Yesterday I took the train into the city to see what wonders might be on display at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I hadn’t been there in a while, and there’s always that slim hope: a new work, something unexpected, something that stops you dead. The encounter you get in Berlin, when you enter the Gemäldegalerie and turn left and there he is—that street kid of Renaissance Rome, laughing, sprawled, with all of human achievement scattered at his feet. The Victory of Love, they call it. Robert Hughes, in The Shock of the New, said the title was a lie—that it’s really the triumph of sex over culture. Hughes, unusually, missed the point. Desire is culture’s engine. Thomas Mann knew that when he wrote in Death in Venice that it’s best the public know only the great work, and not also the source of the artist’s inspiration. How many know that Wagner wore silk underwear while composing? Keep that in mind next time the Valkyries come thundering in.

The train chuffed its way toward Central, passing through Newtown. Once a working-class suburb, it became affordable when the factories closed, then attractive to artists, then trendy, then expensive. The barefoot artists were pushed out by the well-heeled admirers of their way of life. The pattern has repeated across the West, and it’s often blamed for a collapse in cultural output. There’s more to it than that. I’ve written before about censorship, which has reached levels that genuinely threaten creativity with extinction.

Australia has always had a fondness for the censor’s blue pencil. Not so long ago, Lady Chatterley’s Lover was banned, as was Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin’s “Je t’aime… moi non plus.” A bit of heavy breathing and a line like je vais et je viens entre tes reins—I go, and I come between your kidneys—was apparently civilisation-ending. Sodomy! Add religion and conservatism to the mix, and you get local film oddities like Mad Max 2, which is basically the Book of Exodus in leather. The feral kid is King David. The villains, dressed for a BDSM picnic? Read the script: the “gay boy berserkers.” As evil as it gets, apparently.

Art, if it’s anything at all, is an expression of the time and place of its making. Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki once wore a T-shirt that read: Art is a Crime. It should be allowed to be. The artist peers beyond accepted norms and asks, What if? Society answers back. Over centuries, that exchange becomes narrative—far more revealing than a tidy history of dates and names. Walt Whitman’s “O Tan-Faced Prairie Boy” rattled 19th-century morality precisely because it refused to stay in its assigned box.

Kerry James Marshall understands this perfectly. He’s argued against quarantining so-called “Black art” in separate spaces, insisting instead that it belongs within the main narrative of Western art, which, in its modern form, begins with the Renaissance. He’s right. The story of Black Americans is inseparable from the story of American civilisation, itself an offshoot of Europe. One of his paintings from the Lost Boys series stays with me: a Black youth wearing a plastic shower cap. A small, defiant gesture. Dare to comment. Dare to laugh. This isn’t the ghetto victim pleading for sympathy. It’s a young man asserting his right to full human equality—a right long denied. At least, that’s how I read it.

After a coffee, a bacon and egg roll, and a long walk, I finally reached the gallery, mildly euphoric for the undignified reason that I needed the men’s room. The art itself? As dull as ever. Maybe I’m searching for something that’s vanished. The counter-culture revolution ended when those now calling themselves progressives took over art and academia and began drawing lines that must not be crossed. The result is stagnation. And young people telling me, with genuine sadness, how much they wish they’d lived “in my time.”

There are calls here in Australia to expand hate-speech legislation to include the phrase “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, which risks collapsing an already fragile distinction between speech that incites harm and speech that contests history. However, confronting the slogan may be to some, it is not, in itself, hate speech. It is a political claim about sovereignty — one rooted in a particular reading of history — and democracies should be extremely cautious about criminalising such claims.

Australian hate-speech law is rightly concerned with language that targets people for who they are and incites hostility, discrimination, or violence against them. The phrase “Palestine will be free” does none of these things on its face reading. It names no ethnic or religious group, calls for no violence, and prescribes no method by which freedom is to be achieved. What it asserts is that the population of Palestine ought to exercise sovereignty over the land in which they live. One may dispute that claim; one may find it politically naïve, historically selective, or strategically reckless. But disagreement does not convert political speech into hate speech.

Much of the argument for banning the phrase rests on inferred intent rather than expressed meaning. It is said that some people use it to imply the elimination of Israel or the expulsion of Jews. That may be true in particular contexts, but intent is not transferable by slogan. Australian law has never operated on the principle that ambiguous or contested language becomes criminal because it can be read in the worst possible way. If it did, a great deal of protest language — including speech challenging Australian sovereignty itself — would be vulnerable to prohibition.

There is also an ethical dimension that should not be ignored. Palestinian political expression has long been treated as uniquely suspect, as though asserting self-determination is acceptable for some peoples but inherently threatening when articulated by others. That asymmetry has historical roots. From the Sykes–Picot Agreement through the Mandate period and the UN partition plan, decisions about Palestine were routinely made without the consent of its Arab majority. To now criminalise the language through which Palestinians and their supporters articulate a claim to freedom risks repeating that pattern: managing the people while foreclosing their voice.

Importantly, to permit the phrase is not to endorse it. Democracies do not function by protecting only speech that aligns with official policy or settled outcomes. We allow — and rightly so — robust critique of Australia’s own history, sovereignty, and borders. We allow assertions that the existing order rests on injustice. To deny that same discursive space to Palestinians is not neutrality; it is a choice to elevate one historical settlement beyond challenge.

Hate-speech law should remain focused on preventing real harm: incitement to violence, dehumanisation, and threats to public safety. Expanding it to police historical interpretations and sovereignty claims would set a dangerous precedent. Political conflicts are not resolved by banning words. They are resolved — if at all — by allowing competing narratives to be heard, tested, and argued in the open.

Uncomfortable speech is the price of a plural democracy. The alternative is something far more corrosive.

This morning, I received a phone call from Arts Law Australia. I’d contacted them, thinking it might be sensible to have an expert eye cast over my current writing project, given the subject matter. That subject being underage male rent boys in Piccadilly Circus in the early 1970s.

Australian “child abuse material” legislation is draconian by design. It is drafted to leave not a single loophole. So, underage male sex workers? Ouch. That’s the sort of territory where the far right and far left, the religious, the LGBT, and sections of feminism could all, for their own reasons, briefly lock arms and call for your execution.

Honestly, you do begin to wonder why you bother.

The book is in two parts. The first is the story itself — already filtered, pared back, and edited down from what could have been a full-length novel into a 17,000-word novelette. Something an average reader could get through in a few hours. All the most dangerous material, all the sections that point fingers at particular subcultures, removed. No one named. Any detail that could possibly lead to identification altered or excised.

The second part is neurological: current research on trauma, grooming, and long-term effects. Material that could actually be useful — especially for survivors, parents, educators, and mental health workers. I expect nothing from this project other than the satisfaction that it might help a small number of people who genuinely need the information.

And yet.

I think of a 17-year-old gay boy who left his home in a wealthy Sydney suburb, went to the city, and two weeks later jumped from the roof of a hotel. I think of 14-year-old Jason Swift — I can name him because there was extensive media coverage — raped and murdered by six men and dumped in a field outside London. I think of similar cases here in Australia: a 16-year-old homeless boy drawn into prostitution, later found dead beside a Sydney canal.

An American journalist once showed video footage of an interview he conducted with a 17-year-old rent boy in Houston. The boy described accepting a drink from a client, blacking out, and waking up suspended in handcuffs while the man waited with a whip. A week after that interview, the journalist said, the boy’s mutilated body was found dumped in a park.

I could go on. But it’s already clear that anyone who dares to look seriously at the victimisation of males — especially underage males — runs into a brick wall.

My impression from the call this morning was that assistance was being refused, politely, with plausible deniability carefully preserved. I’ve been here before. Others researching the Piccadilly Circus scene of the 1970s have told me the same thing: Freedom of Information requests denied, files sealed, silence maintained.

We know there was a cover-up. A well-known London pimp was under investigation. He threatened to release his client list to the media and was shot outside his front door. Le Monde later reported on a young man who effectively triggered a #MeTooGay moment in France; two weeks later he was found hanged in his student dormitory. The investigation was “inconclusive”. Whether murdered or pressured into suicide, the result was the same.

So what does one do with a book like this?

I told the person this morning they could close the case. There are other jurisdictions. In many of them I could reverse a lot of the editing and spell things out in plain English — for boys naïve enough to chase quick money and thrills, for parents, for educators, and for social and mental health workers who don’t feel the need to normalise what is, quite plainly, abuse.

And then there’s today’s other news.

The Bondi shooting was a tragedy clearly designed to drive a wedge between communities. And yet it failed. It failed because a 43-year-old Muslim father of two, Ahmed al-Ahmed, intervened and saved lives. Jewish lives. His courage blew a hole clean through the hate project.

Sometimes, against all expectations, decency still turns up and refuses the script.

I suppose that’s the uncomfortable position this book now occupies as well.

Francis Eustache suggests modern societies are sliding toward collectivities of victims engaged in permanent recovery. That slide now feels less like an accident and more like a destination. The catalogue of victims expands relentlessly, while the pool of perpetrators shrinks to a handful of increasingly abstract villains. At this rate, soon no one will be left who isn’t injured by something, except a small, conveniently demonised demographic blamed for everything.

This worldview requires faith. Specifically, faith in a perfect society—one that would exist already were it not for a few defective humans clogging the pipes. Remove them, silence them, shame them, re-educate them, and harmony will emerge. This belief is not new. It has uniforms in old photographs.

A university lecturer once asked what the far right, the far left, and the ultra-religious share. They all possess a final answer. Not a proposal, not a theory—a solution. An operating system to which everyone must submit. Disagreement isn’t error; it’s heresy. And heresy has always required punishment: cancellation, camps, gulags, hellfire. The methods differ. The impulse does not.

This is the fantasy of total sameness. Ideological photocopying. A society so purified of dissent that it resembles an aquarium—beautiful, silent, dead. Only goldfish permitted.

We are told diversity is sacred, yet only in forms that don’t threaten power. Skin colour is acceptable. Food preferences are charming. Pronouns are manageable. But diversity of thought? Intolerable. That’s dangerous. That’s “harm.”

The ruling moral class insists people are fundamentally good, except for those who aren’t—and they, conveniently, are the ones who disagree. The guardians of virtue imagine themselves standing between good and evil, enforcing morality through obedience. The obedient wait for the red man to turn green at 2 a.m. on an empty street and call it integrity. It isn’t. It’s conditioning. Morality without risk is not morality; it’s fear rehearsed until it feels noble.

I trust people who can be a little bad. So does everyone who’s honest. They feel human. Zealots don’t. Zealots are intolerable. They don’t drink, don’t doubt, don’t laugh properly—and they drive normal people toward excess just to escape the suffocation.

Alex in A Clockwork Orange is not interesting because he’s violent; he’s boring because he’s absolute. Tintin is the same in reverse—pure, spotless, never conflicted. Neither is human. One is all shadow, the other all light, and both are propaganda. Only when you corrupt them—drunk Tintin, sexualised Tintin, compromised Tintin—does something real appear. A pulse. A flaw. A self.

Jung called this the shadow. The part of us capable of cruelty, domination, obedience. The part required to run camps, point fingers, follow orders. People who insist they lack this part are either lying or dangerous. Given the opportunity, most would adapt quickly. The initial revulsion fades. Authority feels good. Power always does.

There are no good people and bad people. That division is childish. There are only people, and systems that reward or punish particular traits. Every system built to impose “the good” eventually mutates into something grotesque. This is not speculation. It is history’s most reliable pattern.

Which is why I prefer disorder to purity. Too many parties. Too much speech. Arguments that never resolve. The solution to bad speech is more speech, not enforced silence. I’ve found that listening dismantles extremist ideas more effectively than shouting ever could. The far left, however, is uniquely resistant to this—not because it’s always wrong, but because it believes itself infallible.

That’s the moment politics turns into religion.

A perfect society would eliminate dissent, ambiguity, contradiction, and shadow. It would also eliminate humanity. If such a society were ever built, it would not be gentle. And it would not last. Someone would smash the glass.

They always do.

Here’s an interesting report, a sort of planetary health check.

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/75/12/1016/8303627

For those who can’t be bothered reading the report, below is a screen grab of the key findings.

I noticed the mention that ‘hothouse Earth’ may be more likely.’  Fourth point from the bottom. That means runaway planetary heating; think of Venus as what can happen when processes get out of control. Its average surface temperature is 464 degrees Celsius, and this is not because it is closer to the Sun, as Professor Carl Sagan noted in his address to the U.S. Congress in 1985. Few were willing to mention that possibility; therefore, its appearance in a report is significant. 

The report concludes with suggested solutions, as always, which are always ignored, as politics and wealth demand. One glimmer of hope is what’s called social tipping points, that is, when people en masse wake up and demand action. Unstoppable social movements can appear, the report suggests. Lived experience is that the ‘average citizen’ may well be concerned about climate, but getting down in the street? If they do, the movement will be declared a terrorist organisation, laws will be passed, and the executive will be given more power.  Makes you wonder if any of them have children? To be fair, at a climate demo years ago, a young coppa discreetly gave me a thumbs up. He most likely had children and was concerned about their future. 

This morning, I didn’t feel much like going to yet another Palestine demo. Track work between here and the city—good enough excuse. Then that quiet voice: kids are dying, and you can’t be bothered? Excuse number two: I need to work on my next masterpiece. Right. Get off the arse, head for the station.

I arrived early. The usual crowd—the young lefties, the Middle Eastern families, the boomers making up for having missed the Vietnam demos back when they were too square for the street. Or maybe the rebel with a conscience doesn’t die; it just waits for another generation of children being bombed.

Drifting around, killing time before the speeches, I went looking for conversation the way some people look for food. A young Marxist, maybe, itching to spread the gospel of dialectics. Or someone who’d try to convert me to Islam. I’ve lost count of how many undergrad radicals I’ve spooked by bringing up Gramsci’s prison notebooks and Althusser’s autopsy of why the workers of the world never rose on schedule. Planet heating like a runaway boiler—how much time do they imagine they have for a global revolution anyway?

The Muslims were easier. All I had to do was walk past their stall, and one came running, pamphlet outstretched. Bingo. First debate in months.

My strategy is simple. Agree in principle, then raise the bar—slowly—until we cross over into the Zen zone, that space where belief scrapes up against the limits of language. He panicked at that edge and tried dragging me back to the dictionary, back to the safe ground where “God said” settles everything. Bible Belt certainty in a different script.

So I threw the hand grenade.

Whether someone “believes” in God matters about as much as whether fish believe in water. If God is, there’s no escape, and He doesn’t give a rat’s arse whether your forehead hits carpet or the Wailing Wall. Religion is the finger pointing at the moon; once you see the moon, you can drop the finger.

I told him my God is Spinoza’s—impossible to escape because existence itself is the proof. I told him how, as a kid on the street, I was rescued. A miracle. He asked how a boy survives that life. I said when you’re a good-looking kid, you do what you must, and criminals have ways of persuading you not to resist. A broken finger is a first warning. I told him Christ was like an older brother standing beside you at the Meat Rack—not floating above the clouds. Maybe He decided I’d had enough. Maybe the lesson was learned. I didn’t understand any of it until I stumbled into Zen forty years later.

Time to pull up the handbrake. We shook hands.

The demo itself was good. Two years of this and you start recognising faces. There’s a small solidarity in that—just a nod, a smile. A reminder that some people still show up.

But the best part of the day wasn’t the speeches or the march. It was later, waiting for the connecting train home. I grabbed a coffee and sat outside the station. Two little kids walked up—never seen me before in their lives—and handed an old stranger two Christmas cards they’d made themselves.

God speaks.