How Leftists Are Gaslighting Australia With Their Murdoch Madness

Kevin Rudd's claim that the Murdoch media is a "cancer on democracy" is gaslighting the Australian people.

Last week a Rudd-initiated petition was submitted to the House of Representatives calling for a Royal Commission into "the strength and diversity of Australian news media".  In case anyone was in any doubt over what that meant, Rudd called the Murdoch media a "cancer on democracy" when announcing the petition on Twitter last month.  The petition had over 500,000 signatures including Malcolm Turnbull's.

Rupert Murdoch owns a lot of real estate in the real world, but surely not as much as he occupies in the heads of the Australian left.  In keeping with many on the left's preference for character smear over debate, anyone straying remotely from the orthodoxy on climate change, the economy, or COVID-19 policy is accused of being an agent of the #Murdochcracy.

Of course, Rudd's beef with Murdoch isn't about democracy at all.  Rudd's toys have come out of the cot because large swathes of the Australian population still stubbornly refuse to sign up to many of the modern left's ideological mutations.

Many don't seem to think climate change warrants impoverishing their children.  Or they quite like the idea that people be judged on their merits rather than their gender or race.  It seems to not have occurred to Rudd and Turnbull that people may have legitimate reasons for these positions that have nothing to do with a New York almost-nonagenarian playing underwater 8D backgammon with our democracy.

But having seen the city I love destroyed by the Andrews government in the last eight months, what stands out about Rudd's claim is its stunning audacity.  Because we may never know the full depths of the corruption, incompetence and lies of the Andrews government in 2020, but we wouldn't have got within a bull's roar without the News Corp journalists.

Maybe it's just my Murdoch-addled brain speaking here, but as the Andrews government catastrophically mishandled almost every aspect of the pandemic ― and attempted to victim-blame the Victorian people ― it's been the likes of Rachel Baxendale, Gabriella Power, and Andrea Crothers that have held them to account.

And of course, in about five minutes the peerless Peta Credlin uncovered more malfeasance than the Coate Inquiry into hotel quarantine was able to over a period of months.

At a time when simultaneously the government was making possibly the worst public policy mistakes in Australian history, wielding unprecedented power, and parliament was greatly restricted, a handful of journalists in Andrews' press conferences provided one of the few accountability checks the Victorian government faced.

The fact that even this was characterised by many as a Murdoch plot is extraordinary ― as if a political leader having to answer questions they'd rather not is some kind of assault on democracy (as opposed to being the opposite).

Besides, if Andrews was that worried about the News Corp journalists being mean to him, perhaps he could've reconsidered the necessity of daily Castro-length press conferences throughout a crisis that for all its horror has at this point, fortunately, claimed fewer lives than Australia's annual road toll.

The performance of the News Corp journalists in these press conferences meant something.  Politics is not a spectator sport for Victorians anymore.  In the dark winter months as despair settled over Melbourne, it meant something that some journalists were able to extract a measure of accountability over what the government was doing to us.

I say "some journalists" because of the government-funded elephant in the room.  Too often the ABC shamefully ran interference for the government as the bodies piled up, businesses were sent to the wall and families were stretched to breaking point.

Victorians should never forget their betrayal.

And to make the most painfully obvious of points, Rudd and Turnbull may not like the Murdoch media, but they don't have to pay for it.  A poll commissioned in February found that only 32% of people thought the ABC represented the views of ordinary Australians.  The rest of us have to pay for the ABC so that they can tell us how terrible we are.

In short, Rudd thinks an independent media organisation that people can decide for themselves if they wish to consume is "a cancer on democracy".  But the state media organisation that we are forced to pay for, covered for a tyrannical government in Victoria, and uses the power of the state to tell us how wrong most of us are, is hailed as independent, objective, and balanced.

I think this is what the signatories of the anti-Murdoch petition would call gaslighting.

18C On Steroids

The idea that a sitting Tasmanian senator can be dragged before the state Anti-Discrimination Commissioner for her public comments shows the draconian reach of Australia's speech restricting anti-discrimination laws.  Claire Chandler, the Liberal Senator for Tasmania, revealed in federal parliament earlier this month that she had received a letter from the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner, Sarah Bolt, summoning the senator to attend a conciliation conference to answer for comments she had made in an article in the Mercury in July about — ironically enough — free speech in Australia.

In the article, Senator Chandler bemoaned the rise of cancel culture and the way it silences people for their views about sensitive topics like sex and gender identification and commented that "you don't have to be a bigot to recognise the differences between the male and female sexes and understand why women's sports, single-sex change rooms and toilets are important".

A Tasmanian constituent emailed Chandler to ask whether the senator understood the difference between "sex" and "gender".  In response, Chandler said "I do understand the difference.  That is why I have made the point in the my article that women's sports, women's toilets and women's changerooms are designed for people of the female sex and should remain that way".

Chandler's comments about gender identity and what this means for women-only facilities may not be shared by all Tasmanians, but they are undoubtedly shared by many;  and those who share them deserve to have their views articulated by their representative in the Senate.  That is not to say that only parliamentarians should have free speech, but one of the lessons from this is that if a representative of an entire state doesn't have freedom of speech, then it spells a dangerous precedent for those they represent.

Under the Tasmanian anti-discrimination legislation it was open to the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner to reject the complaint for being frivolous or vexatious.  A complaint about the comments of a member of parliament as a part of a social and political debate in a public forum is the very definition of frivolous ― and yet the Commissioner has accepted the complaint in part, commenting that the Senator's comments were "problematic" and questioned whether people "should be subjected to material that is arguably offensive on the basis of gender identity and intersex variations of sex characteristics".

Senator Chandler had even posed in the Mercury article that perhaps "an open letter signed by 150 writers and academics in defence of free speech offers a glimmer of hope that we can put a stop to the anti-democratic so-called cancel culture that has taken root".  That glimmer of hope has perhaps been extinguished by institutionalised cancel culture itself, namely the Anti-Discrimination Commissioner and her Equal Opportunity agency.

If there is a cancel culture hierarchy, then anti-discrimination commissions must occupy one of the most senior positions.  Funded by taxpayers but completely independent of taxpayer accountability or control, these "independent" agencies have free reign to take discrimination complaints and pursue those who express thoughts that are out of step with modern, cosmopolitan orthodoxy backed up by a progressive elite who prefer censorship to debate.

This attack on free speech is allowed because of the chillingly broad provisions of Tasmania's anti-discrimination laws.  Everybody is familiar by now with the federal hate speech laws under s.18C of the Racial Discrimination Act which makes it unlawful for a person to offend or insult a person because of their race, colour, or ethnic or national origin.  Section 18C is an unacceptable violation of freedom of speech, but the Tasmanian laws go even further.  Section 17 of the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Act 1998 makes it unlawful for a person to engage in any conduct which offends, humiliates, insults, or ridicules another person because of one of 14 protected attributes they possess, including race, age, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Curiously the Tasmanian Anti-Discrimination Commissioner rejected the complaint that related to the Mercury article, but accepted the part of the complaint that related to the correspondence about the article.  But there is no firm rule about why the Commissioner would say the complaint about the Mercury article is lacking in substance when a former Commissioner accepted a complaint only a few years ago that was of a very similar substance.  Back in September 2015 an anti-discrimination complaint was made by a Greens activist against the Catholic Archbishop of Hobart, Julian Porteous, for the publication of pamphlets which explained the church's position on the definition of marriage.  The complaint that the pamphlets were offensive on the basis of a person's sexual orientation was received and investigated by the Commission.  Then, as now, the content of the pamphlet was not directed towards the complainant but was considered to fall within the ambit of state anti-discrimination laws.  The decision whether to accept or reject a complaint is at the discretion of the Commissioner, which leaves freedom of speech for Tasmanians in a precarious state.

To be clear at this stage a complaint has been made and the complaint may eventually be rejected or fail at a tribunal hearing.  But the process is a part of the punishment under these kinds of laws.  The threat of compulsory conferences or mediations and tribunal hearings, and the public tarring of being associated with alleged breaches of hate speech laws, is used to scare people from speaking freely.  This is known as the law's chilling effect on free speech.

And there is nothing more chilling than seeing even elected politicians or mainstream religious leaders hauled before anti-discrimination agencies.  And that's the point — the comments made were a part of a genuine public debate, which is why they attract these complaints.  By silencing the loudest voices, anti-discrimination laws are being used to shape political debate itself.  And as long as they are on the statute books, the message is clear:  if they can get Senators and Archbishops, they can get you too.

COVID Dystopia Comes To Melbourne

It was the image that shocked Australia and soon went global.  A pregnant woman, handcuffed in her own kitchen, in front of her children, as police officers seized every computer, tablet and cell phone in the house before frog-marching her off to the station.

It's the treatment that Australians are used to seeing meted out to drug traffickers, suspected terrorists and child pornography rings.  But in Zoe Lee Buhler's case, her "crime" was a Facebook post.

Zoe had tried to organise a protest against coronavirus restrictions in place in the state of Victoria.  For this, she was charged with "incitement", and now faces a sentence of up to 15 years.  She has been released on bail, and will go to court in January.

The most remarkable thing, though, is it's taken until now for some sort of protest movement to emerge.  Melbourne — Victoria's capital city — has been under some form of lockdown since March.  When the coronavirus first hit, the premiers governing Australia's eight states and territories descended into a kind of unspoken competition to see who could take the "toughest action" against the virus — that is, which leader could close the most businesses, destroy the most jobs, and stifle the most liberties in the name of being seen to be "doing something" about the virus.

It was a contest that hard-left Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews won by a mile.  Almost six months later, Melbourne is still under what is by far the strictest lockdown in Australia, and probably the world.  At time of writing, a city-wide curfew applies between 8pm and 5am.  Melburnians are permitted to leave the house for exercise for an hour a day and in groups of no more than two.  You're allowed to go out to get food as well, but only by yourself, and only once a day.  The increasingly few people with jobs must carry a government-issued permit indicating that they're allowed to go to work — and even then only if your job is deemed "essential".

If this shatters your idea of Australia as a rugged, relaxed, irreverent wonderland, then I apologise.  That Australia died long ago, to the extent it ever really existed at all.  Australia has no First Amendment, and its political culture is closer to continental Europe than the U.S.  Fundamental freedoms have been largely left to conventions inherited from the British.  They have proved fragile, though nobody ever imagined that they would be this fragile.

The fact that Melbourne has allowed itself to be decimated in the name of the coronavirus is as predictable as it is heartbreaking.  It's a city a bit like San Francisco or Seattle — A beautiful, vibrant, dynamic metropolis that until now had among the best food, culture and nightlife in the world.  But like America's coastal cities, left-wing politics is a package deal — street art in aid of one asinine cause or another almost becomes part of the scenery.

Daniel Andrews knows this, and exploits it.  Somewhere along the way, he picked up the playbook of Democrats who preside over dysfunction, poverty, crime and thinly-veiled corruption, and make up for it all by wheeling out some woke gimmick every so often — almost always involving vast sums of public money.  The coronavirus has given him the best talking point of all:  "The economy versus human life".

It's the recurring theme in Andrews' interminable press conferences — daily sermons that are so theatrical and dishonest they would make Andrew Cuomo blush.  Behind him always, a purple banner with the state government's Orwellian coronavirus slogan, which can also be found plastered on billboards all over the city:  Staying Apart Keeps Us Together.

The media response is — with a few exceptions — fawning and uncritical, but it's the only real check or balance we have:  The state parliament has barely sat since March, and coronavirus restrictions have been made by executive fiat under dubious "emergency powers".

All that said, Andrews' hitherto insurmountable hold on power is slipping.  The lockdown has wrought enough joblessness, business closures and outright despair that people are starting to take notice.  Even in the People's Republic of Victoria, the mood is turning against the man now widely derided as "Chairman Dan".

But in the meantime, Melbourne's lockdowns continue.  Andrews sought an extension for his emergency powers, which the parliament inexplicably gave him.  And over the weekend, he announced a convoluted "roadmap to reopening" which basically means that Melburnians will enter Australia's sweltering summer under house arrest, and will be holding their Christmas dinners via Zoom.

It's a cautionary tale, and then some.  For the sake of a nasty strain of viral pneumonia, Victorians eagerly cashed in their freedoms for the promise of safety.  In so doing, we have turned one of the greatest cities in the world to a dystopian hellscape with no end in sight.

Australia's Covid Police State

Last week's arrest of Zoe Buhler by Australian police, the video of which swept the world, should terrify every person who believes in liberal democracy.

Buhler, a 28-year-old pregnant mother, was arrested at her home near Ballarat, Victoria, on Wednesday.  She was handcuffed in front of her family, had her computer and phones confiscated, and was led out of her house by the police.

What had she done that was deserving of such heavy-handed treatment?  What had she done that made it worth subjecting her family to the sight of seeing her in handcuffs?

Very little.  She had attempted, through a posting on Facebook, to organise a peaceful anti-lockdown gathering in Ballarat ― a town with just four active cases of coronavirus.

Look at the exact words of Buhler's Facebook post, and ask yourself whether it warrants police intervention:

'PEACEFUL PROTEST.  All social-distancing measures are to be followed so we don't get arrested please.  Please wear a mask unless you have a medical reason not to.  September 5th is FREEDOM DAY!'

Victoria police see those words as criminal activity ― "the planning and encouragement of protest activity".  As a result, Buhler is due to appear in court in January next year.  She could be jailed for up to 15 years.

All for a Facebook post.

The reaction of Australian politicians to Buhler's arrest is even more worrying.  Assistant commissioner Luke Cornelius, one of Victoria's most senior police officers, said he was "absolutely satisfied" with the arrest.  The only thing he regretted was the video, and the "optics" of the arrest of a pregnant woman, which he said were "terrible".  So there you have it:  the only thing Cornelius regrets about the arrest was that the public saw it.

This is an astonishing change of attitude from Cornelius.  Victorians remember in June when he said of the then imminent Black Lives Matter protests that he and the police "absolutely understand the sentiment and the anger that lies behind that and we are very keen to support the community in giving a voice to their concerns".  The authorities promptly allowed over 10,000 Victorians to march in Melbourne without being fined.

It seems it was okay for BLM supporters to voice their concerns, but not for anti-lockdown protesters like Buhler.  The message is clear.  If you are going to protest, it better be for a cause the elites support.

For his part, Victoria premier Daniel Andrews claimed not to have seen the footage of the arrest, even though it was featured on the websites of every paper in Australia, and, among others, in the New York Post, the Daily Mail and on CNN.  But no, the premier of Victoria just missed it.  Other things occupied his mind.  It's not a good look ― he seems unconcerned with the state of democratic society, even as it crumbles around him.

Buhler is not the only person to have been arrested in Victoria in relation to lockdown protests this week.  Another man had his house broken into by police for saying he would go to an anti-lockdown protest.  He was tackled to the ground and handcuffed in his living room.

Victoria is now a police state.  That is the simple and depressing truth of all this.  If the government feels that you are standing in the way of its goals, then your freedoms are forfeited and you will be arrested.

What's more, Victoria's lockdown measures really do need protesting.  If you leave your house after 8pm, you will be fined.  If you stray more than five kilometres from your house, you will be fined.  If you visit your father on Father's Day, you will be fined.  If you go outside with more than one other person for exercise, you will be fined.  And if you protest against any of this, you will be arrested.

Victorians are living in a battered state.  They have been cut off from our friends, our family and our work.  Cut off from so many things that make life worth living ― their culture, their sport, their cafes, their restaurants, their museums, their nightlife.  And they have been bullied by a government that tolerates no opposition to what is going on.

Daniel Andrews speaks of bringing Victoria to a Covid-normal.  That's what they're all adjusting to as well.  Because no Victorian sees the state ever returning to actual normal.

Peter Ridd Challenge Goes To the Heart Of A Free Society

Peter Ridd has decided to fight last week's decision in favour of James Cook University, and the case is of such public importance that the High Court simply must allow the appeal to be heard.

The Ridd case is much more than a mere workplace relations dispute between an academic and his employer.  It is even bigger than a dispute about climate change.

It is about the free speech crisis at our universities, and goes to the heart of the "cancel culture" epidemic engulfing the Western world.

Ridd is a Townsville-based marine geophysicist and Great Barrier Reef expert, whose 30-year academic career effectively ended when he started disputing the conventional wisdom that climate change was "killing" the reef.  He subsequently took the university to court, winning $1.2m in compensation for his unlawful sacking.  Last week, the Federal Court overturned that win in a 2-1 decision.

In deciding whether to grant special leave for the appeal, the High Court will consider whether the case involves "a question of law that is of public importance".  The Ridd matter easily meets this threshold.  It would be the first time the High Court has been called upon to consider the meaning of "academic and intellectual freedom", which is used in enterprise agreements covering staff at almost all Australian universities.

The court's decision will therefore have very real consequences in terms of university governance, and the extent to which administrators tolerate controversial (and, often, commercially inconvenient) opinions from the professoriate.

Should "intellectual freedom" be limited by the whims of university administrators, as JCU is arguing?  Or should it be wide enough to allow for the kind of controversial, but honestly held opinions for which Ridd was ultimately sacked?

The Federal Court's answer to that question is deeply disturbing.  In its judgment last week, the majority seemed to suggest that free speech on campus is past its use-by date.

"There is little to be gained in resorting to historical concepts of academic freedom," scoffed justices Griffiths and Derrington.  For good measure, the majority judgment quoted — arguably out of context — from an academic textbook outlining "a host of new challenges", like "the rise of social media" and "student demands for accommodations such as content warnings and safe spaces".

If nothing else, the Federal Court has exposed just how much our public institutions have been corroded by modern cancel culture.  The free speech crisis at our universities has been apparent for years, but now the hypersensitivity of woke undergraduates is being taken seriously by our penultimate court.  It sets a precedent, and a dangerous one.  While The Australian does not suggest the judges acted improperly, it is worrying that the idea the boundaries of free speech should be defined by self-appointed cultural arbiters and anonymous Twitter mobs is on the verge of formal legal recognition.

This is not about the polite notion of so-called "acceptable limits" to free speech.  It is a radical departure from how our society treats knowledge.  Former opinion editor Bari Weiss recognised this dynamic in her sensational resignation from The New York Times recently:  "I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history," Weiss wrote.  "Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing moulded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative."

You could replace the words "journalism" and "history" with almost any intellectual discipline.  Woke revisionism has trashed the humanities faculties almost beyond repair.  Now it is creeping into the "hard sciences".  That is how we have arrived at a situation in which a respected academic such as Ridd is put through hell for offering a critique of the "settled science" of climate change.

If our judicial system lets JCU get away with it, every academic in the country — present and future — will be forced to choose between speaking the truth and putting bread on the table.

And for students, the Ridd case will mean the difference between tertiary education as a rigorous intellectual pursuit that invites critical thinking, or as rigid dogma that must be internalised and regurgitated in order to secure an expensive piece of paper with one's name on it.

Intellectual freedom and free speech are not antiquated notions.  They are ancient and important rights, and "public institutions" that dispense with them are not public at all.

The issues raised by the Ridd matter must at least be considered by the highest court in the land.  The implications for our most basic freedoms give every Australian a stake in its outcome.

The Federal Court Delivers A Devastating Blow Against Free Speech

The Federal Court has devastating blow against mainstream Australians, against freedom of speech and against freedom of speech on climate change by overturning the earlier decision in the Federal Circuit Court which held that Dr Peter Ridd was unlawfully dismissed by James Cook University.

Alarmingly, this decision shows that contractual provisions guaranteeing intellectual freedom do not protect academics against censorship by university administrators.  The time has come for the Morrison Government to intervene.

This has been Australia's David vs Goliath battle, with Peter Ridd on one side, backed by thousands of ordinary Australians, and JCU on the other side who secured some of the most expensive legal representation in the country in Bret Walker SC to stifle the free speech of one of its own staff.

Dr Ridd, a professor of physics at JCU, was sacked by the university for misconduct for questioning the climate change science around the Great Barrier Reef and for public statements made on the Jones & Co Sky News program.

He is now apparently considering his legal options in relation to a challenge in the High Court of Australia.  If he does decide to take up that fight, I ― as well as thousands of mainstream Australians ― will continue to support his fight for freedom of speech on climate change.

JCU has engaged some of the most expensive legal representation in the country to stifle the free speech of one of its own staff, despite crying poor about university funding in the wake of coronavirus.  It creates a massive chilling effect for any academic engaging in public debate in Australia.

The University's shameful actions prove without doubt there is a crisis of free speech at Australian universities.  Many academics are censured, but few are prepared to speak out and risk their career, particularly if faced with the prospect of legal battles and possible bankruptcy.

The case has identified a culture of censorship when it comes to challenging claims surrounding climate change and the Great Barrier Reef.  JCU to this date has never attempted to disprove claims made by Dr Ridd about the Great Barrier Reef.

Vision Of Justice

"Justice is the end [goal] of government.  It is the end of civil society," argued James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers and the fourth president of the United States, in the Federalist No. 51.  Writing in the year that the First Fleet of British ships arrived at Sydney, Madison understood that citizens need to believe in the fundamental justness of a political regime for it to survive the test of time.

This is why it is short-sighted to dismiss as juvenile the tearing down of statues, cancelling of old movies and removal of products from shelves deemed offensive.

These actions are a part of a broader conception of justice based on identity politics, which holds that the primary moral unit and therefore that which is of most relevance to justice and politics is group identity.  What matters is not the content of one's character, but what biological, racial, or gender tribe one belongs to.

The identity politics view of justice is incompatible with the traditional Western notion of justice which is based on the inherent dignity and equality of all individuals, from which notions such as equality before the law and the rule of law are derived.

These two competing conceptions of justice were on display in the recent Black Lives Matter protests.

Mainstream Australians who had been patiently and diligently obeying social distancing rules were exasperated that apparently an entirely different set of rules applied to the protesters.  But what actually happened was that two entirely different regimes were operating side by side:  the mainstream regime based on the equal application of the law and the identity politics regime based on grievance, victimhood and claimed racial injustice.

Worse, the elites either actively encouraged the protests which were attended by at least four federal Labor MPs and one Greens MP, or they permitted them to take place without consequence.  The argument that it was too difficult to enforce the law given the number of protestors was clearly a nonsense.  State and federal governments have shut down roughly 80 per cent of economic and social life since mid-March.  If they wanted to enforce the law, they could have.

The protests are just the latest example of a failure of the elites to take the side of mainstream Australians.

The principal institutions of cultural influence in Australia have for decades relentlessly foisted onto us the divisive framework of identity politics.  It permeates the editorials of the ABC, tutorial rooms of universities, board reports of major corporations, pre-game rituals of major sporting codes, memos written by public servants and reports authored by taxpayer-funded bodies such as the Australian Human Rights Commission.

From the boardroom to the classroom and everywhere in between, mainstream Australians are consistently berated as racist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic climate deniers.

The reason why Labor, the Greens, and GetUp! campaign against any cut, or even a temporary freeze, to ABC funding is they know the ABC is the chief mouthpiece for identity politics.  This is why GetUp! worked hand in glove with Labor to make ABC funding a central issue at the recent Eden-Monaro by-election.

Winston, the protagonist in George Orwell's 1984, remarked that under Big Brother the past has been "abolished … every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed."  Regime congruence demands that the past must be brought into line with the present.

If Australia is irredeemably and structurally racist, as the identitarian Left contends, then justice demands it be deconstructed and re-written so that the British brought to Australia not liberty, democracy and equality, but violence, racism, and slavery.  This is why statues must be toppled, rather than more being added, and history books re-written, rather than to simply have more discussion of our history.  The point is not to debate, but to alienate mainstream Australians from their own country.

A sign of things to come is the New York Times' 1619 Project, whose objective it is to reframe American history, "understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very centre of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."  The project argues modern America was not founded in 1776 but in 1619 when African slaves were first brought to the British colonies of North America.  The point being that America was founded on slavery not liberty.  A school curriculum with content based on the 1619 Project has to date been adopted in more than 3,500 classrooms in all 50 states across America.

If this is not a culture war, then nothing is.

Fortunately, mainstream Australians have proven remarkably resilient to the division encouraged by the elites.  According to polling undertaken in 2019 and 2020, 71 per cent of Australians believe Australia has a history to be proud of, 88 per cent are proud to be Australian, and 92 per cent believe freedom of speech is an important Australian value.

This polling reflects a reality that there is more that unites than divides us as a country.

Two nurses or mechanics living in Dandenong, Penrith, Longreach, or Elizabeth of different racial backgrounds have far more in common than they do not.  Most likely they own a home and are raising their own family or they aspire to, they work hard and want a better life for themselves and their family, they are honest, dutifully pay their taxes and follow the law, they take people as they are, and if they don't themselves work in a small business one of their neighbours does.

The central debate today is a regime-level one about what it means to be an Australian, with mainstream Australian values on one side and identity politics on the other.  But a house divided cannot stand, and only one vision of justice for Australia will prevail.

Coronavirus: Cover For A Fresh Attack On Free Speech In Victoria

Victorians have experienced an unprecedented trashing of their rights and liberties in response to the coronavirus pandemic, but now the temporary problem is being used an excuse to impose new and permanent limits to their freedom of speech.

The recent call to expand hate speech laws comes in the context of an ongoing parliamentary inquiry into the Racial and Religious Tolerance Amendment Bill.

This bill was introduced into the Victorian parliament in August 2019 and as drafted promises to expand and supercharge anti-vilification laws.

In an email recently sent to anyone who has already participated in that inquiry, the Legal and Social Issues Committee announced that it was extending the inquiry to consider the impacts of the coronavirus.

In the email Committee chairman, Labor MP Natalie Suleyman, claimed that "the need to examine the effectiveness of Victoria's anti-vilification laws has become even more apparent with the reported rise in racially motivated incidents resulting from the pandemic."

The "reported rise in racially motivated incidents" almost certainly refers to claims made by the Australian Human Rights Commission and shared to the ABC in April that one in four people who reported racial discrimination in February and March linked it to the coronavirus pandemic.

However, this is a vague claim and the raw numbers were not released.  The claim as reported by the ABC refers to "racial discrimination" which includes but is distinct from racial vilification complaints made under Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 which prohibits public acts which offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate another person because of their race or ethnic origin.

Regardless of the validity of the number, it is true that any instances of abuse on racial grounds is a human and moral failure and it may be the case that the distress and anxiety related to the pandemic has manifested in poor social behaviour.

However, it cannot be assumed that every claim of discrimination is valid.  Anti-discrimination commissions are generally required to inquire into all complaints that are submitted to them regardless of whether or not they are frivolous or vexatious.

Mixing the claims of COVID-related abuse with the Victorian parliamentary inquiry is a transparent attempt to strengthen the case for expanding anti-vilification laws in the state.

And yet the amendments before parliament are not directed towards COVID-related events.  Legislation tends to be written in general terms, and general terms will apply more broadly than the specific harms they are intended to address.

The bill being considered by parliament would lower the threshold for making complaints of serious vilification, give the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission new information gathering powers to violate a person's right to silence, and would add gender, disability, and sexual orientation as new "protected attributes" under the Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001.

This law currently makes it unlawful for a person to engage in conduct that "incites hatred against, serious contempt for, or revulsion or severe ridicule" of another person because of their race or religious belief or activity.

Just like Section 18C, Victoria's anti-vilification laws are vaguely worded and don't refer to an objective standard for unlawful speech.  It will leave the door open for a judge to draw their own conclusions about what kind of speech is "likely to" "incite hatred" or "severe ridicule".

There is no meaningful difference between an act that is likely to incite hatred and an offensive act because it is based on the subjective assessment of whether an expression is likely to evoke an emotional reaction in another person.  Subjective laws mean you can never be sure when you will be deemed to be breaking the law since you can't anticipate how the law will be applied.

If you are driving 112km in a 100km zone, you know that you are over the limit.  In this case, the offending person won't actually know if they're committing an offence, because "likely to" is so broad.

It is a poor basis for designing laws, and an exceptionally poor basis for laws which restrict one of our most important freedoms.

Since all complaints are heard and investigated, dealing with the process can itself be the process.  The risk of expressing an opinion will frighten people into silence.

This chilling on speech is a feature of all anti-vilification laws and will be a feature of the Victorian amendments.  Those pushing for greater powers for anti-discrimination commissions or expanded anti-vilification laws have not proven that the current laws have failed or that the proposed laws are relevant to the problem they seek to address.

Victorians should be deeply sceptical of any attempt to use the coronavirus to achieve lasting and unrelated policy goals, especially those that would curtail their liberties and freedom of speech.

University O-Week Censors Excel Themselves

"Free speech crisis?  What crisis?"  Uttered in freaky unison, this frequen­t denial from university vice-chancellors has allowed them to resume normal programming.

That consists of VCs putting their heads in the sand rather than confronting those trying to nobble intellectual diversity on campus.  It includes VCs sending long emails about how proud they are of their diversity programs, with no sense of the irony that diversity of opinion is not part of that program.  And it means VCs devoting more energy to attracting foreign stud­ents than defending freedom of expression.

How much longer can univer­sity leaders ignore the accelerating rhythm to raids on free speech at Australian universities?  Today, the most brazen opponents of free speech within universities are those who control student unions.  Funded by other students' money, the leaders of student unions use their union muscle to control what other students hear, read and learn.  Not content with running social events, defending students' rights or holding university management to account, a small group of students have assumed a new role as campus censor.  And they imagine that if they provide a band and a BBQ, they can flex their polit­ical arm without reproach.

On Tuesday afternoon, the student association at Melbourne's Monash University, which runs Orientation Week stalls, BBQs and other events aimed at offering students "a diverse introduction to Monash", rejected an application from Generation Liberty to be part of the program's activities.

Generation Liberty is a program run for young Australians, includi­ng university students, introduc­ing them to ideas, arguments, and perspectives that they may have missed at school or university.  The program is a big hit;  its growth, especially over the past 12 months, points to a real hunger for knowledge not addressed by schools and universities.

In an email, events officer Michel­e Fredregill from the Monash­ Student Association told fellow Monash student Luca Rossi, a Generation Liberty co-ordina­tor at the university:  "We have carefully reviewed your booking request and discussed it internally.  Regretfully we must decline your booking application on the basis of our terms and conditions.  Generation Liberty's positions on issues such as climate change do not align with MSA's."

This is what happens when zealotry is threatened by facts.  There is nothing in the terms and conditions to justify denying Genera­tion Liberty's application to be part of O-Week, which kicks off on Monday.

In any case, a student union, or any other body, cannot use "Ts & Cs" to contract out of obligations under Victoria's Equal Opportunity Act 2010 not to discriminate against a person on the basis of their political beliefs or activities.

More sinister is MSA's reference to not aligning with "Generation Liberty's positions on issues such as climate change".  Generation Liberty has no "position" on climate change.  Gen Lib produces research­ based on facts:  the rest is left up to who is reading, listening or watching papers, podcasts or YouTube videos.

Rossi, 19, has hit back at this MSA censorship.  "As a student at Monash, it is insulting for your ­student association, who supposedly represents you, to basically say you can't be trusted with your own thoughts, we have to think for you."

The Monash law/arts student features in a series of Gen Lib YouTube videos launched late last year called What I Wasn't Told.

At last count, What I Wasn't Told … About Climate Change had attracted just shy of 200,000 views.  The video includes links for the curious to read the research that justifies every statement.

Rossi says had Gen Lib been given the chance to join O-Week, "we would have set up a stall, handed out some stickers and badges, and if some students want to have a chat with us, then we give them the idea of freedom.  And that's it."

What exactly are the officeholders of the student union at Monash afraid of?  That some ­inquisitive students might grab a vegan burger from the MSA BBQ, then wander over to the Gen Lib stall and pick up a free sticker ­carrying the Jordan Peterson quote "In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive"?

Or maybe they fear the badge carrying these words from Ricky Gervais:  "Just because you're offended doesn't mean you're right."

Another badge says:  "Make ­Orwell Fiction Again."

The only steadfast position taken by Gen Lib is a belief in open inquiry and students thinking for themselves.  Clearly this belief in intellectual diversity does not align with the MSA.

Rossi, one of 16 Gen Lib campus co-ordinators at 15 Australian universities, is frustrated by the lack of transparency, too.  "It's shady," he says, alluding to the decision by MSA president James McDonald to fob it off as an "operations issue" in answer to Rossi's request for more details as to why the student union rejected Gen Lib's application.

"It's basically as little transpar­ency as possible:  'You're not allowed­ to be here because we don't agree with your views.  Now please go away'," says Rossi.

Alas, passing the buck about incursio­ns into intellectual diversity happens at the highest levels about an issue that should be embedded in the DNA of every serious ­university.

When the student guild at the Queensland University of Technology refused Gen Lib's applic­ation to be part of Market Week last month, vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil learned about it from the media and responded by ­saying QUT was committed to "a variety of contesting viewpoints".

But when this asserted belief in contesting viewpoints has not filtere­d down to the student guild, it is clear that intellectual diversity is not embedded in QUT's culture.

The dirty little secret is that stud­ent unions are baying campus censors, too.  And it takes only a handful of students who control events such as Market Week at QUT and O-Week at Monash to undermine intellectual diversity for the rest of the student population.  My research compiled last year revealed that 59 per cent of students believe they are sometimes prevented from voicing their opinions on controversial issues by other students.

For student unions, freedom of speech is a controversial issue.

It is a stark failure of logic and leadership when VCs try to dodge responsibility by saying stud­ent unions are "independent" from university administration.  Student unions hold functions on campus, they are meant to represent other university students, and student unions are partly funded by ­compulsory student services and amenities fees paid by every stud­ent, except international ones.

Who then, if not university ­administrators, will hold these stud­ent censors to account?

It is not unreasonable for VCs, acting on behalf of all students, to require students within student unions or guilds to commit, in practice, to freedom of expression, open debate and intellectual diversity.  That starts with O-Week ­activities.

Instead, there is a failure of accounta­bility right up and down the line.  Just over a week ago, new Tasmanian Liberal senator Claire Chandler questioned professor Nick Saunders, chief commissioner of the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, the body charged with holding universities to their part of the funding deal — universities receiv­e federal funding from taxpayers in return for delivering intellec­tual inquiry on campus.  Saunders said the regulatory body has no authority to rein in censorship by student unions.

Chandler tells Inquirer:  "One of the real policy questions that has to be answered here is:  does a university's obligation to promote free speech on campus extend to student unions … given that these unions are getting funding from universities, through services and amenities fees that are compulsory?"

Of course it should.  More than that, it is time to restart the battle over compulsory fees that prop up these student censors.  Whereas the Coalition government abolished­ compulsory student unionism in 2005, the Gillard governmen­t reintroduced them in 2010 in the form of the services and amenities fee.  Ten years later, stud­ent unions are using these compulsory fees to fund their censorship­ of ideas and people on campus.

Chandler, who is passionate about universities fostering ­genuine intellectual freedom to sharpen young students' minds, says that if the model code recommended by former High Court chief justice Robert French in his review of free speech at Australian universities doesn't capture oblig­ations of student unions to free speech, then this "gap" needs to be addressed.

Fill the gap, by all means, but a code will not necessarily change a culture.

I saw a similar problem with the ABC board five years ago.  There was, and remains, a deeply embedded culture among journalists, producers and higher levels of the tax-funded media behemo­th opposed to the intellectual diversity that is explicitly requir­ed under its charter.

Internal codes which purported to commit the ABC to their legislative charter made no difference up against that culture.  Instead­, even egregious cases of bias by journalists were routinely met with management claims that editorial policies are too vague, dodging any finding of a breach of the policy.  Management would suggest the ABC board redraft the policies, a useless "make work" exercise­, to remove areas of grey.

When another glaringly obvious episode arose of bias, often from the same journalist — recidiv­ists were not hard to find — the board would receive the same response.  It's all rather grey so we can't do anything.  In other words:  go away, our ABC culture trumps a code and even a legislative charter mandating intellectual diversity.

The same scenario will unfold across Australian universities.  Even the most beautifully crafted free-speech code will count for nothing until there is meaningful cultural change.

And that will not happen until the Morrison government moves to reduce funding to universities that do not implement cultural change.

Over to Education Minister Dan Tehan to walk the talk, rememberi­ng too that academic freedom was thrown under the bus when James Cook University decided­ to sack professor Peter Ridd on a bogus code of conduct claim.  JCU has committed to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend that action in courts, rather than defend intellectual ­diversity.

In the meantime, we are left to ponder the state of a higher educatio­n where codes, laws, regul­ators and the media are needed to remind VCs and student union­s about the core business of a ­university.

To The Victim, Belong The Spoils Of (This) Law

The government's proposed religious discrimination bill puts the shoe on the other foot, and now the activists who championed every other discrimination law are bemoaning the "divisiveness" of this one.

It is divisive, but so is all discrimination law.

The public consultation period for the second draft of the religious discrimination bill, which prohibits discrimination based on someone's beliefs (or lack thereof), has closed.

Last week the cacophony of complaints about this bill reached fever pitch.

People from former High Court judge Michael Kirby to Olympic swimmer Ian Thorpe have given their two cents' worth of outrage.

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr complained that it threatened human rights.  He goes on to ask why you would enshrine in legislation a particular privilege for a group of people to be able to espouse a view that will offend many, and to grant that legal privilege?

He is not wrong that this bill is a threat, but he is incorrect if he thinks basic liberties, such as the freedom to espouse views, be they religious or otherwise, are indeed a privilege.

This law, at least in part, originated because state and federal anti-discrimination laws systemically infringe freedom of speech (and particularly expression of religious ideas).

Instead of abolishing laws that violate basic freedoms, the government has decided that it is going to fix the problem of illiberal, convoluted anti-discrimination laws by enacting yet another illiberal, convoluted anti-discrimination law.

Doing the same thing over and again but expecting a different result was Albert Einstein's definition of insanity.  History will repeat itself and, just like the notorious section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, it soon will become a bureaucratic goliath that no government can or wants to control.

Discrimination laws are inherently discriminatory.  Discrimination laws operate by granting a right of action to one group against another, meanwhile carving out exemptions for some but not others.

Moreover, it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of individual rights.  It reverses the presumption that all Australians are entitled to be equally free, making some of us more free than others.  The Coalition may think it is giving religious freedom in this bill but in reality it is confiscating it.

The only way to protect religious freedom is by protecting the freedom of all Australians to think, speak and associate.  Freedom of religion is simply the use of these most fundamental freedoms for a religious purpose.  If the government truly wants to protect religious freedom it should repeal the laws that prohibit expression of religious and all other ideas (regardless of their origin) in the first instance.

The activists who initially were protesting against this bill because it would victimise people on the basis of gender and sexual orientation have found a new victim group — religious people.  The newest complaint is that the religious discrimination bill indeed permits religious discrimination.  Again, they are not wrong.  However, if this bill didn't allow places where religious people could associate exclusively with members of their religion, it would not protect religious people at all.

Freedom of association is intrinsic to the exercise of religion and civil society in general.  The issue is not that this bill allows too much freedom of association but that it limits it.

The ability to create a space exclusive to the exercise of one religion is contingent on meeting the criteria set out in the bill, as follows:  a religious body does not discriminate against a person under this act by engaging, in good faith, in conduct to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of adherents of the same religion as the religious body.

This vague and subjective wording does not properly protect freedom of association but is a recipe for litigation.

The Noosa Temple of Satan's submission amusingly demonstrates the problem with this bill.  The Noosa temple says it is a "waste of the federal government's time", but if it is passed the temple will use it "aggressively".

This bill could inflame sectarian tensions between different religious communities and non-religious groups.  Far from creating a society of religious tolerance, it could create a society of religious lawfare and one where the most sensitive win.

Anglicare Victoria tweeted that it opposes "the #ReligiousDiscriminationBill because it allows people to use faith as a means to cause harm to others".

Anglicare is right to oppose this bill but, as with all laws of this kind, the problem is not that it permits bigotry — it weaponises it.

Roaring Into The Twenties

When Ricky Gervais came roaring onto the stage at the recent Golden Globe awards, he cemented his place as the first anti-woke hero of the 2020s.

"If you do win an award tonight, don't use it as a platform to give a political speech," Gervais said.  "You're in no position to lecture the public about anything.  You know nothing about the real world — most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.  So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent and your god, and f— off."

And, pre-empting the inevitable fallout, Gervais reminded the audience:  "Remember, they're just jokes!"

Gervais knew what he was doing.  He was daring the Hollywood wokeocracy to reach for the outrage button in an era when every second joke triggers a garbage fire on Twitter, or at the very least a string of interminable online think pieces about how "problematic" it is.

And that's the rub.  That is the whole dynamic that made the 2010s such a dreary and frankly depressing era.  Like the celebrities lampooned by Gervais, everyone and everything, it seems, is serious and pompous and exhausting.  Nobody has any fun anymore.

It's not just that we're no longer able to tell a few bawdy jokes.  It's not even political correctness itself.  It's the deeper mentality that has engulfed society at large, a pathological tendency to see the worst in everything.

These days, it seems like no aspect of daily life — from how we carry our groceries back from the shops to how we get to work in the morning — is safe from overbearing guilt, or worse still oppressive regulation.  Meanwhile, advertisements abound telling us we drink too much, we eat too much, that we're sending our family to the poorhouse with every harmless punt and that — despite ample evidence to the contrary — a great many of us are unknowing bigots.

It's a mindset that casts Australia and everyone who's in it with original sin.  Everywhere you look, there are naysayers peddling the myth that Australia is a Dickensian hotbed of inequality, on stolen land, spreading poison around the world in the form of our number one export, the demon coal.  Black armband history is nothing new, but over the last decade the grievance industry has boomed, with an army of moral guardians waxing lyrical about how every Australian institution — from our constitution to the local footy club — is seeped in racism, sexism and "toxic masculinity".

To be fair to Australia, it is a disease that's afflicted the Western world in general.  Look at Prince Harry (or whatever he goes by these days), wincing at the thought of commercial aviation — the modern miracle that allows millions to see the world — saying that "We all have to do better".  Or Nike, which marketed itself a couple of years back by celebrating the cause of an elite athlete who refused to stand for the national anthem.  Not to be outdone, Gillette released an ad the following year suggesting that its customers were latent misogynists.

And, appropriately, Time's Person of the Year at the tail-end of the last miserable decade was a sour-faced teen whose most famous public utterance is a finger-wagging "How dare you?"

Say what you like about Scott Morrison, but when he says "How good is Australia", it resonates.  Because more than ever before, there is a deep thirst in the community for a bit of good news, a reprieve from the drudgery of whatever the chattering classes happen to be banging on about.  We want to feel good about ourselves again.

It's not as if there aren't public policy problems in Australia — there are.  Too many people are out of work, red tape is choking our chance at prosperity, taxes are obscenely high and decades of overregulation have transformed electricity — in one of the most energy-rich countries on the planet — from a basic utility to a luxury good for too many.

But none of those things make Australia — let alone Australians — inherently bad.  All it means is that Australia has untapped potential, and lots of it.

And ironically, in global terms things have never been better.  Extreme poverty has more than halved since 2010 and, as of 2018, more than half the world's population has been in the middle class for the first time in human history.  Every available indicator — from literacy to infant mortality — continues to improve.

Meanwhile, freedom is making a comeback in the West, as patriots around the world elect governments that promise to dismantle the worst excesses of the bureaucratic-managerialist state.  Donald Trump's seismic cuts to tax and red tape have created the most free and prosperous economy America has seen in generations.  Boris Johnson's thumping victory last year obliterated the hitherto-insurmountable resistance of the "Remoaner" elite.

And while Scott Morrison's policies — to the limited extent he has any — are somewhat hit-and-miss, we can credit him for heading off the most wantonly destructive policy platform in living memory, a horrible reality we were all but guaranteed to suffer through had the Liberal party continued on the trajectory set by Morrison's deeply unpopular and woefully inept predecessor.

And of course, as the popularity of Ricky Gervais's diatribe shows, the world is increasingly seeing through the dead end of identity politics.  Ordinary people are no longer allowing themselves to be intimidated into silence.  The emperor's clothes are falling off.

By speaking up, by revolting at the ballot box, by opening their wallets for the Peter Ridds and Israel Folaus of the world, mainstream Australians are casting off the yoke of windbag politicians, joyless bureaucrats, condescending "experts", preachy celebrities and every other noxious strain of self-important know-it-all who gets off on micro-managing almost every conceivable facet of the human condition, while making us pay through the nose for the privilege.

So, Australians all let us rejoice.  Let's draw a line under that wretched decade of self-flagellation and start living large again.  It's time to ditch the acrimony and nihilism of the 2010s, and embrace the feel-good twenties.

Intellectual freedom? Only if your values are ''aligned''

The university year began with a rumbling noise that all is not well with intellectual freedom in this country.  What started as a small story at a Queensland campus has become a very big one that demands attention if we care about the future of the current generation of young Australians, the next generation, and the trajectory of freedom in this country.

Generation Liberty is home to a group of young Australians, who are committed to understanding and promoting the way in which freedom has enriched people across the history of civilisation.  I have come to know many members.

They are an eclectic bunch mostly under 25.  So good luck to those creepy fiends of identity politics who try to filter these young people by sex, sexual orientation, racial and religious traits.  This futile search will throw up these common threads only:  they are curious contrarians.  They engage in furious debates, don't take themselves too seriously and are willing to listen to others.  They want to learn things they haven't always been taught at school or at university, the history of Western civilisation, warts and all, the ebbs and flows of freedoms and its impact on people.

Last month, Gen Lib, as we call it, applied to have a stall at Market Week, an extended part of O Week at Queensland University of Technology, which runs in late February.  By email in late January, Alisha Pritchard from QUT's student guild declined Gen Lib's application, telling it the committee had "decided that your brand does not align with our values".

In the days that followed, Drew Pavlou, a student who sits on the University of Queensland's senate, started a petition to ban Gen Lib from UQ's market day activities too.  Pavlou describes himself as a human rights campaigner.  He has tweeted a video of himself supporting Hong Kong protesters at UQ.  Alas, his lack of support for intellectual freedom at home creates a serious credibility problem for him.  In other social media posts Pavlou has called for crushing dissent, burning books and said Gen Lib members "need to be bullied into submission".

What on earth are they afraid of?  This year, Gen Lib intends to run a book club for students that will include Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, Albert Camus's The Stranger, Mark Twain's The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg, A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, and Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell.  Gen Lib also will chat about what we call Big Fat Books, including The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Atlas Shrug­ged by Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom.

Which book frightens QUT's student guild or the student representative on the UQ senate's peak governing body so much that they don't want students knowing about Gen Lib?

When news broke of this censorship of Gen Lib, QUT's student guild ran for the hills, claiming a litany of other reasons for Gen Lib's exclusion.  But remember its first response to Gen Lib:  "Your brand does not align with our values".

At one level, this is a story about a group of students who have not been taught about the empowering forces of intellectual freedom, let alone the history of freedom across a few thousand years of Western civilisation.

But it is part of a much bigger story that includes a vice-chancellor, too.  Following questions from this newspaper to the Education Minister, QUT vice-chancellor Margaret Sheil released a statement last week saying that O Week gives priority to guild-affiliated clubs, and Gen Lib could affiliate and apply next year.  In any case, "the available area for stalls during O Week is currently at capacity", she said.

Then came some pure puffery.  "QUT does not operate on the basis of left or right-wing bias:  the effectiveness of all we do here relies upon remaining open to a variety of contesting viewpoints and to the merits of evidence," Sheil said.

Was Sheil misinformed about the facts or was she being disingenuous?  Either way, the university's leader failed to address the fact that the student guild at QUT rejected Gen Lib's application for Market Week, not O Week, and on the basis that its brand did not align with their values.

On Wednesday afternoon, QUT backed away from its first statement.  Peter Gatbonton, QUT's manager of student engagement, emailed an invitation to Gen Lib's Theodora Pantelich, inviting them to be part of O Week.

What happened to no space?  Maybe like a late guest pulling out from a wedding reception the chaps from the Socialist Alternative couldn't make it after all.

Seriously, are we meant to be grateful that QUT administrators caved in to pressure and managed, after all, to find space for the ideas of freedom at QUT's O Week?

Perhaps, in her private moments, the vice-chancellor of QUT wonders how the heck it reached this dismal state of affairs among her students.  In truth, the responsibility rests with university administrators like her.  Rarely from the goodness of their hearts or the brilliance of their minds do VCs defend intellectual freedom.  They tend to do it once forced, when exposed, and shamed.  Like here.

Vice-chancellors love talking about deliberately ambiguous concepts such as "diversity" and "inclusion" rather than a bedrock principle called intellectual freedom.  Worse, they have overseen the cementing of these woolly words on campus to shut down div­erse views and students who challenge the orthodoxy feel excluded.

We know this from a survey of students conducted last year.  Rather than listening to the public exhortations of VCs, we asked students about their experience at universities.  Forty-one per cent of them said they felt unable to express their opinions at university.  This is what transforms a small story about a student guild at QUT into a very big story about the strangulation of intellectual freedom.  The story gets bigger still.  It includes a set of laws that are lame and a regulator that has had no discernible impact on improving intellectual freedom at Australian universities.

Start with the Higher Education Support Act 2003.  As a condition of receiving federal money from taxpayers, it provides that "a higher education provider ... must have a policy that upholds free intellectual inquiry in relation to learning, teaching, and research".  Then there is the HES Framework 2015 that says:  "The higher education provider has a clearly articulated higher education purpose that includes a commitment to and support for free intellectual inquiry in its academic endeavours".  This framework requires a university "governing body ... to develop and maintain an institutional environment in which freedom of intellectual inquiry is upheld and protected".

Now for the regulator.  The Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency is empowered to enforce the HES Act and the HEC Framework so taxpayers and students know publicly funded universities are carrying out their core mission to educate their students.

TEQSA's own report card is woeful.  Like VCs around the country, TEQSA's chief commissioner, Nick Saunders, has mentioned intellectual freedom, including when asked at a Senate estimates inquiry, but there is scant evidence of a regulator genuinely committed to holding universities to their core mission of intellectual freedom.  If this is yet another rogue bureaucracy ignoring its remit from government, the government has a chance to appoint a new kind of bureaucrat.  TEQSA chief executive Anthony McClaran is leaving his role at the end of next month.  The search for a new boss may be the chance to boost the heft of this body.

But, then again, maybe the law needs reforming.  After all, requiring a policy on paper about intellectual freedom is meaningless;  what matters is enforcement.  This story, then, is also about the federal government.  A series of them, in fact.  Intellectual freedom has been on the slide for decades, going back to the atrocious treatment of Geoffrey Blainey at the University of Melbourne in 1984 when he aired his view that the Hawke government's 40 per cent intake of poor immigrants from Asia could threaten the country's social cohesion unless managed properly.  He was hounded off campus as a racist.  Blainey is not a racist;  he is one of Australia's finest historians.

There has sometimes been a bit of talk from politicians, prime ministers too, and a bit of legislative tinkering such as Julia Gillard's changes to the HES Act in 2011.  But still, today, too many university campuses are not known as places of learning where intellectual freedom thrives.  If they were, a student guild running stalls for new students wouldn't dream of banning a Gen Lib stall on the basis that its brand did not align with the guild's values.  If intellectual freedom were taken seriously, a vice-chancellor would not put up with this baloney on their campus.  And neither would the regulator or our government.

The Education Minister has the authority to direct TEQSA in the exercise and performance of its powers.  Isn't it time then for a ministerial kick up the regulator's backside?  If not now, when?  What will it take for that to happen?

Remember, too, that thousands of Australians are still waiting for the Morrison government to support intellectual freedom by supporting Peter Ridd, who was sacked by James Cook University for challenging the quality of climate science.

Instead, Education Minister Dan Tehan has plans to tweak this, and tinker with that, tightening up the government's "compact" with each publicly funded university to include universities reporting on their approaches to supporting freedom of intellectual inquiry on campus.  That'll fix things, then.

Another more difficult, but not impossible, route to intellectual freedom is to remove sources of public funding from universities that fail at that core mission.

A baker's mission is to bake.  A lawyer gives legal advice.  A plumber will fix your plumbing.  Yet we need laws, regulators, compacts and codes to convince university administrators their core job is to offer intellectual freedom on campus.

No wonder Generation Liberty is thriving, attracting curious young people hungry for what publicly funded universities fail to offer them.  It is a safe bet that, far away from student guilds and VC offices, our values about freedom align very closely with millions of Australians.

Defang Bureaucrats So They Can't Be Used As Political Pawns

The revelations about how former prime minister Tony Abbott and other conservative activists were pursued by the federal Attorney-General's Department at the behest of Labor legal affairs spokesman Mark Dreyfus represents a failure of our democracy and the rule of law.

My Freedom of Information request­ uncovered further details about how the organiser of the Conservative Political Action Conference, Andrew Cooper, and conservative speakers at that conferenc­e, including Abbott, were required to register as agents of foreign influence by the Attorney­-General's Department.

Last July 22, Dreyfus attended a briefing with senior represent­atives of the Integrity and Security Division, the bureaucrats from the Attorney-General's Department who were responsible for enforcing the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme.  This occurred just days before Kristina Keneally's speech to the Senate which sparked a media frenzy about the CPAC conference.

The FITS scheme was introduced into federal parliament in December 2017 and came into force a year later.  The purpose of the Dreyfus briefing was to inform him about the implementation of the scheme.

In notes recorded by an A-G's departmental official, Dreyfus "specifically raised the upcoming Conservative Political Action Conference to be held in Sydney 9-11 August 2019, as an example of an event that may trigger registration obligations under the scheme and asked what the Department planned to do about it".

It is clear the bureaucrats went straight to work following up Dreyfus's request, and by August 2 last year they had sent letters to Abbott, inviting him to register as an agent of foreign influence, as well as Andrew Cooper, who as president of conservative advocates LibertyWorks was the co-­organiser of CPAC.

What is also clear from the FOI request is that the departmental bureaucrats busily monitored the speaker list of the CPAC Australia website each day so that they could also invite others to register as agents of foreign influence.

On October 22, the department sent Cooper a letter demand­ing he turn over all documents regarding the CPAC conference within 14 days, with the threat of being imprisoned for six months if he failed to comply.

It was clear from reporting in The Australian at that time that Attorney-General Christian Porter­ was unaware of the actions of bureaucrats in his department.  He said he had made it "clear to my department that I expect it to demonstrate a focus on the most serious instances of non-­compliance".

He then added what might be seen as an understatement:  "I'm not persuaded this focus has been perfectly demonstrated to date."

The bluntness of this legislation was foreseeable.  My Legal Rights Audit 2018 warned that the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 remove­d procedural fairness, the right to silence and the privilege against self-incrimination.

The very people responsible for protecting our democracy from political interference have been actively undermining it.  Using the power of the state to target political opponents is behavio­ur you expect only in authorit­arian regimes.  Yet this is what Dreyfus apparently sought to do.

Australians understand that foreign interference in our politics is a serious issue and one that our laws should seek to prevent.  It was shameful of Dreyfus to seemingly try to ­harass his political opponents by using a law designed to address the genuine issue of political interference by communist China.  If it was found that a Coalition MP had tipped off bureaucrats under the guise of national security legislation to investigate the links between an Australian prog­ressive activist organisation co-hosting a conference with a US organisation there would be wall-to-wall outrage at the ABC and The Guardian.  Rightly so.

Yet some mainstream media outlets have been all but silent when it comes to reporting revel­ations of the misuse of national ­security apparatus to hound their ideological opponents.

In any other liberal democracy, to require a person to hand over any information where the consequence of refusing is jail time would require these bureaucrats to stand before a judge and secure a warrant.  Not here.

A recent poll by Dynata found 64 per cent of Australians believed unelected bureaucrats had too much control over our lives.  The Dreyfus revelations show Australians are right to be worried.

The FITS legislation needs to be recast to defang the bureaucrats as well as opportunistic politicians such as Dreyfus who apparently use it target enemies.

We Need A Full Public Inquiry Into Labor And The Pen-Pushers' CPAC Outrage

As revealed in The Australian today, my Freedom of Information request has revealed that former prime minister Tony Abbott and president of LibertyWorks and organiser of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference, CPAC, Andrew Cooper were investigated by the Attorney-General's Department at the instigation of Shadow Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus.

The FOI reveals that on 22 July 2019, eight days before Senator Kristina Keneally's speech to the Senate condemning CPAC, opposition legal affairs spokesman and former and former attorney general, Mark Dreyfus QC, met with senior representatives from the Integrity and Security Division of the Attorney-General's Department for a briefing on the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, and "specifically raised the upcoming CPAC conference to be held in Sydney on 9-11 August 2019 and asked what the Department planned to do about it."

This is a shocking development.  Using the power of the state to target political opponents is something that occurs in the authoritarian regimes, not a liberal democracy like Australia.

Here is part of the FOI:

Senior bureaucrats have been caught conspiring in secret with the ALP to intimidate and harass Labor's political opponents.

This conspiracy between Dreyfus and powerful public officials has threatened Australia's democracy and national security.

Andrew Cooper put it well when he told The Australian, "Mr Dreyfus has deliberately and methodically sought to use the state to censor the free speech of his political opponents at CPAC."

"It is a contemptible and cowardly act."

Too right.

But the fact the Attorney-General's Department were able to do this and its worrying powers were foreseeable.

My Legal Rights Audit 2018 warned that the Foreign Influence­ Transparency Scheme Act 2018 was found to remove procedura­l fairness, the right to silenc­e and the privilege against self-incrimination.

There must be an independent and public inquiry into this scandal to establish how far and deep this conspiracy has spread.

This absolutely disgraceful scandal shows why this law needs to be completely recast so this can never happen again.

A Fake Assault On ''Fake News'': Government's Intervention Is As Chilling As It Is Insulting

The Morrison government bills its proposed digital platform reforms, announced on Thursday, as "world-leading".  That may be true, in the same way that China's "Great Firewall" — a tool of authoritarian suppression — was "world-leading" when it began in the 1990s.

If that comparison seems dramatic, it is meant to be.  The government's ham-fisted measures have absolutely no place in a liberal democracy like Australia.

The proposed laws come as a response to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's digital platforms inquiry, which in itself was largely a response to complaints by conventional media outlets about the impact of social media on their business models.

Not that they don't have a point.  There is an uneven playing field, with broadcasters and publishers subject to a suite of regulations that digital platforms are not, ranging from advertising standards to defamation law.  But the way to achieve "platform neutrality" — as the government calls it — is to scrap said regulations, not apply them to new players in ways that are almost certainly unworkable.

But what should worry us most is the proposed remedy for "fake news" — fabricated stories on dubious websites purporting to be legitimate reporting.  Citing the "increased prevalence of fake news and disinformation", the government plans to have the digital platforms develop a "voluntary" code of conduct on "news quality", overseen by the Australian Communications and Media Authority.

For one thing, as problems go, fake news is extremely exaggerated, largely by sections of the commentariat seeking to explain away electoral phenomena such as Brexit or Donald Trump.  The conventional narrative is that huge sections of the population are being duped by nefarious conspiracy theorists flooding the internet with bogus reports.

But the evidence doesn't stack up.  Analysis of Twitter user patterns published in Science magazine this year, for example, found that more than 80 per cent of fake news sources were consumed by just 1 per cent of users and shared by just 0.1 per cent, largely on the extreme right.  In other words, most fake news is read and shared by a tiny proportion of social media users.

Even if fake news were a problem, the cure here would be much more cancerous to our democracy than the disease.  Sure, the code would be "voluntary" on paper, but that's not saying much.  We live in a world where regulators try to enforce a "culture of compliance" rather than just the laws themselves.

Companies that fail to comply with the code will just be named, shamed and beaten into submission.  And that is the pernicious rub.  One way or another, we will arrive at a situation in which unelected bureaucrats will decide what is real and what is fake, what is fit for public consumption and what is off-limits.

And how wide will ACMA cast the net?  Will it stick to obvious hoaxes containing plainly false reports?  Or will "fake news" include ill-informed opinion pieces?  Simplistic analysis?  Empty gossip?

We should be deeply suspicious of this, for the same reason we should be suspicious of every attempt by government to regulate the public debate.  The free and open exchange of ideas, reflected via the ballot box, is what confers democratic legitimacy on government.  It is not the place of government to confer legitimacy on the public debate.

John Howard has often said that in the end, the Australian people always get it right.  Scott Morrison seems to be saying that the Australian people will get it right if the government ensures they receive the right information.  It is a mindset as chilling as it is insulting.

There May Be 1300 Reasons This Law Does Not Work

There are potentially 1300 smoking guns pointing to evidence that the Attorney­-General's Department has been using the power of the commonwealth to target conservatives­ in Australia.

It is not acceptable for bureaucrats to be running a covert political operation out of the Attorney-General's Department to silence Australians because of their polit­ical beliefs, but they are able to under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme legislation.

On October 2, public servants in the Attorney-General's Depart­ment issued a notice that Andrew Cooper, founder and president of libertarian advocacy organisation LibertyWorks, provide all documents "detailing any understanding or arrangement" between LibertyWorks and the American Conservative Union.

Cooper was given 14 days to respon­d to the demands, after which criminal penalties could apply.  Despite facing possibly six months' jail, he refused to co-operat­e.

Last August, Liberty­Works and the ACU co-hosted the Conservati­ve Political Action Conference in Sydney.  It featured speakers from Australia and overseas.  CPAC is a mainstream right-of-centre conference that in the past few years has branched out to international locations such as Japan and Australia.

One CPAC speaker was former prime minister Tony Abbott, who controversially was invited to register as an agent of foreign influe­nce under the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme for addressing it.

Abbott rejected the request and labelled it absurd.

Attorney-General Christian Porter has admitted that there has been a "lack of common sense to date" in the scheme's application.

Following the subsequent scandal, I lodged a Freedom of Inform­ation request asking for documents and correspondence between senior executive service-level public servants in the Integrity and International Group between March and November that mentions Cooper, Abbott, CPAC or the ACU.

This is a straightforward reques­t.  It potentially could clear the public servants of any wrongdoing or expose if there was anything more untoward.  If there was nothing seriously amiss, you would imagine the bureaucrats would be forthcoming, keen to clear up the incident.

The Attorney-General's Department responded to me this week with what is known as a "practical refusal notice".

The Integrity and International Group in the Attorney-­General's Department that oversees the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme employs only eight staff, yet says a preliminary search has identified more than 1300 documents relevant to the request.

More than 1300 documents and correspondence relating to Abbott, Cooper, CPAC and the ACU captured from eight full-time public servants across a seven-month period hardly seem the actions of one rogue employee, which is how the government has portrayed the targeting of Cooper.

Rather, it possibly suggests a co-ordinated surveillance operation being run by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats under the Attorney-General's nose.

The department needs to ­release these documents.  Innocent Australians have a right to know if they are being monitored by the state.

In giving the notice of practical refusal, the department states that the work of processing the request would substantially and unreas­on­ably divert the resources of the department from its other operations due to its scope.  Yet this same department gave Cooper just a fortnight to comply with onerous demands of supplying potentially thousands of documents relating to the CPAC conference.

Given the extent of Chinese influenc­e reported in the media this week, it is unacceptable that Australian public servants in the Attorney-General's Department have devoted such a significant amount of time and resources to targeting Australians because of their political beliefs.

It seems the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme legislation may not be being applied impartially or in good faith.  Porter has suggested that the staff overseeing the scheme will be moved, which is hardly adequate.  They also have shrugged off suggestions that they need foreign-speaking officials overseeing the scheme.

As reported in The Weekend Australian, Porter was angry to learn of the notice being issued to Cooper.  But the bluntness of the legislation and its worrying powers were foreseeable.

My Legal Rights Audit 2018 warned that the Foreign Influence­ Transparency Scheme Act 2018 was found to remove procedura­l fairness, the right to silenc­e and the privilege against self-incrimination.

The scheme should be repealed or recast so that vaguely worded legislation cannot be abused.  And there should be answers as to why commonwealth public servants were potentially misusing their power.  The state targeting people due to political affiliation or belief is a feature of authoritarian regime­s, not a liberal democracy.

Christian Porter's Defamation Reform Would Be A Catastrophic Mistake

Attorney-General Christian Porter wants social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to be legally liable for defamatory comments made by their users.

Right now, the common law can distinguish between the legal liability of active publishers of information (like newspapers and broadcasters) and the passive platform operators that allow users to publish information themselves.  Courts decide where this distinction is drawn according the unique facts of each case.

But in a speech to the National Press Club on Wednesday, the Attorney-General declared he wants to eliminate the distinction altogether:  "Online platforms should be held to essentially the same standards as other publishers."

The Attorney-General's proposal is fundamentally confused.  Removing the distinction between digital platforms and newspapers would have a devastating effect on both those platforms and our ability to communicate with each other.

The proposal is bad on its merits.  But even besides that, the conservative government needs to understand how destructive it would be to the conservative movement online.

Let's start with the legal principles.  It makes sense that newspapers and broadcasters are liable for what they publish.  They actively commission and produce the content that appears on their services.  They read it, edit it, arrange and curate it.  They pay for it.  Newspapers and broadcasters have not only an editorial voice, but complete editorial control.  Indeed, it is this close supervision of what they publish that gives them strength in the marketplace of ideas.

Social media platforms do nothing of the sort.  Not only do they not commission the content that appears on our newsfeeds (let alone read, factcheck, or edit that content), they don't typically confirm that their users are even real people — not, say, bots or foreign impersonators.  They merely provide a platform for us to communicate with each other.  Social media has facilitated a massive, global conversation.  But it has no editorial voice.

In the United States a parallel debate is going on among Republicans about whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — which explicitly prevents courts from treating "interactive computer services" as publishers or speakers for the purpose of legal liability — should be abolished.

Section 230 has variously been described by scholars and commentators as "the 26 words that created the internet" or the "the internet's first amendment".  The internet law professor Jeff Kosseff writes that eliminating this provision would "turn the internet into a closed, one-way street".  Attorney-General Porter's proposal would have the same effect.

If social media platforms have to bear legal responsibility for what their users say, they will assume editorial responsibility for it.  That means editing, deleting, and blocking all content that could be even the least bit legally questionable.

Newspapers and broadcasters sometimes take calculated risks with what they print, if they believe that the information they reveal is in the public interest.  But why would a technological company — a company that lacks an editorial voice or the journalistic vision — be anything but hypercautious?  Why wouldn't it delete anything and everything with even the slightest risk?

And here is where the practical politics comes in.  Even if the Attorney-General's proposal was a good idea in principle, this policy would be particularly devastating for the conservative movement that supports his government.  Indeed, it is hard to imagine a legislative proposal that would more effectively, and immediately, cut down the Australian conservative movement online.

After all, what side of politics benefits most from the political diversity and openness of the modern internet?  What side of politics has relied most on the internet's ability to bypass traditional media gateways?  It is difficult to imagine the conservative political surge in recent years without social media — without Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and all those podcast platforms.

If conservatives are concerned about social media networks "censoring" conservative content on their services now, well, making them liable for everything conservatives say would supercharge that.

And why would this policy stop at defamation laws?  Why wouldn't it also apply to liabilities around, say, Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act?  Or our sedition laws?  We are looking at a future where technology companies in California (companies that many conservatives believe are stacked with culturally left employees) could be required to second-guess how the most left-wing judges in Australia might enforce this country's draconian anti-speech restrictions.

The Coalition government should also reflect on how some of its most recent legislative programs have backfired on conservatives.  The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, passed in 2018 in order to tackle Chinese interference in Australian politics, is now being used to target the organiser of the Australian Conservative Political Action Conference, Andrew Cooper, and even Tony Abbott.

The Attorney-General is right that defamation law needs reform.  Australia's defamation framework is heavy-handed and disproportionately favours private reputation over the public need to discuss significant issues.  But removing the courts' ability to determine liability for defamation — and instead deputising the world's technology companies to enforce what they imagine it could be — would be a catastrophic mistake.

This Foolish Act Must Be Repealed At Once

Bureaucrats are using Australia's foreign-influence laws to run a covert political operation out of the Attorney-General's Department to silence Australians becaus­e of their political beliefs, all under the nose of the Coalition government.

This is the kind of behaviour one would expect from the Stasi in East Germany in 1961, not in Australia­ today.

On Saturday, The Weekend Australian reported that Andrew Cooper, the founder and president of libertarian advocacy organisation LibertyWorks, had received a letter from the Attorney-General­'s Department advising him to provide all documents ­"detailing any understanding or arrangement" between LibertyWorks and the American Conservative Union.

LibertyWorks and the ACU co-hosted the Conservative Political Action Conference in Sydney in August, which featured a range of speakers from Australia and overseas.

The notice, issued by the deputy secretary of the department's Integrity and International Group, also requested copies of correspondence with speakers, as well as the transcripts and recordings of the addresses given at the conference.

It further noted that a failure to comply with the notice within 14 days could expose ­Cooper to criminal penalties, with a maximum penalty of six months' jail.

Former prime minister Tony Abbott has also been harassed by A-G's bureaucrats under the same laws.  This political intimidation was enabled by the government's Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme, which came into force last December.

Under section 45(2) of the scheme, officials in the Attorney-General's Department are given broad powers to issues notices requiring a person to produce­ information where offic­ials "reason­ably suspect" that a person might be liable to register under the scheme.

When the Turnbull government introduced the laws into parliament in 2017, the scheme was purportedly designed to counter the "serious threat posed to Australia and our interests by covert interference and espionage".  Specifically, the laws were introduced as part of a push to challenge intrusions into Australian democratic activities undertaken by the Chinese Communist Party and its agents.

The Chinese government operate­s an extensive influence apparatus that includes Confucius Institutes embedded within Australian universities, Chinese govern­ment-owned companies that are deeply linked to the Commun­ist Party, and so-called community groups active in Aust­ralia but that lobby governments here on behalf of foreign powers.

However, instead of implementing careful and proportionate measures to curtail foreign influence, the Coalition government has handed the bureaucracy untrammelled power to operate a covert political operation to target Australians based on their political views.

Cooper has not been charged with a crime.  The laws enable a bureaucrat to go on fishing exped­itions without a warrant or court order to collect information on the mere suspicion of foreign influence.  The nature of this scheme raises the question of which govern­ment parliamentarians sat down to read the bill, and how they could approve of it.

Apparently the department has sent about 500 letters to a range of individuals asking them to consider whether they need to register under the scheme.  It is not an isolated problem.

Under the circumstances, the departmental secretary should be stood down so that an investigation can take place to understand why this has happened, who else has been targeted, and to ensure it does not happen again.

Observers of American politics will recognise the parallels to the Lois Lerner saga during the latter half of the Obama administration.  Lerner was the head of the Internal Revenue Service division which processed applications for tax-exempt groups.

A 2013 investigation found that the IRS had singled out conservative organisations for intense scrutiny, sometimes based on such arbitrary grounds as the name of the organisation.  The IRS delayed applications and improperly questioned some organisations about their donors and religious affiliations and practices.

This was the result of a massive bureaucracy becoming a power unto itself.  The signs from Aust­ralia's foreign-influence laws suggest­ we may be heading down a similar path.  The difference here is that the abuse of power is ­happening under the noses of an ostensibly centre-right government.  This is what happens when you try to govern with a public service­ stacked with people who align with a green-left agenda.

These consequences were not unknowable or unforeseen.  In research published in January, I identified that the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 added to the body of laws that undermine our fundamental freedoms and betray the rule of law.

The research revealed that the legislation removes the right to silenc­e and imposes criminal penalties for failing to give inform­ation when requested to do so under a notice.  It even abolishes the privilege against self-incrim­ination when such information might expose the person to a penalty.  Finally, natural justice is ­removed as departmental officials are not required to observe procedural fairness when exercising the powers granted under the act.  An investigation must be launched into the Attorney-­General's Department to find out how deep and widespread the ­potential abuses of power are.  For every Andrew Cooper and Tony Abbott, who have the profile and public support to fight back, there could be thousands of conservative Australians being told to shut down and shut up.

The Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme Act 2018 must be repealed.  If the government fails to act swiftly, it could find that s45(2) becomes the new s18C.