Vikki Campion: Governments want to exert more control via censorship and we need to resist

As Anzac Day passes and we reflect on our hard fought freedoms, another battle looms as our government decides only to allow you to look at what it deems appropriate. It must be resisted, writes Vikki Campion.

In the dark, no skilled photographer can fully capture the crowd’s enormity. They said 40,000 at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and thousands more at every city and town cenotaph – greater than any protest for any agenda-hijacking social media platform.

We flock for solace in an Australia we don’t recognise – stabbings in shopping centres and churches and murders of mothers.

The one day of the year when a Maori man belts out both the New Zealand and Australian national anthems a cappella before a game of two-up, the Dunghutti soldier plays the didgeridoo to the nation with no guilt-laden Welcome to Country, where both men and women shiver in the catafalque party as the temperature plummets below 1C – and no one mentions gender quotas.

A population exhausted by the ongoing moralistic lectures flocked to the memorials because of a guttural national need to recognise why we are free and to remind ourselves – in prayer, hymns, the ode and the lyrics of Advance Australia Fair – that freedom has to be fought for.

The veteran in the beret with his glasses and deep, handsome lines, you know what he gave, who he lost. We saw it on the news, in archives and museums – his emaciated troops surviving on rotten rice and luck.

Australia needs to continue to fight to maintain all its hard won freedoms, writes Vikki Campion. Picture: Jason McCawley/AFL Photos/via Getty Images

But now, as our government decides only to allow you to look at what it deems appropriate, we need to fight for freedom more than ever.

This new generation of veterans, struggling with what’s behind their eyes, don’t have wrinkles.

The vet in the V-neck, not yet greying, explaining the hell of defending Australia in a way that the eSafety Commissioner would remove.

He pulls from the ocean by their arms those thrown to death by people-smugglers – and is left holding just their arms.

He learns to recognise human remains by an algae that forms on the sacrum, submerged in the sea but still getting the sun.

His mate has fingernail scars in his arm from a woman he tried to save in an ocean storm, hit by a broken boat, until the day he killed himself to end the memory of failing her, despite diving down deep again and again.

This is the reality of a war fought on Australia’s seas.

We dance around it now. We talk about mental health because talking about how veterans feel is palatable; seeing what they saw, how they saw it, is not. We were censored from their horrors.

Now we have the Albanese government – apparently supported by the Coalition, hellbent on never returning to government as they acquiesce to another Labor policy – on a mission to censorship, to remove the live-streamed video of a Christian bishop attacked as he delivered his sermon.

They don’t try to take the hellish images of Gaza, of poor, injured children off the internet.

They want you to be compelled to show compassion for them, so why doesn’t a Christian congregation, or a boy in the navy, deserve the same?

This week, a community-run page on Facebook had a post removed.

It read: “Opinion: @australianlabor with zero social licence continues to spin to spend billions to damage our pristine coast with turbines made in China, tonnes of concrete, and kilometres of cable to generate unreliable electricity for ever-increasing demand. Destroying our economy and environment to save the planet, we deserve and can do better than more taxpayer destruction.”

Meta marked it as “misinformation“ and took it down.

The war on censorship is not about protecting you.

It’s all about strangling out opinions political leaders fear because they go against the narrative they wish to seed. Renewable energy is cheaper even though your bills are going up, and it is better for the environment – despite videos showing forests being blown up to build wind turbines.

In taking down the church video, the wider message is that a young Islamist was allegedly trying to kill a bishop because of his beliefs.

Any reporter knows they need dramatic pictures to go with that, but try to find someone who doesn’t agree with the disgruntled former X (Twitter) employee and eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to take it down.

We have pictures of Australian soldiers emaciated if they survived the worst war camps, such as Ambon, but no photos or videos of what they endured inside those camps exist because torturers never wanted anyone to know.