Peta Credlin: Anthony Albanese should not decide what you watch

We cannot allow the Albanese Government to get its way in controlling what you can see and read online and that’s why the removal of the footage regarding Bishop Emmanuel is such an important issue, writes Peta Credlin.

The online world is something that most of us now live in but don’t think about – or at least don’t think about it as much as we should.

But given how much time we spend on social media and given its place in driving opinion and even shaping character, a thorough analysis of its pluses and minuses, and what might be done about them, is long overdue. Because in so many ways, we are what we read and watch.

Because the church service was being live-streamed online, the alleged terrorist attack on the Assyrian Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel happened in full technicolour and was then viewed millions of times by people all over the world.

The Australian eSafety Commissioner has ordered the footage be taken down because she says it involves “gratuitous violence” and X boss Elon Musk is fighting this in court as an infringement on free speech.

Given all the “gratuitous violence” and other graphic content on the internet, why this footage? Why remove the footage of the Christian bishop being stabbed and not the sermons of Islamist hate-preachers calling for violence and “death to the infidels” that helps breed terrorist radicalisation?

So, let’s be upfront about what’s really happened here. From the Prime Minister down, our authorities wanted this particular violent incident withdrawn from access (and not all the other violent imagery) because they fear it reflects badly on Islam and the official mindset holds that Australians are always on the verge of succumbing to Islamophobia. Which is utter nonsense, but it is why our political leaders can’t speak about the rampant antisemitism that’s now on Australian streets without bracketing it with a near-non-existent Islamophobia.

Islam has to be treated with kid-gloves: first, because Muslim leaders are so quick to make racism accusations (and racism is today’s unforgivable sin), and second because of the growing influence of the Muslim vote in key Labor seats.

It is also why I have not heard one mention of the ‘I’ word from police in connection with the Bishop’s stabbing. Instead, it’s simply “a religiously motivated ideology” If we call it what it is we won’t defeat it.

The stabbing of the Christian bishop is imagery about an ideology that Australians should know about.

I am a conservative before I am a libertarian. And by that I mean, I believe in free speech but not a free-for-all. I do believe there are constraints such as some of the depraved content available online that should be removed such as child abuse and violent pornography.

But footage such as Bishop Emmanuel’s attack should not be taken down because it depicts an important news event and these sort of images, all containing “graphic violence” like 9/11 or the assassination of JF Kennedy, or the images out of Holocaust camps, must be understood by all humanity.

In the case of the stabbing of a Christian bishop, it is also imagery about an ideology that Australians should know about, and need to understand given its power to recruit would-be killers as young as 14 years of age, as the charges laid in the wake of the incident have shown.

The Albanese Government has been quick to use the events at this Western Sydney church to renew its bid to censor what you can see and hear via the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill that, if passed into law, will give faceless officials the power to impose massive fines on online platforms (like Facebook etc) who do not remove material that the bureaucrat says must go.

Right now, the Coalition says it can’t support this legislation, but it has got itself into a difficult position of inconsistency because it earlier agreed that the footage of Bishop Emmanuel’s stabbing should come down. And this is what happens when political parties react to issues rather than deal with them based on sound policy principles.

It was only a few months ago, during the Voice referendum debate, that the arguments of the No side were regularly removed from the internet. Indeed, my work on exposing the Uluru Statement as a much longer, more radical list of demands than the one-page poster that the PM tried to pretend it was, upset the highly political ‘fact-checkers’ who ordered it removed. It was only after lawyers for this masthead and Sky News took them on that my factual material was reinstated.

We cannot allow the Albanese Government to get its way in controlling what you can see and read online. And that’s why the removal of the footage regarding Bishop Emmanuel is such an important issue. It is not about cleaning up the internet. It is about censoring it. And as always with the left, it is not where you start, it is where you end up and without free speech in a democracy, the very nature of democracy is under threat.

LEST WE FORGET THREAT OF RADICAL MINORITY TOWARDS ANZAC DAY

It’s vital that we don’t let activists do to Anzac Day what they’ve already been allowed to do to Australia Day. More than 80 local councils now refuse to hold citizenship ceremonies on January 26, supposedly because it’s a day of shame over the dispossession of Aboriginal people.

There are now similar stirrings over April 25, that it celebrates war and excuses genocide, with almost no basis in fact, but still relentlessly pushed by the militant left.

Last week, pro-Hamas protesters desecrated Anzac Day via a vigil on the steps of Parliament House Melbourne. Some Green councillors likewise tried to exploit our most solemn national day by laying wreaths while sporting keffiyehs.

Our politicians seem all-too-keen to police anything that’s insulting to minority groups but the right to protest should not extend to a licence to insult majority views either. The last thing we want is green-left councils refusing permission for Anzac Day marches but that’s what’s coming if we don’t fight back against denigration of the Anzac story.

Last week on Sky I covered the anti-Anzac bigotry of a group called Teachers for Palestine. A leader of this group claims that she’d been contacted by “hundreds and hundreds of teachers sick of doing ideological work for arms companies and the government”. Her excuse for this Anzac Day travesty was that one or two defence contractors have sponsored exhibits at the Australian War Memorial.

It worries me that they work closely with schools across the country to try to change how Anzac Day is taught in the curriculum.

Education ministers must be pressured now to act and demonstrate to all of us that they have stamped this radical nonsense out.

Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm