Gay bashing was wrong. Straight bashing is also wrong.
For decades the state followed grown people into their bedrooms. That was wrong. Whatever two consenting adults do in private is none of the state’s business.
By the 1990s, Australia had more or less arrived at a simple deal. Live and let live. Mind your own business. Respect the bloke next door, even if his life doesn’t look like yours.
It didn’t last.
The Pendulum Didn’t Stop
The attack on one side stopped. Good. But the moment it stopped, a counter-attack started. It’s still going.
First gay marriage. Then adoption. Then surrogacy. Then pronouns. Now we have grown Aussies being dragged before tribunals for declining to call a bearded man in a skirt a lady.
The pendulum went past the middle. Past respect. All the way into compulsion.
To understand why that’s wrong — and why it’s illegal in the only sense that matters — you have to know one Frenchman.
What Bastiat Figured Out in 1850
Frédéric Bastiat wrote a short book called The Law. It sits on every honest libertarian’s shelf. It should sit on every Australian’s shelf.
Bastiat said the law is the collective power of individuals to protect themselves. Nothing more.
One person has the right to stop someone from attacking them. To defend themselves. To stop someone from nicking their car.
That’s the whole list.
When people club together and call their combined defence “the law,” the law still only has those same powers. It can’t do anything you can’t do. It can’t go around attacking people who haven’t attacked anyone. It can’t go around taking property from people who haven’t stolen anything.
The moment the law tries to do more than that, it stops being law. It becomes a weapon.
Keep that in your head. It unlocks three arguments that otherwise seem confusing.
The Baker and the Cake
A baker in the US refused to design a wedding cake for a same-sex wedding.
He didn’t refuse to sell them bread. He didn’t refuse to serve them coffee. He sold them regular cakes any day of the week. What he wouldn’t do was put his craft, his time, and his hands into designing a celebratory cake for an event he didn’t believe in.
The couple took him to court.
Think about what they were actually demanding.
They weren’t saying “don’t hit us.” They were saying “make us something we want, or we’ll send men with guns to take your money.”
Because that’s what the law is, at the end of the day. A court order, backed by police, backed by a prison cell if you don’t comply. Violence, held in reserve.
So the real choice was: either the baker does what he doesn’t want to do, or he’s attacked by the state.
Under Bastiat’s test, who’s the aggressor?
Not the baker. He wasn’t attacking anyone. He wasn’t stopping them from buying a cake from the next shop. He was just declining a job. The couple were the aggressors. They wanted to use the collective force of the state to make a man do something he didn’t want to do.
You can’t make someone paint you a picture. You can’t make a pacifist artist paint a battle scene. You can’t make a baker bake a cake. The moment the state says you can, the state has become the weapon it was invented to defend against.
The Pronoun Question
Same principle. Different stage.
Nobody has the right to force anyone else to say something they believe is a lie.
You might call someone “she” out of politeness. Plenty of Aussies do. A man in a dress walks into a café, most Aussies will call him “ma’am” and move on with their day. That’s manners, not submission.
But if a bloke with a beard and a chest like a wardrobe insists you agree he’s a woman, and you won’t, that’s not an attack on him. That’s you telling the truth. He’s free to walk away. He’s free to never talk to you again. Free association works both ways.
What he’s not free to do is get the state to punish you for the words you didn’t say.
That’s compelled speech. That’s the law gone perverted, exactly the way Bastiat warned.
And notice who’s driving it. Not children. Not ordinary families. The managerial class. The HR departments. The academics. The policy crowd. The same crew who three years ago were banning anyone from saying the jab had side effects.
When the Third Party Changes Everything: Surrogacy
Now a harder one. Because this time, there is a victim — and it isn’t who the papers pretend.
Surrogacy is a wealthy adult paying a poor woman to carry a child, and then taking the child away from her.
The UN’s Special Rapporteur on the sale of children says most commercial surrogacy, as it’s practised today, amounts to the sale of children under international human rights law.
That’s not a conservative talking point. That’s the United Nations.
Under Bastiat’s test, the third party being harmed is the child. The child was nine months inside one woman, then handed to strangers. The child has been bought and sold.
Doesn’t matter how nice the buyers are. Doesn’t matter if the money changed hands politely. Doesn’t matter what the contract says.
Here’s the giveaway test for whether something is actually a good arrangement or a crime dressed up with paperwork: ask the people who champion it whether they’d encourage their own eighteen-year-old daughter to do it. Take two years off uni. Be a surrogate.
They won’t. They know what it is.
So they fly to poor countries and call it a “free commercial arrangement.” Economic pressure pushing poor women into something nobody’s rich daughter would ever do.
If you paint a bullet pink and draw a flower on it, the man you shot is still dead. If you pay for a kidnapping and call it a surrogacy agreement, the child is still taken.
Every child has the right to a mother and a father. Every child has the right to know where they came from. Adoption — the honest, open kind — can still serve a child when a young mum can’t raise them and a loving home steps in. That’s a rescue. Surrogacy is the opposite: inventing the situation on purpose, for the adults.
And now we’ve got Californian throuples — three blokes — sharing a baby and fighting for all three names on the birth certificate. No-one asked the kid. Because the kid isn’t the point. The adults are the point. That’s the whole problem.
The Rule, on a Beer Coaster
A right is the right to live your life without being attacked, robbed, or forced.
It is not the right to make someone else do what you want.
You can’t force a baker to bake. You can’t force a neighbour to say what you want said. You can’t force a poor woman to sell you her baby.
Everyone has exactly the same rights. No special group. No protected class. No magic words that flip the rule upside down.
That’s Bastiat. That’s common sense. That’s the line between a free country and a pushy one.
Where Australia Is Right Now
We’re past the middle. We’re into the bit where ordinary Aussies get reported to HR for saying what the bloke at Bunnings would say. Where kids in some Victorian schools can start “transitioning” without their parents knowing. Where surrogacy is legal in every state if you pretend no money changed hands.
And now, while the compulsion is in full swing, the same crowd wants to ban kids under 16 from social media. Built around government ID. Tied to your identity.
Why now? Because the same crowd had no problem with kids on social media when the apps were pumping out woke content. Suddenly the apps loosened the censorship, and kids started sharing memes that made the whole charade look ridiculous. The government’s own Step Together website now warns about young people “being groomed in ideology” online — meaning they’re reading things that disagree with the official line.
It was never about protecting the kids. It was about protecting the official line.
Call it what it is. It’s a country where the law has been turned the wrong way round — not to protect you from attack, but to attack you if you don’t go along.
The fix doesn’t need a revolution. It just needs enough Aussies to remember what the law was for in the first place.
This post is part of the Freedom & Power thread on Common Sense Australia — where we run every new law through the Bastiat test: is the state protecting, or forcing?
Leave a Reply