In 2016, the former Tasmanian Senator Bob Brown was arrested for refusing a police direction to leave a forest where logging was occurring.
Bob Brown and some protestors challenged their arrest in the High Court. They won. The court found that despite it being illegal for protestors to hinder business activities, green activists have a constitutional right of freedom of political communication.
Free speech is not mentioned in our constitution, but our High Court has decided that there is an implied right of political communication because the Parliament has to be “directly chosen” by the people. The right is not absolute. Governments can restrict your free speech but it must do so in a “proportionate” way towards a legitimate aim.
About the same time that green activists were interfering with forestry businesses, the Australian Government established the eSafety Commissioner. Its role has expanded over the years but its main focus was to stop the spread online of illegal or restricted content, the bullying of children and the abuse of adults. Worthy aims but as the eSafety Commission has grown in power so has its intrusion in the free speech rights of Australians.
Two months ago, Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel was shockingly stabbed during a sermon in western Sydney. The sermon was being streamed live and soon videos of the stabbing circulated on social media. In a miracle, the assailant’s pocket knife did not work at first and so while the Bishop was struck the videos showed no blood.
We see much more violence on our nightly news from king hits at pubs to the shooting of an Aboriginal youth in Yuendumu a few years ago. But in stepped our eSafety Commissioner. She demanded the video be taken off social media, and not just in Australia. She demanded it be removed from the entire world.
Fortunately, X (formerly known as twitter) didn’t take this lying down. They refused to remove the video globally and won in court against the eSafety Commissioner’s overreach. The Commissioner has now discontinued further action.
Unfortunately, she has not stopped trying to censor the internet. Last week she tried to remove another video from an account named “Celine Against the Machine”. This video reported that a primary school in Melbourne had established a “Queer club” for students aged 8 to 12. Celine argued that “there is no place for an LGBT club in any school, let alone a primary school.”
Now you can agree with that statement or not, but it is clearly a matter of legitimate political debate. In recent years, there have been coordinated campaigns, including some funded by the ABC, against Christian schools for teaching Christian ideas to Christian students.
I do not agree with this outrage. I think if you send your child to a Christian school you should expect them to be taught Christian things. But I will defend someone’s right to make such criticisms of Christian schools. I like living in a free country, criticism of my views can be uncomfortable but it is healthy.
The eSafety Commissioner started out as a noble attempt to stop children being bullied online but it has now morphed into the free speech police. And worse, the eSafety Commissioner is a biased cop, wantonly taking down critiques of the LGBT agenda but, to my knowledge, doing nothing to stop the violent statements made by some Muslim clerics since the October 7 attacks in Israel.
Our world is changing fast and so it is more important that we allow robust debate about these changes. It is time for the eSafety Commissioner to stop policing our political speech. In coming months I plan to introduce an amendment to the *Online Safety Act* to make clear that no government agency can demand the removal of legitimate political communication online.
My amendment will likely fail against a Labor-Green Senate that wants to police your “misinformation” speech too. But we can at least take solace at the bumbling and perverse way the eSafety Commissioner is trying to shut us all up. If not for her attempt at censorship, I would never have heard of Celine’s criticism of the Victorian education system.
But we can’t rely on the “Streisand effect” to protect our free speech. All Australians deserve to be able to debate their political views, not just Bob Brown and his green activists.
