Freedom is both a blessing and a curse. In the West, we enjoy freedoms that our ancestors could neither have imagined nor conceived of. Not knowing that you can have something, nor that it's realisation is even possible, is not painful. What you never had cannot be a loss. How can you miss what never was?

At the far edge of freedom, a place where we now seem to reside, is a location of seemingly endless (consumer) choice, of ever-expanding rights, a withering of custom and tradition, a challenge to any and all censorship and the normalisation of the private become public. There is much to be commended in a lot of this change, for who would want a return to the conditions of 50 years ago, where half the population was repressed, where a novel like Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned, where authority rarely was challenged. Native Australians could not vote in an election until 1967.

Like all revolutions, this freedom project has probably gone well beyond what was wise. Democracies are not always adept at handling change and once freedoms are conceded, it is hard to reel them back in. Amongst the major errors of our time are the proliferation of pornography in the public space (principally the internet but elsewhere too), the untrammelled freedom of "the market" in people's lives (choice, choice and more choice) and a pronounced decline in public standards of dress, behaviour and speech. I know it's not a trendy thing to say, but punctuating every sentence with expletives is not a freedom of speech issue. In this rush to unshackle the perceived injustices or impertinences of the past, personal responsibility has taken a shellacking. It only takes a small minority to transgress for social relations to begin unwinding.

Before I am accused of fuddy-duddyism or the like, it is not my approaching dotage that persuades me of this view, for I have always felt thus, but a need to be in the debate, if only as a footnote. Freedom of speech this is, of the kind that tries to persuade, and is open to persuasion. It is not hectoring nor obscene nor entirely sure of itself. But it is speech that is worth having and encouraging, no matter what the point of view.

One of the champions....