One issue that Campbell raised, that I haven’t yet addressed here, is the proposal that protections from hate speech might be extended to groups defined by their political opinion. This is a particularly controversial aspect of the government’s proposed changes, with even people strongly supportive of hate speech reform concerned about overreach. While the Government agreed in principle that hate speech protections should be expanded to all the protected classes in the Human Rights Act, it has more recently appears to be in two minds. Most (perhaps even all) of the strong defences of widening the protections against hate speech I have read, say they are concerned that expanding protections to groups defined by their politics: they agree the criminal offence should expand from the race/nationality/ethnicity it currently covers to other grounds such a religion, sex/gender, and sexuality, but think expanding to all of the grounds may be going too far. Victoria University’s Dr. Edward Clark has suggested that the grounds contained in the Harmful Digital Communications Act might be a compromise.