‘Freedom’ spruikers like state power — just so long as it’s used against brown people

The hypocrisy of many high-profile anti-lockdown advocates is easy to spot.

Craig Kelly — for the moment allied with Clive Palmer on an anti-lockdown platform — says “the freedoms that were once the birthright of every Australian” have been “stolen”. But Kelly’s concern about “endless authoritarian lockdowns, the emergence of a police state” is recent indeed. To this day his website boasts of the government’s expansion of surveillance laws and greater powers for the government for biosecurity and border control.

Kelly has also repeatedly attacked the Black Lives Matter movement in Australia by arguing that Indigenous prisoners die at lower rates than non-Indigenous prisoners, refusing to acknowledge they are 13 times more likely to be incarcerated in the first place.

George Christensen, another dogged advocate of freedom and supporter of anti-lockdown protests/superspreader events, attacked Black Lives Matter protests, linking them to terrorists, calling them “race-baiting” and claiming they were “a slap in the face to our Diggers”.

“This disrespect for public health and the Australian community is most certainly not welcome here,” he piously pronounced.

He also wants to ban forms of Islamic dress and opposes marriage equality.

Or there’s failed Queensland premier Campbell Newman, who has abandoned the LNP in disgust over its failure to support freedom, its support for lockdowns, and criticisms by Coalition politicians of anti-lockdown protesters. He was less concerned with freedom when as premier he introduced draconian “VLAD” laws against motorcyclists — they were later abandoned. Newman has also complained about BLM protests being allowed and the failure of Labor to oppose them.

Right-wingers being hypocrites on freedom is pretty standard fare — most of the loudest conservative voices on free speech are completely silent when the speech rights of their critics or opponents are stifled. But it provides a valuable insight into their thinking.

For Kelly, Christensen and Newman and other right-wingers, freedom clearly isn’t a fundamental aspect of civil society, otherwise they’d be consistent in supporting it whenever it was abridged, no matter who the victims were. They might even understand that once you start curbing the rights of unpopular groups or minorities it becomes easier to curb those of everyone else.

That’s an exercise in complex thinking that’s evidently beyond them, or at least presents implications they’re uncomfortable with.

Instead, they evidently regard freedom is conditional. Not conditional in accepted senses, like “no freedom to yell fire in a crowded theatre” or “no freedom to undermine the freedom of others”, but conditional on some form of status in society. For Kelly and Christensen, it seems curbing freedom is fine for Black people, Muslims or LGBTI+ people — just don’t use it against white Australians.

In Newman’s case, curbing the rule of law to target motorcycle riders in a quest to look tough on crime is perfectly consistent with more broadly supporting freedom — they don’t get freedom, but “ordinary” people should.

Underpinning this — no doubt unconsciously on the part of these men — is a clear racial basis for ideas of citizenship.

In colonial settler societies, citizenship is always racially based. Early thinking about citizenship in the United States had to deal with the problem of women, Native Americans and slaves, with democratic rights being limited to white men.

Philosophies of citizenship and democracy in the US were heavily racialised and gendered, with a strain of blood purity running through them, including the idea that US democracy owed its lineage as much to ancient Germanic legal forms (transmitted to the US via Magna Carta and 17th century Puritans, and so reliably Protestant) as to the slave-holding city-states of Rome and Athens.

The sovereign citizen movement, which migrated to Australia along with many other right-wing conspiracy theories, was founded by racists and anti-Semites in the US and draws on fantasy history lessons and bizarre legal theories that endlessly cite Magna Carta.

From this perspective, freedom must be limited to certain types of citizens who claim to be able to trace a kind of blood-borne right back to the 13th century and, for that matter, far further back through the Anglo-Saxon occupation of eastern England and into the dark forests of Thuringia before the Romans arrived.

Freedom is a status marker not merely of whiteness but a certain kind of whiteness (and maleness, though graciously extended partially to women). Indigenous Australians, Muslims, LGBTI+ people don’t get to share in the blood-borne legal magic, which is a status marker reserved for the Kellys, Christensens and Newmans of the state.