Dan Tehan’s ‘university foreign interference taskforce’ has gone relatively unnoticed in the mainstream press, yet it’s imperative that progressives on campus oppose such moves to impose more government scrutiny on academics and their conduct – particularly one that so deliberately fans the flames of anti-Chinese racism.

Free speech no longer emerges, in the words of Jacques Rancière, in a time and in a place you’re not supposed to speak, exercised by those who aren’t allowed to speak. Free speech is now a weapon in the right’s arsenal: by invoking free speech, they simultaneously bludgeon an ‘intolerant’ left who dare disagree with them.

On Friday, Canadian alt-right YouTuber and activist Lauren Southern will host the Melbourne leg of her national speaking tour, alongside fellow alt-right YouTuber and compatriot Stefan Molyneux. Southern’s video announcing her tour really tries to bring the drama: ‘You guys are at a crossroads. Do you want to retain your culture … your borders, family, identity? Or will the boats keep coming, the no-go zones keep growing and will you become another victim of multiculturalism?’

An increasingly common experience is the ‘phantom lecture’. This is when surplus students can’t fit into the main lecture theatre and are told to go to a second theatre where they’ll find the main lecture streamed onto a screen. Except, that is, in the first week of this semester, when the university forgot to hire someone to set up the stream in the second lecture theatres and students were left staring at a blank screen.

At my sister’s twenty-first a few weeks ago, right in the middle of the postal survey, my cousin sat beside me and asked, ‘Have you voted yet?’ He must have known where I stood on the question: I’ve spent this year travelling to different university campuses around the country launching the yes campaign, running enrolment stalls, and building on-campus demonstrations.

There is a common perception that the Russ­ian Revolution ushered in an era of draconian, merciless state atheism that was utterly hostile to all forms of religion. Even among those who might be sympathetic to the aims of the Revolution, it is taken for granted that the destruction of the Orthodox Church and the ‘withering away’ of religion was a key ideological plank for the Bolsheviks. It is true that not all radicalised Muslims thought as highly of Lenin and the Bolsheviks as Barakatullah; but the policies of religious freedom and national self-determination pursued by the Bolsheviks and the fledgling Soviet government in its early days helped wind back the oppression that Central Asian Muslims had experienced under the Tsar’s rule.

Speaking of poverty, hardly much has changed since 2013 when a Universities Australia report revealed that two thirds of students live below the poverty line. The Youth Allowance rate at the time was set to $407.50 per fortnight, or 42.3 per cent of the poverty line. Four years later, Youth Allowance has gone up 30 dollars per fortnight.

So here we are: the LGBT community, once marginalised, once anathema to the values of the far right is now told that it’s only within the fold of the far right that we’ll be safe and welcome. Except that rather than the far right shielding us from attack, our rights and our existence are being used to shield groups like the FN from the charge that they’re socially backward.

‘When I was a child,’ French philosopher Jacques Rancière wrote, ‘on the day of solemn communions we’d go to school to meet our non-Catholic friends, wearing our communicants’ armbands and handing out pictures. No one thought that this was a threat to laïcité.’ So what changed? How did the onus to subscribe to secularism shift from the state to the individual?

It was the horse that I noticed first. I could see its agony, escaping as a shrill bray from its agape mouth, with its teeth and tongue exposed, its head craned upwards, eyes wide in horror. The same agony is echoed in the wail of the mother, on the left-hand side of the canvas, crying to heaven for the dead child in her lap – but crying in vain, for it was from that heaven that the bombs dropped.