Qualified Speech.

Queensland has banned two phrases. It has not, however, banned the phrases. It has banned you from saying them.

This is an important distinction, and the law is careful about it. Journalists may handle the phrases. Academics may examine them. Artists may deploy them, provided the deployment is sufficiently artistic. Lawyers may repeat them at length in courtrooms dedicated to establishing whether anyone else was allowed to say them.

The phrases themselves are fine. It is the speaker that requires inspection.

The legislation is called the Fighting Antisemitism and Keeping Guns out of the Hands of Terrorists and Criminals Amendment Bill 2026, which is less a title than a declaration of intent not to be argued with. Parliamentary counsel presumably typed it with the expression of someone asked to ice a cake with a pneumatic drill. As a rule of thumb, bills named like campaign slogans tend to contain something the government would prefer you not read carefully. This one passed Queensland's parliament in March, which has no upper house and therefore no institutional obligation to slow down.

Speed and a good title - a strong combination.

The practical mechanism is this: a minister may recommend that certain expressions be banned by regulation if satisfied they represent an ideology of extreme prejudice and are regularly used to incite harm. The test is not what the speaker meant. It is what a relevant group might reasonably understand the phrase to mean. Meaning, in other words, is outsourced to the audience.

This is not entirely new as a legal concept, but applying it to specific slogans in a democracy is a reasonably ambitious move. Language in political contexts has never been especially stable. The same words have meant different things to different people at different moments for as long as people have had words. That is a large portfolio for a regulation.

There is also the question of symbols, which the bill expands. Queensland already had a sensible system: banned symbols were drawn, depicted, and published so that anyone wishing to remain law-abiding could look them up. The new provisions abandon this courtesy for symbols associated with prescribed terrorist organisations. Those symbols are now automatically banned without being specified anywhere.

The ordinary Queenslander is expected to know which symbols identify which terrorist organisations without being told what they are, which creates the theoretical possibility, raised, with admirable composure, by at least one constitutional scholar, that if a prescribed organisation were to adopt, say, a watermelon as its identifier, the watermelon would become a prohibited symbol.

Queensland has not yet banned fruit. It has simply created the administrative conditions under which fruit may one day require a legal opinion. This is the kind of sentence that should not be possible to write about a functioning democracy. And yet.

The self-censorship has already started, which is worth noting because it suggests the law is working before it has been tested. One legal commentator, discussing the legislation publicly, chose not to repeat the banned phrases. Not because doing so would clearly be illegal, the educational exemption would likely apply, but because it might not be worth the administrative inconvenience of finding out. Cleaner to describe them. Much safer to go around.

This article has referred to them as "the phrases" throughout, for similar reasons, although the author is aware of the irony of a piece about banned speech that declines to say the banned things. It is not a comfortable position. But it is, apparently, the correct one.

When the High Court eventually looks at this, and it will, as groups arrested in April have already pledged a constitutional challenge, the judges will not be settling the underlying conflict. They will be asking whether a state legislature can criminalise the public use of language, and whether it has done so with sufficient precision and necessity to survive the implied freedom of political communication.

Australia does not have a broad free speech guarantee. It has something narrower and, in some ways, more interesting: a constitutional limit on how far governments can burden political communication. That limit has undone tidily-assembled legislation before. The High Court has noted, with characteristic restraint, that you cannot draft your way out of constitutional invalidity.

Someone tried, though. The structure, a statute of general application with specific bans delivered by ministerial regulation, is, by at least one expert assessment, as clever as one could make it. The regulations face a lower constitutional bar than the statute. The specific phrases are kept out of the primary legislation. It is well-constructed. Whether well-constructed is enough remains to be seen.

There is a simpler way to look at it. A professor can write about the phrases. A journalist can quote them. A barrister can say them repeatedly in open court. An artist can use them, if the work is genuine and the purpose defensible.

- You may not!

- Same words. Different standing.

The law has not banned the phrases from public life. It has redistributed who gets to handle them. The credentialled, the supervised, the institutionally accountable, they can manage the dangerous language responsibly. The person in the crowd with a sign is a different matter.

This is presented as a safety measure. It is also, viewed from a certain angle, a very old arrangement: some people are trusted with difficult things, and some people are not, and the difference is rarely just about the words.

Queensland is not burning books. It is, however, deciding who is qualified to say them aloud.

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The views expressed are those of the correspondent. Factual claims draw on publicly available sources.