It has been a dismal year for the commanders and foot soldiers in Australia’s war against so-called hate speech. In several recent ground operations, the massed forces of contemporary censorship and conformism have been repulsed by the exertions of popular resistance movements.

The censors’ equivalent of the Big Bertha howitzer – active promotion and enforcement of section 18c of the Commonwealth Racial Discrimination Act – has been misfiring and lobbing ordnance behind the censors’ own lines.

At the state level, an attempt to haul the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart into the local anti-discrimination apparatus to explain himself for having dared to communicate with his flock regarding Catholic teaching on same-sex marriage was abandoned, but not before the kindly prelate was subjected to several months of hate-drenched condemnation.