The Free Speech Myth. What We Owe Our Kids About Truth and Law in Australia.

The words free speech carry a seductive power. They’re waved in protest signs, muttered in pub arguments, thrown into comment threads on social media like grenades. In Australia, they’re often claimed as if they exist in the same way they do in the United States. But that belief is not just sloppy. It’s dangerous. Because in this country, there is no absolute right to free speech. And if we keep teaching children that there is, we set them up for a collision with reality that will hurt far more than a bruised ego.

Australia does not enshrine free speech in its Constitution. But thanks to "education by social media" many young Australia's assume that we have "the right to free speech" What we have instead is a fragile, court-constructed principle called the “implied freedom of political communication.” It is not a personal right. It exists only to preserve the machinery of representative democracy. It is narrow, technical, and subject to limits. Hate speech laws can still catch you. Defamation can still bankrupt you. An employer’s code of conduct can still silence you. If you tell kids that they can say whatever they want because they live in a free country, you are not telling them the truth.

This matters because children are growing up inside an environment where their voices travel further and faster than any generation before them. A twelve-year-old on TikTok is not just talking to classmates, they are broadcasting into a networked arena where words can be screenshotted, litigated, and weaponised. A joke in a private group chat can end up in a disciplinary report. A comment on Instagram can be grounds for expulsion or worse. If we don’t give kids the truth about speech in Australia, we are failing them at the very point where they are most vulnerable.

When the High Court carved out the implied freedom in 1992’s Australian Capital Television Pty Ltd v Commonwealth, it wasn’t crafting a blanket protection for citizens. It was safeguarding the right of voters to hear political communication necessary for democratic choice. That’s it. Everything else remains subject to law and regulation. In practice, this means a sixteen-year-old speaking about government policy on climate action might enjoy some thin protection. The same teenager making a cruel post about a classmate? No shield. The law draws those lines with force, and the internet makes them visible in ways that feel both arbitrary and unforgiving.

This is why teaching kids the Americanised fantasy of free speech is not ok and unfortunately a lot of our young people are self-educating on social media and therefore devouring US laws that have no relevance at all to their daily life. It denies them the skills to navigate the actual legal terrain they live in. They need to understand that expression in Australia is always balanced against harm, reputation, safety, and social order. They need to know that context matters, that words have consequences, and that those consequences are not just social but legal. This isn’t censorship. It’s the structure of the society they are inheriting.

States like Victoria, Queensland, and the ACT have their own Human Rights Acts, which do nod to a right of expression. But even these provisions are carefully hemmed in. They apply only within those jurisdictions. They only bind public authorities. They are always subject to “reasonable limits.” Teaching children about these frameworks isn’t about burdening them with complexity. It’s about preparing them to move through the world without being blindsided by it.

Think of the harm in the opposite approach. A teenager who believes they can say whatever they want online discovers too late that their comments are defamatory. A young worker who rants about their boss on Facebook finds themselves unemployed, confused that “free speech” didn’t save them. A university student who shares a meme that crosses into racial vilification ends up in court, wondering why their right to “just have an opinion” was not protected. These are not hypotheticals. They are the lived consequences of a cultural myth.

If we want to raise resilient, thoughtful citizens, we must replace the fantasy of free speech with the reality of responsible speech. That starts in classrooms, where civics education must move beyond the rote recitation of parliamentary structures and into the messy, lived terrain of rights and limits online and off. It must continue in households, where parents need to resist the shortcut of telling kids they can “say anything.” And it must shape our digital literacy programs, which cannot be credible if they fail to confront the legal frameworks that govern the platforms our children use daily.

The hard truth is this: Australian free speech is not about the individual’s right to self-expression. It is about the community’s right to preserve a functioning democracy. That is both narrower and more profound. It means your child’s voice matters when it speaks to the accountability of those in power, but it also means their words are always weighed against the rights and safety of others.

If we want our children to thrive in this society, we must tell them the truth. That free speech, as America influencers that they follow online understand it, does not exist here. That what exists is narrower, conditional, and embedded in the responsibility to uphold democratic accountability. That their voice is powerful but never limitless. And that the sooner they learn this, the more safely and meaningfully they can use it.