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"No‐Platforming" has increased in prominence within Australia in recent years. Furthermore, it has moved from university campuses to more mainstream sectors of the Australian public sphere. The "no‐platforming" of an audience member on an ABC current affairs programme in March 2022 is evidence of this. By focussing on the arguments for and against no‐platforming, as well as this incident, this article seeks to show their wider significance for no‐platforming in Australia, and the implications of this for freedom of speech within the Australian public sphere.

As the recent Charlie Hebdo, Copenhagen café, and Garland, Texas, shootings show, religion has recently reemerged as a source of violence within liberal democracies, particularly in those instances where cases of alleged blasphemy are involved. Although toleration arose, within the liberal tradition, as a means of dealing with such conflict, some individuals, possessed of devout religious belief, when confronted with beliefs or practices profoundly at odds with their faith, cannot conceive of toleration as a possibility. In such situations, the demand that these individuals tolerate that to which their faith is at odds is likely to run up against a more personal and, for its adherents, eternal agenda. This article considers a way in which those with devout religious beliefs might tolerate that which is profoundly at odds with their faith, thereby providing a means to avoid violent outcomes such as those in the "extreme cases" above.

This article challenges a prominent interpretation of the liberal tradition which seeks to divide that tradition, from its origins, into two competing strands, one committed to reason (however defined) as a normative ideal, and the other, involving no such ideal, centred on a commitment either to negative liberty or the political management of diversity. This dichotomous account seeks to enlist the inaugural figures of John Locke, Immanuel Kant and in one case John Stuart Mill as the origins of that part of the liberal tradition committed to reason. This article will show that such claims have no foundation in the most inaugural figure cited, and that, as a consequence, liberalism, from its origins, has had a far deeper commitment to negative liberty and diversity than to any necessary connection with reason.

Timothy Stanton is the latest in a line of Locke scholars who, in focusing on Locke's theological commitments, have sought to place these at the center of his political philosophy. Stanton insists that those who interpret Locke's political philosophy in more material terms, centered on individual liberty, government authority, and the need to reconcile both via consent, apply to it a misleading "picture" and fail to perceive its essentials. By showing that this is precisely how Locke himself intended his political philosophy to be understood, with the theology substantially removed, this article shows how Stanton is profoundly mistaken in his interpretation of Locke.

John Gray has acquired international prominence and notoriety for his trenchant and uncompromising critique of the liberal tradition. According to Gray, the pervasive value pluralism that characterizes the contemporary world has rendered liberalism, and in particular its theory of toleration, both historically redundant and theoretically obsolete as a means of ensuring peaceful coexistence between competing values and practices. Gray insists that his alternative political framework of modus vivendi is far more capable of achieving these outcomes. This paper challenges Gray's account of the liberal tradition, and its theory of toleration, revealing the shortcomings of that account at a historical and philosophical level. It argues that liberalism emerged in a European context characterized by precisely the sort of pluralism that Gray associates with the contemporary world, and was specifically conceived to deal with it in a manner which is still relevant today. In this way, it is possible to rescue the liberal tradition from the theoretical obsolescence and historical redundancy to which Gray seeks to consign it.