Last night our television screens were plastered with footage of perhaps the most divisive writer in the country walking out of the Federal Court.

“We should not insist on the differences between us,” a defiant Andrew Bolt claimed without a hint of irony, “but focus instead on what unites us as human beings.”

Earlier in the day I had sat at the back of Federal Court Room No. 1 to watch the result in the much-publicised case of Eatock v Bolt.

I listened to Justice Mordecai Bromberg outline his reasoning in deciding the case.

I felt the wave of emotion come over much of the gallery as it became clear the decision would be in favour of the applicants.

And as the jubilant crowd slowly departed the room, I stayed back to observe proceedings to the very end. What I saw was a bewildered family, a legal team in crisis and an outspoken columnist shaking with shock, anger or a combination of both.

It was the case that was built up as a struggle between freedom from racial discrimination and what Tony Abbott eloquently phrased, as perhaps only a Rhodes Scholar can, as the “sacred principle of free speech”.

What actually came out of yesterday’s decision was something quite different.

Mr Bolt had argued in two pieces that appeared in the Herald Sun in 2009 that “fair-skinned Aboriginal people” had “chosen” to be Aboriginal in order to access unique benefits available to Indigenous Australians.

In case you haven’t had time to read the full judgement (and its bulkiness almost justifies the handy sound grabs we have been hearing), Bromberg J concluded that these remarks were likely to offend the 18 people named in the article, therefore breaching the Racial Discrimination Act, introduced during the Whitlam years.

Leave it at that and you have out-and-out censorship. But the decision does not end there.

You see there is a clause in the very same piece of legislation - the following sentence in fact - that protects freedom of expression. It is right there, as black and white as half the MCG come Saturday.

However, Bromberg J found that this did not apply in the current case because Mr Bolt’s articles “contained errors of fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language”.

In effect, Mr Bolt’s habitual practice of using google for much of his research had come back to bite him. It turns out that these fair-skinned aboriginal people have risen to google prominence, not through government handouts, but of their own accord.

Furthermore, not one of them had “chosen” to be aboriginal, but had been brought up identifying with their own culture from early childhood.

He asked us to consider how intimidated we would be if we read these articles as a young and impressionable fair-skinned Aboriginal person struggling with our cultural identity.

In his concluding remarks, Bromberg J made it very clear that the offending articles were not a contravention of the Act because of the subject matter, but “because of the manner in which that subject matter was dealt with”.

Yet Mr Bolt came out of the court and staunchly declared that yesterday was “a terrible day for freedom of speech in this country”. 

This brings us to the very fundamental point of what free speech actually is. Most of us appear to agree that this concept is a key to a thriving democracy, but if you would believe those in Bolt’s corner this means the freedom to say absolutely anything we want, including misinformation.

But we know from defamation law that this is not the case.

There are plenty of other examples where freedom of speech is not unfettered. 

If the Herald Sun truly believed in free speech, for instance, they would surely have published all the comments made yesterday on their online article about the Bolt case. Yet what was the total number of that eventually found their way on to the bottom of that webpage?

Zero.

Indeed, no country in the world has complete freedom of speech. Believe it or not, even our motor-mouthed American friends, with their Constitution’s First Amendment, do not have universal free speech.

The fact is that freedom of speech is not the mere spreading of the first thought to pop into your head (or for that matter, the first results on google).  Rather, it is the liberty to have a robust debate on any topic. It is the freedom to talk about any idea, no matter how dangerous that idea may be.

As one of my more senior colleagues says, “Any time, any issue”.

Some people in the media seem to think they can publish anything without taking responsibility for their actions. In some cases, the focus is not upon what is factual, but what will garner the greatest reaction.

Yesterday’s ruling is a wake up call, and not just to Mr Bolt and the Herald Weekly Times either.

Put simply, we need to be accountable for what we say.

We came out of the Court Room No. 1 with the freedom to talk about any idea still very much intact.

Should we have a robust debate about the issues involving indigenous Australians?

Absolutely!

But let’s have it in an informed way. Let’s go out into aboriginal communities, let’s talk to these so-called ‘fair skinned aboriginal people’ and let’s get the facts right before we go making hasty conclusions.

Do not limit research and responsible journalist to search engine results obtained in a high rise building in Southbank.

As American journalist Thomas Friedman once penned, “when widely followed public figures feel free to say anything, without any fact-checking, it becomes impossible for a democracy to think intelligently about big issues.”