When it comes to free speech we either fight back or shut up

Illustration: Johannes Leak.

When confronting people who do not believe in free speech there are two choices.

Fight back. Or shut up.

Last week Alan Beasley fought back. This ordinary bloke is as mad as hell and he is not going to take it any more. He saw another company that advertises on Sky News succumb to intimidation.

Beasley stepped up because the choices people like him make determine the health and ultimate survival of our democracy.

Speaking to The Australian, the Sydney businessman, who grew up in country NSW, recalled the protagonist in the 1976 movie Network Television host Howard Beale stares down the camera and tells his audience to fight the ­hypocrisies of their time.

“I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it and stick your head out and yell ‘I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more’,” roars the TV host. And millions did.

Beasley stuck his head up last week. He wrote to the NIB board, disgusted that the health insurer pulled its adverts from Andrew Bolt’s program on Sky after Bolt raised questions about the verdict against George Pell.

As an NIB member through Qantas’s health insurance arm Qantas Assure, Beasley denounced NIB for giving into “bullies and intimidation”, entering into a “PC debate”, putting “activists before customers” and “playing politics” instead of focusing on its business.

Beasley asked NIB to admit error and return its advertising to the Bolt show. If not, the Sydney businessman promised NIB he would lobby Qantas to end its association with NIB. He ended his March 6 email to the board with this: “I regard NIB corporate behaviour as gutless.”

Explaining why he took action last week, Beasley tells The Australian. “We don’t as a community stand up for the right thing. If we walk past intimidation and corporate cowardice we are endorsing that behaviour.”

He says ordinary people like him, the silent majority, need to understand they can be part of something bigger: “If more people like me know there are other people standing up against companies who cave in, other people will speak up too.”

Beasley is stunned by NIB’s arrogance: “They can’t possibly know what the majority of their customers think about free speech or this particular issue about Pell.”

In any case: “What has that got to do with providing good value, efficient health insurance?”

A woman called Cassie kicked off this glorious fightback the day before Beasley’s email.

She emailed me about NIB’s pusillanimous decision, along with a cracker of a letter she sent to NIB. Sleeping Giants are midgets from the far Left political spectrum who want views different to theirs shut down, she told NIB

“A word of warning. If I hear NIB has succumbed to bullying by Sleeping Giants and pulls its advertising from Sky, I will move to another health fund. I can be an activist too,” she wrote to NIB.

NIB’s response was craven. Thank you, blah blah, for your concerns. NIB confirmed that Bolt’s views do not reflect those of NIB or many of its members and that the company has decided not to appear in future shows, blah blah blah.

NIB’s retreat from the single most important piece of intellectual machinery that fuels a healthy democracy led Cassie to register her disgust again.

She told NIB she would switch funds and encourage family and friends to do likewise.

“Activism works both ways,” she wrote.

Other Sky viewers have decided to be activists for free speech, abandoning NIB and sticking it to other corporate cowards. On Thursday Michael Fry wrote to Scenic Luxury Cruises, a company he and his wife travelled with last year.

He copied me into that letter, which rebukes Scenic Luxury Cruises for succumbing to “commercial terrorism”.

Fry lays out the facts about the small band of anonymous activists, facts Scenic should have checked for itself.

Andrew Priest, an Edith Cowan University academic, was responsible for 43 per cent of the tweets that formed part of the Sleeping Midgets’ campaign to bully Sky advertisers between January 1 and February 21 this year. Fry admonishes the company for choosing anonymous activists who “would never be customers of Scenic” over a customer base of frequent and well-off travellers like him and his wife.

“We choose to never be customers of Scenic again,” he told Scenic.

The fightback is under way. More and more people understand what is at stake. These anti-intellectual pygmies can’t win open and robust debates so they try to shut down those who challenge their views.

The Sky business model, a news and opinion channel, is their No 1 target in Australia. If they succeed, there will be less honest and open debate in this country.

This way the views of the yapping activists prevail. It is also the road to totalitarianism.

The Sleeping Midgets routinely, as in every week, almost every day, tweet a list of companies that advertise on Sky News programs.

They bully companies into submission, companies either too weak to stand up to them or too lazy to look past a Twitter handle and determine who is behind this anonymous group.

When Sky News drew on experts at BrandWatch to break down the social media activities and piddling numbers behind Sleeping Midgets, the midgets piled on the data firm too.

This group has an app that asks you for your real name and phone number, then targets Sky’s advertisers with preset complaints at the push of a button.

It beggars belief that CEOs and directors who profit from our democracy are too weak to ignore an anonymous Twitter handle that despises free speech.

Here is a list of some of those corporate chickens.

On February 27, Hotondo Homes caved in to a Sleeping Midgets activist who listed their company as an advertiser on Bolt’s show the day after Bolt raised doubts about Pell’s conviction.

“We have confirmation our ads will not run — paid or unpaid — during these types of programs,” the company tweeted back.

Poolwerx pulled its advertising dollars from Bolt’s show as well, bowing and tweeting its capitulation to Sleeping Midgets a day later on February 28.

Hyundai succumbed the same day, when midget activists tweeted to Hyundai about their ads on the Bolt report.

Remember these corporate cowards. Look out too for other companies that pull their advertisements from Sky. The ones that disappear, let them know what you think. They are destroying this country’s heritage of free speech in favour of a small group of activists who don’t want you to hear views that differ from theirs.

Look out for the companies that do believe in freedom of expression, open debate and different views. By advertising on Sky, these companies support a news and opinion channel that drives healthy debate. Your purchasing power translates directly into support for free speech.

One by one we can be activists too, by pulling money from firms that do not support basic tenets of Australian democracy and directing our purchasing to those decent companies that do. When it comes to corporate social responsibility, there is nothing more responsible than supporting the values that allow democracy to thrive.

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