Harry Richardson, President of the British Australian Community, speaking at the Sydney Free Speech Rally on 30 August 2026:

First, an acknowledgement. The BAC would like to acknowledge the Anglo explorers, the pioneers and their descendants who planted the British flag and Christian faith on this continent, creating the Australian nation. We acknowledge the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have lived here since the Dreamtime.

And we acknowledge the Federal Commonwealth of Australia, created by the nation, under the Crown, to guard the nation and the liberty of all citizens. Today, in 2026, there are few countries that have free speech. The ones that do are mostly European or European-derived.

Yet in England, Sir Edward Coke insisted that freedom of speech was an ancient custom of Parliament. That was in the 1590s, more than 400 years ago. I grew up in England in the 60s and 70s and played out in the street every night.

And once in a while, some kid would come running into his mum and say, Mum, Johnny called me an idiot. And the answer every kid got from his mum was the same. Go and tell Johnny, sticks and stones can break my bones, but names will never hurt me.

In other words, grow up and take it on the chin. Hurty words won’t damage you. People have a right to insult you. Deal with it.

This was the ancient culture of free speech that we were marinated in as we grew up. But whilst in the atmosphere and parts of Western Europe, free speech was a foundational part of our culture, in the rest of the world, it mostly wasn’t.

Saying the wrong things could have you punished or even killed. Our leaders used to tell us that we were an anomaly, because we were a European country in Asia. Now they tell us that we’re not a European country at all and never were.

They say that the only defining feature of Australians is their values. They say that anyone could come here and adopt our values and instantly be as Australian as anyone else. But in order to bring in people from such diverse backgrounds, one of the first things they had to do was to shut down our free speech, which is one of our most precious values.

In 1975, just three years after Whitlam decided to abolish discriminatory immigration, our elites introduced the Racial Discrimination Act, which began the process of cramping down on free speech in order to facilitate a diverse society.

But that wasn’t enough, of course, so later they added the hated 18C. Then when Tony Abbott promised to repeal 18C, a coalition of diverse minorities got together and made damn sure that he would do no such thing, even though it was a foundational value of the Anglo-Celts who settled and built this nation.

Now even that isn’t enough, so they bring in the anti-Semitism and hate speech laws, which are even worse. And this isn’t the end of it. You mark my words.

The destruction of free speech has been intertwined with the project to force multiculturalism onto Australia. If you don’t believe me, Chris Minns, the New South Wales Premier, spelled it out for you. He said, and I quote,

“We don’t have the same freedom of speech laws that they have in the United States, and the reason for that is that we want to hold together a multicultural community.”

So there you have it. We can’t have free speech anymore because now we’re multicultural. We all need to understand that.

When we choose migrants, most of us want people with the same value systems as we have. But how do we make sure that people share our values before we give them a passport to one of the richest countries in the world?

Well, our founders wrestled with this idea and came up with a simple solution. It wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was the best they could manage. They decided to restrict entry mostly to people from the British Isles and to a lesser extent Western and Northern Europe. Some people called this the White Australia Policy.

Why did they think that people from Britain would share their values and loyalties? Well, probably because our founders were of British descent, and they were very explicit about that.

Henry Parkes, the father of Federation, talked about the crimson thread of kinship. His views were hugely popular. So they ran this policy for the first 70 years or more after Federation, and not surprisingly, most of the migrants shared the same values as other Australians.

They believed in freedom of speech, the rule of law, Christian morality, and the Protestant work ethic, and so on. During this time, the policy was wildly popular with the citizens of the nation, and the nation flourished. Australia had a high standard of living, low levels of crime and corruption, and all the benefits of a high-trust society.

Importantly, we had a deep cultural affinity for free speech, which we understood was the bedrock of the kind of free and stable society to which we were accustomed to. But our elites decided to introduce non-discriminatory immigration, which benefited minorities. They told us that this wouldn’t matter, because the new migrants would have our values.

But when people found that many new migrants had different values, the government crushed dissent by clamping down on free speech. The problem is that once the government gets the right to ban speech they don’t like, it never stops, because they love to ban criticism of their own policies. And the policy that most people wanted to criticise was mass indiscriminate immigration.

So multiculturalism and immigration have been protected by constantly undermining our ancient free speech rights and values. In Britain today, thousands of people are arrested every year for expressing opinions, and most of those opinions are in opposition to mass indiscriminate immigration. Free speech is effectively dead in that country, and Australia is catching up fast.

You can’t import people en masse from countries with different value systems, and expect them all to adopt our loyalties and value systems the moment they arrive here. It isn’t easy to defend free speech, even amongst educated Westerners. How can we expect people who’ve grown up in cultures which hate free speech to suddenly embrace it? It was never going to work.

Just ask Salman Rushdie. Under our current immigration system, only about 3-5% of migrants come from the British Isles, and 90-95% of our new migrants come from outside Europe. These new people come from countries with different values, and for the most part, free speech is not one of them.

Values exist in the minds of people, not in the magic soil or floating in the air. Different people have different values. If we allow the government to turn us into a hated minority in this land, then don’t expect our values to hang around.

So this is the game. They want to shut down your free speech so that they can bring in more people who don’t believe in free speech. We have to fight these laws and preserve our free speech, or as George Washington said, it may be taken away, and dumb and silent we may be led like sheep to the slaughter.

WATCH:

Birmingham City Council, Britain’s largest local authority, has gone to the High Court to stop residents putting the Union Jack and the St George Cross on lamp posts without its say-so.

If a judge grants the injunction, breaching it could mean up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine. Yeah, you can be imprisoned for the unauthorised raising of your own nation’s flag.

The application, which was filed on August 26, names eight people directly, including Ryan Bridge, who co-founded the grassroots Operation Raise the Colours campaign that’s put English and British flags on street furniture across the country over the past year, plus a catch-all “persons unknown” clause that leaves the net open to anyone who does the same thing.

The council insists this isn’t really about the flag. Green councillor Jane Baston, Birmingham’s cabinet member for equalities and communities, called it a lawful, proportionate, and evidence-led approach to unauthorised attachments on the highway. She cited public safety and staff welfare as the actual concerns.

Birmingham isn’t the first. Oxfordshire County Council won a similar High Court order back in April, the first council to do so.

But nobody’s buying the “neutral policy” framing. Multiple outlets have noted that this enforcement push applies to English and British flags specifically, while flags from other countries flown elsewhere in the city haven’t drawn the same court action.

And yet, if the English and British flags are problematic, what do foreign flags flown in Britain communicate? Nobody plants a flag as mere decoration. It’s a claim of belonging: this is ours, we’re here, we stand under this, this represents who we are.

Take a flag down and put nothing up in its place, and you’ve made a slightly different, quieter claim that whatever it stood for doesn’t get to be visible here anymore. At the very least, the land no longer exclusively belongs to those that the flag represents.

That’s true whether it’s a war memorial, a town centre, a local council, or a lamppost.

The St George’s Cross has flown over England for the better part of a thousand years. A red cross on white, adopted from the banner of England’s patron saint and tied to the Crusades before it ever became a national symbol.

The Union Jack layers three Christian crosses on top of one another: St George’s cross for England, the blue-and-white saltire of St Andrew for Scotland, and the red saltire of St Patrick for Ireland.

It’s not an abstract or arbitrary pattern. It’s the patron saints of the home kingdoms stitched into a single piece of cloth. It’s a literal union forged from shared ancestry, homelands, and Christian inheritance.

Of course, none of that is what Birmingham’s injunction talks about. They use the rhetoric of “unauthorised attachments” and “community cohesion.” But it is curious how all of these multicultural efforts result in the same thing: no native Britons, no English imagery, and no Christian symbolism.

But let’s suppose, for a moment, that Birmingham’s neutral framing here is entirely accurate, and that the council is genuinely concerned about “unauthorised attachments” undermining social cohesion and fracturing the community.

If that’s the case, then we should be asking another obvious question: What does it say about the state of those communities if displaying the national symbols of the country is supposedly enough to threaten social cohesion?

If newcomers and immigrant communities regard St George’s Cross and the Union Jack as so provocative and offensive that their mere presence on a lamppost is deemed a threat to community cohesion, what does that suggest about their relationship and commitment to the nation those symbols represent?

In that case, the problem isn’t the flag or what it represents. The problem is a failure to integrate people into a shared national identity. The problem is the importation of attitudes that are so hostile to that identity that even its most basic symbolism has become something to be suppressed rather than celebrated.