I dunno, there is not really anything we can’t say here. “Hate Speech” is not verboten. I don’t know if you do, but if you follow same sex marriage debate here, you would see plenty of hate speech. No one is suggesting it should not be allowed, only that people ought know better, and ought not be allowed to enshrine the hate itself into law.
My own vision, as I said above, is that Australian rules of law are a cousin of ours. And so I (and by proxy Americans to the extent they think about it at all) expect that your freedom of speech is in fact, as you allude to, pretty similar to ours in practice.
Which is precisely why the current (an you say repeated) proposal comes as such a shock. Cousins grow up independent of each other of course, but one doesn’t like to see a cousin go against the most precious principles in this way, or even flirt with doing so.
So it is not that there are particular restrictions I am aware of … (time out, I just did 2 minutes searching, I take that back)
Wikipedia seems to indicate there ARE restrictions you have that are odd by US standards. See here and here (I am sure the reverse is true too, but that wasn’t the question).
And much much more, that is only a sample of what I found.
The only remotely similar thing I am aware here are bans on hard alcohol and tobacco advertising on TV since the early 70s, and that is presented as a public health issue. Advertising is permitted (and common!) elsewhere.
The rest of that is what gives me reason to doubt your claim that Australians will somehow never end up with a firewall in place, as it appears it could be pitched as an extension of restrictions on speech you (as a country) have already accepted. Perhaps it is not something new, only an extension of a fight against something the public already values, but whose shape has shifted in the internet era?
That is a slippery slope you are not only on, but sliding down in an accelerating fashion IMHO.
No, sorry maybe I was misunderstood, I didn’t mean it was, as presented, a method to squelch dissent. Control comes in more subtle forms, by framing expectations, by setting boundaries that frame future discussion. This can happen in any number of ways - it is Economical because it involves overt and covert decisions on how to allocate limited resources, both tangible and non-tangible. And it is Political because politics is inseparable from economics and vice versa.
That is pretty abstract. Less abstractly, your government is proposing to limit your speech, and hence your thought, even more than it currently does. Americans would argue that this is political at the core, because government has no right to define how we can think. This is at the core of our feelings about government and politics. It concerns us when any country suggests it can control and hence define what the citizens can think about, no matter the topic. We just don’t expect to see it from our close cousins while we combat it in places like China.