Australia’s e-Safety Karen | The Spectator Australia (2024)

If you were to believe Anthony Albanese, Elon Musk is the greatest threat to Australian democracy since Lucifer fell from heaven.

The Prime Minister, with his freespeech adverse e-Safety Commissioner by his side, has gone all the way to the Australian Federal Court to stop Twitter from publishing footage of the alleged terror attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel. The Bishop survived the attack, is recovering well, and has graciously already forgiven his attacker.

We are told the footage of the incident is too distressing for us to see. We are told watching it will create too much disagreement between people in the community. Oh, the irony! The Prime Minister, who spent a year trying to divide us by race, is suddenly concerned about community harmony…

It beggars belief that an Australian government would seek to deny Australians the ability to see what happened to a fellow Australian in Australia.

Apparently, it’s a heinous crime to allow real people to post real videos of what really happened in real life. As it turns out, our politicians don’t-like-real-life.

I, a politician, posted that contentious video, along with a 7-minute monologue explaining my thoughts on the incident. Go and watch it if you choose.

Today, Communications Minister Michelle Rowland asked me to explain my actions. Minister, I already did. Didn’t you watch my monologue? Maybe you can read this one instead.

Who made you the arbiter of speech anyway? What right do you have to compel the political speech of a sitting Senator? The only people who I answer to are those who might vote for me at the next election if I choose to contest. Minister Rowland, I would never attempt to censor your political speech, so do not try to censor mine.

It appears the government would prefer us to live in a world carefully curated by an e-Safety Karen who decides what we may and may not see.

Of course, we all know the government’s attempt to censor posts on Twitter has nothing to do with sparing us from confronting images. If confronting images are the problem, will they erase footage of 9/11 from the internet? Will they demand vision of the Bali Bombings be taken down? Will they demand that footage from Gaza be scrubbed from the internet? Will they demand that footage from Ukraine be deleted? The answer is no, they will not. One can simply go onto YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and the nightly news and see all manner of footage from these places. But all we hear about in the media is Twitter [X]. Why? Why X…?

The reason is simple. X is run by afree thinking,free speech advocate. X has provided a platform for individuals to challenge the government and the globalist narrative. This is what the government fears – losing control over the narrative.

And it’s not as if the government is trying to protect the dignity of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel, who was attacked. Honestly, since when has this government done anything but attack, undermine, and seek to suppress Christians?

Let’s be very clear once again, the government does not care about individuals. They care about taking down X as X poses a threat to their control of information.

The attack on Bishop Emmanuel is being used as a Trojan horse to ram through the government’s long talkedaboutmisinformation and disinformation legislation. This is just the excuse that they needed.

And here, of course, is the other great irony. If the government wasreallyconcerned about misinformation, they would be demanding Elon Musk censorthem, and not the other way around!

It’s the government that insists a man can become a woman by simply declaring himself to be one.

It’s the government that insists that renewables are the cheapest form of energy even as our power bills are going up.

It’s the government that insists we are in a climate crisis so bad it is labelled global boiling, even as Adelaide this week recorded its coldest April morning in nine years.

It’s the government that told us the vaccine was ‘safe and effective’ when it wasn’t.

It’s the government that told us to wear masks when masks proved completely ineffective in stopping Covidand, in some cases, made people’s breathing worse.

It’s the government that told us they would legislate Stage 3 tax cuts exactly as planned, only to go and change them.

It’s the government that paid experts to tell us that the East Coast of Australia would be in a permanent state of drought. This is right before dams in Brisbane and Sydney overflowed, flooding thousands of homes.

It’s the government that told us theUluru Statement from the Heartwas only one page long when the full version was actually26 pages long.

It’s the government that told us young people would benefit from the Covid vaccine, when they didn’t.

It’s the government that told us they would save us $275 on our power bills if we voted for them. We’re still waiting.

It’s the government that told us they would be more transparent, butdeclinemore orders for the production of documents than any other government in history.

It’s the government that told us they would not change superannuation before going and taxing more of our superannuation.

And I could go on. And on. There are many more examples.

The greatest purveyor of misinformation is the government – especially this one! If we want to stop misinformation from spreading, all we need to do is to stop some of these politicians from talking.

When the government say that no misinformation or disinformation should be allowed it is clear what theyreally mean. They mean that onlytheirmisinformation and disinformation should be allowed!

In ancientGreece, free speech was the right and privilege of free men. It was recognised as essential for the survival of democracy. The only people denied free speech were slaves. Slaves were not allowed to speak freely. Well, governments around the Western world are trying to turn us all into slaves.

Rather than continue the progress of the enlightenment, governments are trying to frog march us back to the Dark Ages when our speech was restricted, our thoughts were limited, and we were easily controlled. It is exactly the future George Orwell warned us about.

He wrote that the last and most important command of the party would be disregarding what we could see with our own eyes, and what we could hear with ourown ears.

We are living in Orwell’s 1984.

It should not be difficult to see why governments around the world want to clamp down on free speech. They are horrified that their half-truths and deceit can be called out publicly by anyone in real-time.

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern famously insisted that she and her government should be New Zealand’s sole source of truth.

In other words, no one should listen to anyone but her.

Ourown e-Safety Commissioner spoke at the World Economic Forum where she said that we would need to re-calibrate what freedom of speech means.

The e-Safety Commissioner and the government are hell-bent on deciding what you can and can’t see. In that spirit, they have demanded X remove content globally. This is clearlya dangerous precedent. Elon Musk responded with the following:

‘Our concern is that if ANY country is allowed to censor content for ALL countries, which is what the Australian “eSafety Commissar” is demanding, then what is to stop any country from controlling the entire Internet?’

The desire to muzzle free citizens is not only strong in the Labor Party … and the totalitarian instinct is not only strong in places like Beijing.

Liberal leader Peter Dutton has announced he will support the government’s misinformation and disinformation laws. Well, of course he will. They were, after all, originally proposed by former Liberal Communications Minister Paul Fletcher during the Morrison government’s term in office.

Politicians the world over are on a unity ticket when it comes to curtailing free speech. Whether in Scotland, America, Canada, Brazil, or here in Australia – politicians would have us believe that Elon Musk’s X platform is the cause of all our problems.

It is not.

X is the cause of all politicians’ problems, since it allows the average citizen to call politicians out in real time. They don’t like it and so they’re trying to shut it down. That’s what is really going on. And it must not be allowed to happen. For if it does, democracy dies.

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