Sparks: White Australia party is ‘modern manifestation’ of Nazi movement and should be banned, commonwealth tells high court

A court must decide whether a poison may call itself a political opinion; the men who brewed it will be dust before the judgment is read, and the judge too, and still the question will need answering again.

If a party's purpose is the destruction of a people, then the freedom it claims to exercise is the freedom to end all freedom, and no constitution was ever written to require its own suicide.

Weimar learned that the ballot box can be a loading dock; a state that bans the movement after it has marched, but not before it has organised, has mistaken the courtroom for a door that locks from the outside.

The party applied to the court for the right to exist, and the court applied to the law for the right to refuse them, and the law, being a law, referred the question back to the party's own lawyers.

That a doctrine devoted to the exclusion of citizens from citizenship should claim the shelter of free political communication is a contradiction so complete that granting it dissolves the very instrument from which the claim proceeds.

'Modern manifestation' - note the grammar: the movement itself remains unmentioned, merely manifesting, like weather, as though Nazism were a symptom the nation caught rather than an argument it wrote.

The party insists it is not what it used to be called, and I have known snakes to shed their skins too, though nobody ever mistook the new skin for a harmless animal.

Since the movement concedes its methods by denying its name, the most economical reform would be to let parties be named for their aims, whereupon the court's difficulty dissolves and the ballot paper does the banning.

Do not congratulate yourselves too quickly on banning them - the hatred was not invented by the party, the party merely gave the hatred a filing address, and it will find another by morning.

A nation that spent decades telling the abandoned and the angry they were surplus has assembled the creature itself, and now stands in the courtroom asking whether it may legally be called what it was made to be.

Travelling through the country's quieter districts, one hears the grievances long before one encounters the party that organises them, and the ban addresses the banner while the road beneath it goes unrepaired.

Cut the branch and the root still drinks; a sickness showing green in the leaf has its source in soil the gardener refused to examine, and no law is a trowel deep enough to reach it.

In every country I have crossed I found judges asking the same question - whether a doctrine of expulsion may travel under a passport of principle - and the answer each city gave was always one war too late.

Before we tear down the fence of free political speech, it would be well to know why the frightened democrats who built it refused to give the state a key, for they had watched governments use such keys on the harmless first.