The rise of ‘right think’ is a curse on everyday freedom

ABC presenter Leigh Sales. Picture: Getty Images

The insidious rise of “right think”, with its legions of morally superior enforcers, is a modern malady that must be challenged. It has infected all levels of public discourse and is being institutionalised under the dubious guise of fact checking and censorship provisions that are designed to protect vested interests and prioritise the state. Under legislation being put to parliament, government will always be considered to be right and academics above rebuke. Anyone who contradicts their messages can be ejected from the public square for spreading misinformation or disinformation.

The irony is that limits to freedom of thought are being tightened when the possibilities for expression and discovery have never been more vast. Examples of censorship and thought policing are ubiquitous. The ABC’s war on discussion about the length of the Uluru Statement from the Heart is merely one example. The public broadcaster has engaged high-profile presenter Leigh Sales to coach more junior staff on how to hold the line and silence discussion.

The Uluru Statement from the Heart on display at the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Regardless of whether the Uluru Statement is one page or many, in a freethinking society the answer would be to encourage everyone to read as many of the documents as possible to understand where the statement came from and the context of its creation. Anthony Albanese’s admission he has not read the documents, with the refrain “why would I?”, is a despairing moment.

Sky News host Sharri Markson has been almost a lone voice in her dogged pursuit of the truth of what happened at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology and whether it played a part in the Covid-19 pandemic. Other media outlets have been incurious and obstructionist to the point of deficiency. The mounting evidence is of a community of scientific experts that has had its doubts about the facility but colluded to keep them hidden from the public. Investigations have been similarly tainted by censorship of facts that should have been made known. This includes the suppression of research by scientists at the US ­Defence ­Intelligence Agency’s National Centre for Medical Intelligence that concluded Covid-19 almost certainly was the result of experiments in a lab and not of natural origin as the world has been led to believe. The same sort of control, suppression of facts and selective release of information has characterised the response of government to the pandemic worldwide.

The P4 laboratory (L) on the campus of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Picture: AFP.

Writing on Monday, Washington correspondent Adam Creighton highlighted how the truth is now selectively policed and that lying is tolerated, even ignored, while good-faith disagreements are savaged. The mounting evidence surrounding the influence-peddling activities of the Biden family is being studiously ignored by an incurious media fixated on Donald Trump. But those who make arguments that challenge the conventional wisdom, which includes having different views on the urgency and effectiveness of slashing carbon dioxide emissions or escalating the war in Ukraine, are cast as malevolent, stupid or liars. Nowhere is the unwelcome trend to information control greater than in the area of climate change and energy.

Consideration of a non-renewables future is off limits. Few would know that hard coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef is at its highest extent in more than three decades, when record-keeping began. As physicist Peter Ridd has explained, the reef now has twice as much coral as in 2012 when it hit a low point after being smashed by major cyclones. But science institutions responsible for the reef have managed to turn what should be positive news into further cause for public concern. The good news was spun as bad by describing the record-equalling 2023 coral cover as a “pause in recovery”. Dr Ridd questions the science institutions and says it is time they were subjected to serious scrutiny of whether they have become ideological and inclined to groupthink.

Hard coral cover on the Great Barrier Reef is at its highest extent in more than three decades,

Comments by American climate scientist Judith Curry, that publishing climate science in the peer-reviewed journal literature has become highly politicised, with gatekeeper editors influenced by mob action from activist scientists, reveal a worrying development. Dr Curry was speaking following the retraction of a paper by Italian scientists on the frequency of major weather and extreme events. The study found there was no evidence of a climate emergency in the record to date.

Rather than challenge the paper in the peer-reviewed literature, as is the scientific method, senior climate scientists made their criticisms in the media and pressured the journal to withdraw it. The associate editor who handled the initial review process said discussion “seems not abnormal and seems a very healthy thing”. He said complaining scientists could be invited to publish a comment. “We should not as a journal refrain or be afraid from a scientific discussion, but it should be in a correct way,” he said. But after a year-long process in which the paper was praised as accurate by some of its reviewers, it was withdrawn by the journal, European Physical Journal Plus. Removal of the paper might be considered a victory for the dogmatic climate elite, but it is a tragedy for the credibility of science and further proof of the overweening nature of right think.