In 2014, George Brandis announced that, with the imminent abolition of section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, “Never again in Australia will we have a situation in which a person may be taken to court for expressing a political opinion”.

Stirring words. We can only imagine the kind of freedom-loving utopia Australia would have been these past two years if he had gotten his way.

Workers at detention centres on Nauru and Manus Island would have been able to expose the barbaric conditions of those camps without fearing that they or the journalists they told their stories to would be locked up for speaking out.

Wearers of the infamous “Fuck Tony Abbott” T-shirts would not have faced harassment and fines from police.

Young Muslims would have been free to criticise Australian government foreign policy and express support for the democratic revolution in Syria without being branded terrorists.

Indigenous people would not have been locked up for making the perfectly reasonable observation that the police standing over them were “fuckers”.

Workers picketing CUB in Melbourne would have been free to call those who collaborated with the bosses’ attack on wages by taking other people’s jobs for lower pay by their proper name – scabs.

Well, not really. None of those things would have happened, because abolishing 18C would have made no difference at all to the draconian laws restricting free speech that make all of the above activities subject to legal sanction.

It’s not 18C that prevents people telling the truth about what is happening in Australia’s detention camps. It’s section 42 of the Australian Border Force Act, which makes any information disclosed by employees, contractors and those engaged by the department in the course of their work an illegal act exposing them to up to two years in prison.

It wasn’t 18C that allowed police to threaten with arrest the people who wore Fuck Tony Abbott T-shirts – it was the Victorian-era style “offensive language” laws. These same laws are routinely used by police to victimise mostly young Indigenous people if they display anything but the most abject subservience in the face of police harassment.

It’s not 18C that drags young Muslims before the courts for nothing more than talking about their hatred for a government that has been engaged in a decade-long war in the Middle East that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians. Responsibility for that lies with the vast array of “anti-terror” laws that have been introduced in Australia since 9/11, which are so extensive and arbitrary as to make the Big Brother of George Orwell’s imagination seem positively liberal.

And it is not 18C that prevents workers from calling scabs scabs. That honour goes to Julia Gillard’s “anti-bullying” legislation, which was nominally designed to protect workers from victimisation at work, but instead, grotesquely, is much more routinely used to protect bosses and their stooges from any attempt by workers to stand up for themselves.

None of this is of the slightest interest to Andrew Bolt, Cory Bernardi, David Leyonhjelm, or any of the other desperately oppressed brigade of rich white men (sue me, David) whose concern with free speech extends only to defending their right to tell the truth about how halal Vegemite is destroying Australia and to lament that slit-eyes are buying up the country.

If you ask me, there’s nothing much worth defending about 18C. If it actually had the effect of preventing hate speech, Bolt, Bernardi, Hanson and Co. wouldn’t all be national celebrities. But if we are interested in fighting for free speech in Australia – and we should be – let’s start by changing the laws that actually get in the way of that freedom.