Vikki Campion: Albo sneaks first step to gag us under cover of darkness
Like most thieves of freedom, the first stage of the misinformation bill snuck into our lives under darkness dressed innocuously, writes Vikki Campion.
Opinion
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Like most thieves of freedom, the first stage of the misinformation bill snuck into our lives under darkness dressed innocuously.
Under the roar of US election coverage, the Albanese government quietly snuck the first step of its dangerous new laws to censor us through your House of Representatives.
The US presidential election has, thanks to fixed terms since the mid-1800s, been held on the Tuesday following the first Monday in November. This provided Labor’s top tacticians some 175 years’ notice for the darkest day to ram through their most dangerous bill on the legislative agenda.
The house, which under Albanese has become used to comfy dinner-time adjournments and family-friendly hours, instead sat until 10pm to rush debate as distracted Australians were fascinated with events across the Pacific.
There was no “take out the trash” day quite like it, and no bill ever needed it so much.
As the Greens mourned and the right gleefully popped Champagne, political burglars began pinching our right to free speech.
Most members of parliament failed even to feign interest in what was happening in their chamber on Wednesday.
Even during question time, broadcast live to the nation on radio, internet and television, they were more fascinated with Pennsylvania than Penrith, deep in key races reporting on the device in their hands, while barely there for the pickpocketing of free thought unfolding in front of them.
The Greens, usually among the most prolific contributors to social media on parliamentary business, appeared unconcerned with the misinformation bill in the Australian chamber online, instead panic-posting a succession of “y’all mind if I scream” memes while leader Adam Bandt mourned Trump’s victory as “a pretty terrifying outcome”.
Even in ABC newsrooms, journalists we pay over $1bn of our taxes to tell Australian stories accurately were focused on the US. This was one day after ABC bosses in estimates struggled to explain editing fake gunshots into a war crime story on veteran Heston Russell.
It’s wildly sneaky for Labor to push the censorship bill through the lower house while it is still under inquiry in the Senate, with a secretariat that has been swamped with submissions and “large volumes of material” as so many wrestle with the legal grey area of vague definitions of misinformation and disinformation while giving new powers to Canberra bureaucrats.
There is precedent for forcing a bill through the Senate while it is still under inquiry, and technically, they can guillotine debate.
However, you have to wonder about the tactics of censoring the censorship bill.
The inquiry report is due on November 25, leaving just three days on the Senate’s sitting calendar to consider the bill before parliament shuts down for the year.
Our election is around the corner, and there will be no surprises if parliament does not sit for more than a week in 2025.
Labor still needs to pick up a few crossbenchers to help it gag the nation, which is where Climate 200 funded Senator David Pocock could shine, with three independent senators plus the Greens needed to make it law within two remaining sitting weeks.
Did Labor use the rest of the week to lift the blanket off our heads and roll out members and ministers to call press conferences to laud the enlightened benevolence of the government, telling us what we can think as determined by the government as it passed?
Nope.
Few could sing its virtue.
ALP member for Lyons Brian Mitchell had a crack: “We live in a world where misinformation can impact public health, such as during Covid-19, when false information about vaccines and the benefits of vaccines circulated so rapidly. This is not a trivial issue. Misinformation led many to question or outright refuse lifesaving medical treatment.”
Actually, people who dared question whether pharmaceutical companies had completed enough vaccine research were immediately chucked into Facebook jail.
One former Facebook jail inmate earned her internment for posting a comment about her own immune system on a local Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down community page.
And the vaccines did hurt people – that’s why there is now a government fund dedicated to compensating people who were vaccine-injured.
Mr Mitchell blamed misinformation for leading “to a distrust in government”. We don’t have to trust you if you hurt us.
This bill gives Chinese and American corporations control to remove Australians’ content online before we see it, with no option for review and no way to know what has been censored.
Labor should be careful, as what made constituents vote red in the US can, if the Coalition learns the lessons from the Republican campaign, provoke them to vote blue here.
Sneaking around in the dark, slipping in laws to gag us, will do it.
NOW HOME AFFAIRS IS AIRBRUSHING OUR FLAG FOR ‘CULTURAL REFORM’
You can’t change the flag without Australians voting for it, so our bureaucrats undermine it by stealth and airbrush it out.
Not from the arts department or some irrelevant agency whose eye-popping antics can’t cause any real harm, but Home Affairs, which is in such shambles that its new minister, Tony Burke, was forced to bring back ankle bracelets to keep watch on people at “substantial risk of seriously harming any part of the Australian community by committing a serious offence”. The exact people Home Affairs were letting out.
The agency peddling bridging visas should treat the flag with respect and dignity as the nation’s foremost symbol. Instead, a staffer with an airbrush app has removed our flag.
The national Australian flag tells our story. Like it or not, we are a member of the Commonwealth; that’s why we have the Union Jack and a constellation only visible in southern skies, which has risen above thousands of attempts to change it and held strong on to the mast.
The Australian national flag is either laid on a coffin or presented to families at poppy services to honour the contribution of deceased service personnel.
Defence department senior leaders and service chiefs proudly pose with either the Australian flag or the relevant ensign for their service in their portraits, because those with a military background understand the flag’s power when putting their life on the line for it.
Not Home Affairs.
“Having photographs against a background of flags gives a certain formality to the photo,” Home Affairs secretary Stephanie Foster told Senator James Paterson.
Ms Foster says she asked staff to rub out the flags as part of “our cultural reform … to make sure that the senior executive is very accessible to staff”.
What about your accessibility to Australians? If you want to serve the staff, become the union rep.
Her department is also responsible for the Australian citizenship ceremony code.
This has diluted the national flag from being an “important element of a ceremony” where the flag “must” be displayed in 2018, to now where the word is reduced to “should”, inevitably be reduced to “may,” “could’ or preferably not with the blue ensign a mere footnote “in national symbols to be present … in keeping with other Commonwealth official occasions”.
There is nothing more infuriating than a bureaucrat enacting a personal view and enforcing it on Australia. This is not just their flag, it’s ours.
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