There’s no moral high ground in state censorship

Australia's eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant addresses the National Press Club. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

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Did you know “staring or leering” can be a criminal offence in Victoria? So is “shouting insults” and “unwanted sexualised comments”. Courtesy of Victorian taxpayers, Melbourne tram passengers are reminded daily that they live in a state where the right to free speech, let alone free eye movement, has become a relic of a bygone era.

“Experience it or witness it? Report it to police. Text STOP IT to 0499 455 455,” reads a prominent government advertisement aimed at aggrieved parties, or even annoyed bystanders, keen to waste police resources and potentially ruin someone’s life for the hell of it.

The idea that sensible people apparently could think these laws are reasonable or enforceable, rather than a legal crutch to arbitrarily persecute politically disfavoured groups over frivolous nonsense, is a depressing sign of our times.

It is borne of an insidious totalitarian mindset that seeks to control thought and action whatever the cost. Perhaps these advertisements were a special shock to me, having returned recently from the US, where even in lefty California they would be unthinkable. For all its faults California has the strongest constitutional free speech protections of any US state.

Australia appears to be caught in a boiling frog situation, where legislators are continually chipping away at whatever is left of free speech until it’s too late. A sudden burst of anti-Semitism in NSW and Victoria last year prompted a wholesale reduction in the rights of Australians, likely never to be unwound, at the state and federal level with almost no public debate.

The once admirable push to remove section 18c of the federal Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it illegal to “offend or humiliate”, has disintegrated. Victoria’s legislative updates, passed in April, were unsurprisingly the worst, crippling speech rights for seven million Australians overnight.

The Justice Legislation Amendment (Anti-Vilification and Social Cohesion) Act 2025 makes it illegal to “severely ridicule” any politically favoured group based on “race, religion, disability, gender identity, sex, sexual orientation”. There’s no need for any intent to upset, truth is no defence, and individuals can even claim harm vicariously via what’s called “personal association”.

An extraordinary array of behaviours could now be illegal: stand-up comedy, publication of data on crime or educational achievement by ethnicity, quotation of Bible passages or criticism of our out-of-control immigration intake. Amid a shocking surge in crime in Melbourne prosecutors should have better things to do. I promise to text “STOP IT” if I do see any suspicious leering on the morning commute.

The best that can be said of these news laws and their drafters is they mean well, but they are unlikely to be wielded in good faith. “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime,” is likely to be the guiding principle to laws that essentially criminalise the ordinary messy business of life.

Perhaps out of extreme embarrassment for misjudging everything during the pandemic, the federal bureaucracy is also increasingly obsessed with censorship too.

eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant demanded social media platforms take down videos of the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney last year

In a speech at the National Press Club this week, eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant was demanding the government try to prevent children 16 and under looking at YouTube – in effect curbing parents’ rights to determine what’s best for their children. Again, curbing the amount of trash kids watch might appear laudable but it’s also unworkable and buttering up voters for further, more intrusive rounds of censorship.

The slippery slope isn’t a logical fallacy here: Inman Grant has already demanded social media platforms take down videos she didn’t like for whatever reason, most bizarrely the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney last year, when far more gruesome content is readily available.

Last year she demanded X remove a post by Melbourne woman Celine Baumgarten, who had questioned publicly whether a “Queer Club” was appropriate at a primary school.

My biggest fear of what the Albanese government might do is to revive the so-called Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, which it withdrew from parliament last year. The idea that bureaucrats can arbitrate truth is ludicrous. The bill would unleash a federal censorship apparatus that would make Beijing proud, in effect stopping ordinary Australians from disagreeing with established political and scientific conventional wisdom.

Only mainstream media outlets would be exempt – perhaps a sneaky ruse by the government to gain support for this bill in an age where social media can help ordinary citizens see through government propaganda.

Were the law in place during the pandemic, the dissenters who were ultimately proved right, who hastened the end of destructive mandates, would have been muzzled. Going forward, governments wouldn’t be able to resist stifling criticism of increasingly ridiculous climate change or immigration policies.

We’re creating a society where politicians in parliament and the mainstream media have far more free speech rights than the ordinary citizen. In Britain, police are making 30 arrests a day for “offensive” online messages, according to a recent report in The Times of London. Expect similar wastes of policing resources here too once the new raft of laws and potential laws ramps up.

Amid calls to increase defence spending massively, presumably to defend “our values” from those dastardly totalitarian regimes, it’s worth asking what “our values” are exactly; they appear to have shifted significantly in recent decades.

Indeed, Australia is on track to end up with a censorship industrial complex, developed via ostensibly democratic means, that looks depressingly similar to those imposed by the dictatorship we are told to loath. I’m no expert in Chinese law but I doubt wolf whistles have been criminalised as they have been in Melbourne.

If we want to keep the moral high ground we must tell our politicians to STOP IT, not each other.

Adam Creighton is chief economist at the Institute of Public Affairs.