By the time you read this article, I may have been disciplined, or even sacked from my job. My crime is that I believe employers, especially in local, state and federal government, should not have the right to enforce a religious, political or social philosophy on employees as a prerequisite of employment.

This civilised idea, one of the bedrocks of democracy, no longer exists in Australia because free speech is dead. It’s been killed by feminists and LGBTQ+ activists who have privileged subjective feelings over principle. And the most radical overhaul of rights in Australian history has occurred under the eyes of an intellectual class who have allowed a radical minority of left-wing extremists, without oversight or criticism, to undermine the most cherished principles of liberal democracy – the right to freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of association. This fundamental attack on rights occurred when captured institutions decided that people did not have the right to their own beliefs, and that if people disagreed with the latest cause du jour of the left – gender recognition – they would, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau said, be forced to be free. Puritans exist in every generation.

Last week, I was coerced into attending a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion training session in my local government job, which, ironically, was about workplace bullying. The session, which lasted over three hours, was a perfect example of propaganda. Banal truths were presented as radical knowledge, while extreme, anti-democratic measures were surreptitiously introduced into the proceedings with smiling faces and soft and fluffy rhetoric. Glibness, the most obvious sign of a parasitised mind, saturated the entire session. Staff, though, lapped up the feel-good mood, which proves that if the rhetoric, contra Barack Obama, is persuasive, you actually can put lipstick on a pig.

Ostensibly the purpose of the training session was to demarcate the line between acceptable and unacceptable behaviour in the workplace, but, by a strange coincidence, everything unacceptable was distinguished by the subjective feelings of people who either cannot face reality, or who are neurotic and are easily offended. This was the true purpose of the session, to make ‘psycho-social rights’ co-determinate with action, (essentially to conflate words with violence). But the core ambition of the project was hidden in a larger structure of obvious truths and common sense. The devil was in the detail.

The session started with a glib dig at capitalism, when we were told that a small percentage of people were not just psychopaths but ‘corporate psychopaths’, which elicited herd-like laughter from the audience. The first half of the session was when four actors, two women and two men, played out scenarios of alleged bullying behaviour. Once again, by a sheer coincidence, the men and women were caricatures from the feminist phantasmagorical imagination. The men were distinguished from their female counterparts by their stupidity and crassness, while the women, one a complete victim and the other a partial victim, were intelligent. Larry was the villain of the piece, a stupid, crass, boorish psychological type, who does exist, (I’ve met Larry in real life), but who nobody has ever taken seriously and who I’ve never met in a work environment, especially in the public sector. Rule one of propaganda is to caricature your opponents. Rule two is to make the unusual the norm.

The second half of the training was a perfect example of a ‘Struggle Session’, which was a tactic of control in communist regimes. Find the troublemakers and allow staff and management to know who they are. Staff were separated into three psychological groups, who were given the names of animals. (I know, these were adults, what can you say?). I was a ‘honey badger’, the blunt speaker of truth, although I could have been in any of the groups because people are complicated. Then a game, the second part of the struggle session, was played where staff had to rate six scenarios of possible bullying from ‘okay’ to ‘not okay’. Most of the answers were obvious, but embedded in the six questions was one about the use of transgender pronouns. (This is where our right to free speech was compromised, because transgenderism is an ideology and forcing people to acquiesce to a belief system is antithetical to traditional concepts of employment rights in Australia. It’s illegal, in other words). We then had to publicly call out our answers, which I refused to do. I told the presenter it was a form of bullying. Outing a person’s private beliefs in a work setting, when those beliefs go against the official ideology, is bullying. The third example of the struggle session is when we had to sign a document, state which department we worked in, and rate the course.

The entire session was like existing in a parallel universe to a just body politic, but one of the most extraordinary claims made during the training is that intentions are irrelevant in determining innocence or guilt. Only the action, or, to reveal the philosophical underpinnings of their argument, the subjective feelings of your accuser, are apposite. This goes against every notion of due process and justice in the history of democratic legal theory.

To put this in perspective, imagine if your boss, who could be a priest, a Liberal party member, or a vegetarian, forced everyone in their employ, on the threat of being sacked, to say the Lord’s Prayer, espouse capitalism, or to eschew eating meat. Yet, this is what’s happening in Australia.

In a democracy, people are free to believe anything, even if it violates the subjective opinions and most cherished ideology of another person, but no employer can coerce an employee, as a prerequisite of employment, to adhere to another person’s beliefs. Anyone who espouses this ideology is an authoritarian and an anti-democracy fanatic who has no respect for people’s autonomy.

The next Coalition government, or the Labor party and its allies, must remove the amorphous idea of gender recognition from legislation and law in Australia. It is imperative, as a matter of principle, that the democratic right of freedom of speech be the fundamental bedrock of rights in Australia.

I’ll let you know if they sack me. Now that would be both bullying and discrimination.