But what it reveals in stark detail is the fawning, gnawing social envy among these rightwing people, who consistently saturate themselves in the iconography of rebellion that no part of their sad addiction to conformity and authority in any way resembles.

Alan Jones publicly claims he’s the “voice of the voiceless”. His loudmouth ex-politician friend and his commentator mates emphatically brand themselves as “outsiders”. Pauline Hanson wants to be thought of as a “maverick”. Again and again, the organised right want to denote themselves as rebels – their hero, Donald Trump, vested with the institutional stature and authority of being President of the United States, poses as a renegade. One Australian conservative commentator even tried to claim that conservatism was the “new punk rock” – with a selfie.

Yet faced with a nine year old or some football players who refuse to go along to get along – who resist the influence of the traditions and authorities around them and risk their social reputations to stand for solidarity – the self-styled “mavericks” lose their freakin’ minds. Those preening their images through “rebel media” are so privileged by the status quo that they’ll threaten the actual non-conformists with expulsion, ostracism, violence. Their incessant, yawping demands for “free speech” and “individual rights” fall silent the moment anyone else exercises any. The right aren’t rebels, they’re apologists for privilege, a quality that eternally defines them.

Real rebels, of course, face down threats, having reckoned in advance there will be a cost to their refusals. This does not make the treatment of Harper Neilsen in any way acceptable within a modern democracy. Not when our historical lessons have taught us – so keenly – that it’s not the non-conformists who are the threat to freedom, but those who sing the songs without question, and do, without thinking, what those adult bullies say.