Dire Press Council ruling a woke-up call for free speech

The media watchdog has joined the tech titans in undermining basic freedoms of expression.

Cartoonist Johannes Leak at his gallery in Ettalong Beach. Picture: Nikki Short

We live in an age when the barbarous theocrats of the Taliban – whose foot soldiers summarily execute perceived opponents or apostates – can host Twitter accounts to promote their extremist views globally, while former US president Donald Trump is banned from the platform. Also using Twitter to promulgate slaughter is Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who rails against the “wolf-like Zionists” of Israel he labels as “malicious, criminal and barbaric” while he suggests a “final solution”.

All this while Sky News Australia was banned from YouTube for a week because it hosted ­robust and diverse views on the most contentious issues of our time, such as pandemic management and Covid-19 treatments.

This is free speech and the contest of ideas distorted and deformed not by community standards or democratic will, but by the feeble posturing of woke, Californian billionaires.

The standards, values and freedoms delivered by the enlightenment, developed by Western liberal democracies, and defended by the blood and treasure of their citizens over centuries, have been overturned on the whim of unaccountable virtue signallers. Too many of us do not understand or value our greatest strengths as a society.

Sadly, the modern left is ambivalent. Free speech and the regulation of public debate in our postmodern era has reached a farcical and dangerous situation where politically correct activists campaign to silence or cancel any views with which they disagree.

The people who once self-­described as the intellectual left or liberal left – choose your favourite oxymoron – proudly claimed to be champions of free speech. Now they strangle it.

The new absolutism of the green left is used as a distorted moral justification to cancel their political opponents or silence inconvenient arguments. They hysterically reframe pet causes such as global warming or the pandemic into existential threats and moral causes so that counter­arguments can be shut down for the good of all.

This is ruthlessly illiberal and blatantly anti-intellectual. On that score it has more in common with the Taliban than it does with our national values.

In Australia, embittered former politicians Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull have teamed up with the green left fringes of the serving cohort, such as Greens senator Sarah Hanson Young, to campaign obsessively against News Corp and Sky News Australia. Rudd has lauded YouTube’s de-platforming of Sky and suggested the broadcasting regulator do the same.

Think about that; an apparently sentient former left-of-centre prime minister applauds a foreign-owned digital giant silencing an Australian media organisation talking to a wide range of experts and commentators about issues important to Australians. Presumably, if News Corp (a global giant with Australian roots) cancelled the views of Labor or the Greens, Rudd would scream blue murder.

The arguments from Rudd and his comrades fall over on first principles. Because they are not motived by principle, but by political or ideological sides.

These critics resent and oppose News Corp and Sky News because, unlike most Western media, these organisations do not have green left views as their default settings, nor do they judge all right-of-centre positions and personalities to be guilty until proven innocent. In short Rudd, Hanson-Young and crew seek to use the power of the state to quash media that amplifies views and causes with which they disagree.

The campaign is motivated more by malice than reason and it is being ventilated through a ­Senate inquiry. It is tempting to dismiss this as an amusing sideshow because it is entertaining, to be sure – a retired pollie’s version of extinction rebellion gluing themselves to the road – but they are pushing for action through government and quasi-government bodies involved in media regulation.

These bodies can be menacing, intolerant and wrongheaded, restricting rather than encouraging a diversity of ideas. Advocates who either refuse to toe the green-left line or openly argue from the right of centre can and have been persecuted in ways that diminish their voices and corral public debate within boundaries set by the virtue signallers.

My experience has been relatively gentle – all I had to endure was the public broadcaster telling lies about my Hindmarsh Island bridge coverage in the 1990s and slandering me as a racist manipulator. Nice. Then, decades later, they responded to my criticism of their political bias by attempting to shame me as a molester of ­canines.

People who know me understand I would never get close enough to a dog to do to Fido what the ABC did to the reputations of George Pell and Christian Porter, or what it did to itself with the “Story of the Century” series on the non-existent Russia collusion conspiracy. But there are people who have seen this sort of partisan vengeance play out through official bodies in a manner that is both unjust and deeply worrying.

Andrew Bolt was found to be in breach of racial discrimination laws by the Federal Court and had columns officially banned – yes, in Australia, not Cuba – because he questioned why people were free to choose the element of their ethnic background they could highlight in order to qualify for preferment or grants. This is hardly a black and white issue, pardon the pun, and is worthy of debate and interrogation – but (wouldn’t you know?) little scrutiny has ­followed.

In 2016, cartoonist Bill Leak was pursued by both the Australian Press Council and the Australian Human Rights Commission (whose “race commissioner” spruiked for complaints) over his provocative cartoon drawing attention to community and family dysfunction at the core of disastrous juvenile detention rates for Indigenous Australians. Leak died suddenly of a heart attack seven months after the cartoon triggered a pile-on from the feral left of Twitter which was taken up by these two bodies – organisations that should defend freedom of expression rather than constrain it.

Now, grotesquely, the same forces are aligned against Johannes Leak who has brilliantly filled his father’s shoes in this newspaper. The APC – in a finding that is either mind-numbingly ignorant or deliberately deceptive – has decided that a cartoon excoriating identity politics and lampooning the tokenism of Joe Biden’s Veep choice and political posturing was really a racist and sexist attack on Kamala Harris.

The Press Council cannot be that naive. It must know that in 2019 Biden’s team briefed out that his Veep choice needed to be a woman of colour in order to take advantage of the Zeitgeist, and that when Biden announced Harris (a former presidential contender who had called him out on race issues) he issued a cringe-worthy and sanctimonious tweet about giving hope to little “black and brown girls”.

Leak told the APC his cartoon was “anti-racist, anti-misogynist and anti-identity politics” and, frankly, you would have to be ­racist, misogynistic or a slave to identity politics to see it any other way. Either that, or you would have to possess the cephalisation of an earthworm.

A cartoonist pricks the bubble of patronising reverse racism and superficial identity politics, and the APC declares it is he who causes racist offence. By backing absurd claims of racism against Leak, instead of seeing race-based politicking by Biden, the body not only exposes itself as an enemy of freedom of expression but also as a weapon of partisan activists – not to mention an artless arbiter comprehending nothing of scepticism, satire, or old-fashioned bulldust detection.

This is how contrarian voices are marginalised with odious labels, opinions are second-guessed and debate is checked. Activists use these bodies as weapons, and they allow their processes to become punishments of drawn-out shaming. It is more civilised and incremental, but it is the same thought control imposed by the Taliban.

Coincidentally, this week I have been reading Fred Pawle’s soon-to-be-released biography of Bill Leak, Die Laughing. It is a ripping read and, as someone who developed a friendship with Bill only in the last few years of his life, I was fascinated by the backstory, his artistic development and his combative relationship with the Archibald Prize.

Bill had enough talent, passion and intelligence to fill three characters – I learned more about art during a half-hour chat looking at paintings on his loungeroom walls than I had from a dozen gallery tours. The biography covers much territory but because of those battles just before Bill’s death, Pawle focuses intently on issues of free expression.

He quotes Bill at the launch of one of his cartoon anthologies in 2012 – before he ran foul of the PC mob. “These days what passes for leftism seems to me to be more like an insidious, encroaching form of wowserism,” said Bill, showing it was not only his paintbrush that was sharp.

“There’s a censoriousness about the new leftists that I find insulting. Being of the left used to mean you had a deep belief in the collective good sense of the masses. The people who claim to be left-wing now are all of the view that the masses can’t be trusted to think for themselves – they have to be told what to think, what they’re allowed to say – even what they should eat, what they’re ­allowed to drink.”

In the decade since, it has only got worse. If it wasn’t so deadly ­serious, you would die laughing.

You can pre-order Die Laughing via www.dielaughing.org.au