An article today in The Australian points out that if your employer has a code of conduct which forbids your free speech rights, and your alternative choice of employer has exactly the same sort of code of conduct, then you don't really have free speech at all.

Corporations inhabit a zone between state coercion and civil liberty: they can coerce only if people agree to work for them. The problem is that increasingly people are finding themselves unable to avoid them in their quest for a livelihood, yet corporations are not subject to the same liberal democratic constraints as the government. This is why corporate activism is so dangerous to real-life liberty, as the Folau case demonstrates.

Graham Young
www.aip.asn.au