Swimming in political paddling pools means swallowing a lot of hypocrisy, just as a matter of course.

For most commercial politicians, opinions tend to be based on focus groups and political expediency, rather than strongly held beliefs.

For some, that is borne from f–king around and finding out and when an opinion falls foul of a party line, and for some it’s just part of the ambition ladder – you believe what you believe until you believe differently.

Then there are some who are hypocritical with their whole chest and seem miffed that anyone would ever accuse them of not being consistent.

Enter Liberal senator Sarah Henderson.

For the past three years, Henderson has used her position in the parliament to advocate for Israel and seek to censor, or vilify, anti-genocide protesters as antisemitic.

She commended the Adelaide Festival for cancelling the appearance of Randa Abdel-Fattah, and then questioned why she had been invited in the first place. She has called for police investigations into student protests against One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, accused striking ABC staff of “hijacking news programs to convey false information”, demanded ABC Americas editor John Lyons be “shut down” and demanded an inquiry into what she deems the ABC’s “impartiality failures”, demanded stricter social media guidelines for ABC staff, and used Senate estimates to question SBS executives about why Israel received no Australian votes in Eurovision, among many, many other interventions into what she believes journalism should be.

So it was amusing to watch Henderson use journalists and freedom of speech as justification for the Coalition’s opposition to the government’s proposed social media feed changes.

“There are serious harms on the internet which must be prohibited. But as Angus [Taylor] has said, this is a proposal to give the government a blank cheque and this is a very serious threat to free speech. This is so ham-fisted and so rushed that the government has not even carved out news media websites. The power to censor journalists in this country undermines a fundamental tenet of our democracy,” she said.

“Freedom of speech in our country is precious and it must be protected at all costs.”

The issue with that argument is that Henderson has made a career out of declaring what she believes free speech to be, seeking to police, censor or ban views she doesn’t personally agree with.

This is the Senator’s right – and a well-worn path. At one point or another, everyone runs into something that rubs against their sense of self, values or political beliefs and seeks to overwhelm it, or shut it down. What is ridiculous is we pretend this is something only the left does.

And while Henderson is absolutely right in that hate speech and free speech are not the same thing, and there are consequences to controversial views, much of what she highlights are things she doesn’t agree with.

A NSW Supreme Court justice has ruled on the difference between criticism of Israel and antisemitism. Henderson speaks for some, but not all Jewish people in Australia. Her criticisms of media – particularly the ABC, where she worked once upon a time, and individual journalists – range from the obvious to the understandable to the ideological nonsensical, and that is her right.

She’ll always find people who agree with her, just as she’ll find those who disagree with her. Where it strays into ridiculousness is when we are supposed to believe that one of the biggest culture war warriors in Australia is suddenly worried about censoring journalists.

There is much to see with Labor’s proposed social media legislation. And many debates to be had over social media, the power of billionaires to control what we see and the power of government to regulate these spaces.

But let’s be for real. The Coalition started last week with a proposal to criminalise burning the Australian flag, a policy position even the grandfather of Australian culture wars, John Howard, rejected. And their lead defender of freedom of speech is a Senator who mostly believes it to be what she agrees with or not.

If we are going to have any sort of serious conversation about any of these issues, we need to be serious about who is leading the chat.