Nordically pale, I have never ever been on the receiving end of any racial abuse in all my 50 years in Australia. Racially, mine has been a charmed Anglo-Saxon life. No one has ever tried to insult, offend or humiliate me in racial ways.

And yet, if I found myself a white, male, bourgeois Liberal MP in the federal parliament (it takes a superhuman effort to imagine myself as a Liberal but I am doing my best) I do hope I would be honourable enough to fight for the retention of 18C as it is.

What qualifications do smug palefaces like Australia's ultra-conservative men have that they think equip them to have worthwhile abolitionist views on 18C? They insist racially vulnerable folk should just "grow thicker skins" so that racial insults just ricochet off them, the insulted, like hailstones off a rhinoceros. But one can no more by choice grow a thicker skin than grow another head, a third buttock.

White men who never have the thickness of their own skin tested by racial insults are in no position to know how hurtful words can be. Thinking people listen more attentively to contributions to the debate made by Labor MPs Linda Burney and Anne Aly, both with actual experience of racial horrors.

And of course these awful 18C abolitionist men urging others to grow thicker skins are people who, through nature or nurture, are themselves deeply, truly, emotionally and intellectually thick-skinned. Listening to these simpleton-fossils (one of the most representative of them is One Nation senator and conspiracy-monger Malcolm Roberts) it is obvious that all the fine things of civilisation (for example fine learning, big ideas, poetry, fine music) that tenderise and sensitise the souls of the best of us, making us humane and kindly, have just ricocheted off their rhino-thick hides. Words cannot hurt a rhinoceros.

During this bountiful autumn unhappy Bill Shorten continues to attract as many accusations of hypocrisy as the flowers of my garden's bottlebrushes are attracting delirious bees.

The government and especially its suddenly macho leader Malcolm Turnbull (his image choreographers have taught him to brandish a clenched fist when speaking so as to seem more manly) keep accusing that Shorten and Labor are being populist hypocrites about penalty rates. Shorten is showing "gold-plated hypocrisy" the PM accuses, in opposing the Fair Work Commission's advice on penalty rates.

Coincidentally, with these horrid h-words ringing so loudly through our nation's public conversation, your columnist has stumbled online across a bright new discussion of hypocrisy.

B.D. McClay's piece in the intellectually prickly Hedgehog Review offers a shy defence, an acceptance of political hypocrites.

I thought of Bill Shorten and his accusers as I read McClay's essay in which he says "The political philosopher Judith Shklar claimed that hypocrisy is a vice particularly loathed in pluralistic liberal democracies because, she argued, the very functioning of a democracy depends on people saying frankly what they mean. Yet at the same time [she argued] a certain hypocrisy is unavoidable, because even the most principled people must be willing to compromise."

What's more, McClay probes, since a hypocrite as defined by the dictionaries is the person who says one thing but does another, perhaps the worst thing one can say about hypocrites is that they are inconsistent. Is inconsistency on its own, he wonders, such an unforgivable vice?

"By itself, hypocrisy does not test for goodness, badness, efficacy, or even purity of intention - it can only test for and demand consistency. We require a vocabulary for moral failings that is more exacting than [charges of] hypocrisy … "

This gives food for thought. I have always thought of hypocrisy as the most unforgivable of vices (and there is no doubt Shorten and Labor are being opportunistically hypocritical about the Fair Work Commission). But perhaps McClay is right and we should be forgiving of what may be only a minor vice. Perhaps, on the galaxy of subjects in which Shorten seems a hypocrite, we should still credit him with good, pure intentions.

And in any case, McClay sighs, "though exposing our partisan enemies as hypocrites gives us undeniable pleasure, such accusations leave their targets largely unscathed"

"To pick just one example, Tennessee state representative Scott DesJarlais, a pro-life Republican who pressured sexual partners to have abortions, is a pure hypocrite … but his political career is not in danger: Even rank hypocrisy goes unpunished in American politics."

Yes, enough Tennessee Republicans have continued to vote for this swine (Politico magazine calls him "The biggest hypocrite in Congress" and the popular media epithet "the worst man in Congress" is velcroed to him now) to keep his career alive and bubbling. Needless to say he is very popular with amoral and unhinged Trump, and has just been made a new member of the House Armed Services Committee.

Are we there yet? Could a rank Australian hypocrite as rank as DesJarlais blossom and thrive in Australian politics?