IT IS COMMON to hear Australians wistfully admiring the United States’ famous Bill of Rights, those first ten amendments to their Constitution.

I have come to observe a common lack of understanding of freedom as often as a lack of appreciation of freedom here. Australians don’t (generally) value freedom because we don’t understand freedom.

I believe a Bill of Rights will not protect freedom of speech (or any other freedom) so long as a majority of voters do not properly value that freedom.

To better value it as a culture, we must first understand it. The point of this article then is to argue that if we better understood freedom – its origin and its end – than we would have no more need of a Bill of Rights.

Did you know that the American Bill of Rights are amendments precisely because most of the Founding Fathers were convinced that there was no need to stipulate them originally?

James Madison and others rightly believed that:

“the government can only exert the powers specified by the Constitution.”

In other words, unless the Constitution specifically said the government could restrict, require or regulate: religion, speech, press, assembly and petition – then such freedoms (and more) are the natural condition of citizens, and it was redundant to say so.

Likewise the government of course had no right or power to disarm citizens, to force homeowners to billet soldiers, to search or seize private property, to unfairly prosecute or punish people accused of crimes or to torture criminals.

Americans ended up with a Bill of Rights because it was politically expedient to do so, not because the Founding Fathers actually believed them necessary. Anti-federalists opposed the Constitution with a strong sense of the importance of decentralising and disempowering the national government – fair instincts.

James Madison strongly opposed the Bill of Rights, but rather than risking the whole project of federation, he introduced a list of amendments and whipped the necessary number of his colleagues into supporting it. He appreciated they could at least help educate people about their rights, and strategised that conceding these quickly might prevent the anti-federalists from making more drastic changes to the Constitution.

Some Australians wrongly believe that we have no right to free speech. This is only true in the uneducated minds of voters who believe rights and freedoms are granted by government. This can’t be true, else every government that denies rights and freedoms does so legitimately, and every brutal regime in history was morally justified by the mere fact of its ability to pass laws.

Any objective person knows a government killing its citizens for political reasons is immoral and unjustifiable by any procedure or parliament.

Likewise with less sensational, natural freedoms.

Every Australian properly has a natural right to free speech, even if we don’t have codified, legislated freedoms.

To the extent that we don’t understand the freedoms we’re naturally embued with by Almighty God for His purposes, we don’t value them, and don’t resist them being trampled by invalid laws fraudulently passed by mere politicians.

The lack of freedom is an illusion, a deception with only as much yet all the power we give it, especially in a (once) liberal democracy like ours.

One may object to my argument that natural freedoms and unalienable rights are of no practical help when a policeman is knocking on the door because of memes, a dystopian reality in once Christian nations like England.

The reality is that by the time that happens, the Bill of Rights won’t save you either. The battle has already been lost at that point because the culture has grown to permit and even demand such trampling of freedom.

In the United States, the same amendment which guarantees freedom of speech also guarantees freedom of religion, yet has been so butchered by past membes of the Supreme Court that they actually restricted religion, banning students from having bibles and prayer in schools.

John Locke noted that government exists and functions by the consent of the governed.

Americans cooperated with the incremental loss of freedom of religion, and now bakers and photographers are forced to celebrate homosexual charades of marriage. The Bill of Rights was impotent to protect what the culture didn’t popularly value.

Conversely, the right to bear arms is alive and well in many American states and cities despite fierce political activism for precisely the opposite reason – the culture still values that God-given, natural freedom. In many other USA jurisdictions, the culture has allowed gun rights to be regulated away – all under the same magical Bill of Rights.

In Australia, a relatively small minority of awake, angry people was not enough to protect clearly unlawful breeches by government covid policies. We were just too stupid to understand why freedom was more important than safety, & we sold out for just the promise, the feeling of safety.

It reminds me of the stupidity of Esau in Genesis 25. He cheaply sold his birthright, his inherited, natural rights, to his brother Jacob, because he was really hungry. He even said he would die if he didn’t eat – talk about alarmism! He was ruled by his overly dramatic, temporary feelings, and failed to value his God-given rights. He lost everything.

No, there are no legal silver bullets, no insta-fixes to the loss of our natural rights.

There’s only a long road of hard work reforming culture, reforming education, reforming religion to once again instil a national knowledge that government is NOT the highest Authority in the land, and has no power except that we give it.

The Constitution already has the fulness of freedom & justice baked in, if only we  really understood it. But we’ve vainly swapped “humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God” for pride parades & “your Truth”.

Australians arrogantly reject God, and with Him: Truth, justice and freedom.

Yet more laws will never change hearts. The only sustainable solution is national repentance, reformation, & revival of traditional Christianity.

Dave Pellowe is a Christian political educator & commentator, founder of The Good Sauce, convener of the annual Australian Church And State Summit and host of Good Sauce’s weekly The Church And State Show. Since 2016 Dave has undertaken the mission of arming Christians to redeem culture through events from Perth to Auckland, videos, podcasts and articles published in multiple journals across Australia and New Zealand. [more]

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