Well, it wasn’t how to get people into homes or help them put food on the table.

No, the priority of the final parliament was to rush through laws to make discussions about ethnicity, religion and identity politics even more illegal than they already were, placing Australia at the front of the formerly free world’s race towards tyranny and censorship.

VANDALISM

These laws might have been expedited in response to the recent wave of anti-Semitic vandalism and graffiti across the nation, but the perpetrators of those crimes are not the ones now losing sleep about being arrested in the middle of the night.

Rather, it’s you and I who will be targeted by these new laws.

In short, the new laws make it illegal to say anything that might, intentionally or not, provoke violence towards someone based on their – and here I quote from Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus himself – “race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, intersex status, disability, nationality, national or ethnic origin or political opinion.”

Every time there’s a new law to further restrain free speech, there’s a new group of supposed victims lining up to enforce it.

According to the new legislation, offending statements don’t need to actually provoke violence, they just need to pass the vague test that someone, somewhere, might take your words as an incitement to continue the conversation through physical means.

Until now, Australia’s legal-grievance industry had to prove that a subjective remark was intentionally provocative, which in this age of trigger-happy grievance-mongering is hardly onerous.

But a bipartisan consensus in federal parliament yesterday lowered that bar even further, to the level of “reckless”.

This means that if a harridan with the humour of Hillary Clinton collecting Bill from a Jeffrey Epstein party overhears a harmless joke about her ethnic minority as she’s walking past a pub, she can now file a complaint to the police and almost certainly send the person who cracked the joke off to a mandatory year in jail.

Humour is now ostensibly illegal in Australia because a person whose only ambition in life is the acquisition of victim status can find ways within the myriad hate-speech laws across the States and country to deem it offensive and potentially inciting violence.

Comedians like Billy Connolly may be in strife.

Is Connolly intentionally offensive? Absolutely – if you only take his jokes at face value.

But his overall intentions are eminently inoffensive, even noble.

Connolly often points out forms of behaviour that he finds ridiculous, and humorously suggests that the people who comply with such behaviour might, if they looked around, find more fulfilling ways to spend their time on this Earth.

GOD-GIVEN

He has a God-given right to hold, and express, that opinion. If someone wants to make a counter argument in defence of things like suicide bombing and arranged marriages of women wearing bedsheets, let’s hear it.

Better still, how about an equally offensive joke about Scottish people being even stingier than Jews. That would be hilarious.

But, as of yesterday in Australia there is a third option, and that is to say “I’m offended” and, on the grounds that someone could have been provoked to violence as a result of hearing the joke, virtually guarantee the joker, regardless of intent, goes to jail.

It goes without saying that these laws will never be used against the people who racially abuse white people because, frankly, us white people have better things to do than whinge about hurty words.

But they will be used against us for two reasons: firstly, one of the key characteristics of being devoted to western civilisation is to frequently question whether recent fashionable cultural adaptations – such as multiculturalism, Islamism and chopping people’s body parts off in the name of gender identity – are an overall benefit or burden to our collective wellbeing.

And secondly, merely raising these issues is routinely misconstrued as some form of bigotry by members of the sensitivity squad, when it’s nothing of a kind.

The chilling consequence of this is that people who love our history and culture and wish to retain them for the benefit of all against formidable global forces must remain silent, and those who wish to change our culture irreversibly can say whatever the hell they like.

Our politicians probably hope that we see them as merely incompetently pursuing noble objectives.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was in Parliament on Tuesday explaining his fierce determination to end the scourge of anti-Semitism.

“We have a simple message for those cowards and criminals engaged in these low acts of hatred: You will be caught, you will be punished. Our government has no tolerance for your actions. That is why we introduced…”

Introduced what? A ban on the Palestinian flag, which flies above the crowds of protesters marching through our streets every weekend chanting for the genocide of Jews? Er, no.

Albo went on: “That is why we introduced the landmark ban on the Nazi salute.”

Of course. It’s those darn Nazis!

If, upon hearing this, your response is a weary, “Mate, I think you’re barking up the wrong tree,” then Albo will take that as a win.

All he and every other politician in parliament wanted to do this week was pass this legislation without anybody mentioning the M-word in place of the euphemistic “anti-Semite”. And the Opposition was more than happy to oblige.

If the Prime Minister really cares about anti-Semitism, then why did he and half his front bench walk out as Opposition Leader Peter Dutton added his voice to those condemning the recent attacks.