To paraphrase A Fish Called Wanda, to call Australia’s political class ‘stupid’, is “an insult to stupid people”. Michael Shellenberger, the University of Austin’s CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship and Free Speech, found that out for himself, yesterday. The occasion was a meeting with government staffers, regarding the political class’s temper-tantrums at not being able to censor Australians’ internet access hard enough.
What Shellenberger found out was what the rest of us already know: the Canberra Bubble is an echo chamber of the authoritarian leading the ignorant.
Well, that was wild. I’m at the Australian Parliament and just left a meeting with two staffers for the governing party. They told us that the government needed more power to censor things like the upcoming US execution of Nidal Hasan.
When I asked why they needed to censor that video, one said it was to prevent copycat killings. Copycat killings by governments? I asked. Er, no, they said. Copycat killings like of a backpacker, several decades ago.
So, under that logic, I pointed out, the government should censor things like last year’s Bondi massacre, where two Muslims killed 15 people, no? Well, that was news, they said. Didn’t they realize their bill would allow the government to censor news? They didn’t seem to know, or care.
What the Canberra Bubble don’t know would fill parliamentary libraries. Especially what they don’t know about the very laws that they drafted themselves.
They also admitted that they did not know that the bill would allow the government to create and operate an unlimited number of fake social media accounts to attack its political enemies and spread disinformation. Having presented them with information they had never heard about a bill they had clearly not read, they emphasized to us, strenuously, that they were moving forward with the bill.
At issue is the planned livestream of the execution of Muslim terrorist Nidal Hassan. This was the Islamic extremist (apologies for the tautology), remember, who gunned down dozens of his colleagues in cold blood. Including a pregnant young woman, who died screaming, “My baby! My baby!”
Still, I have no real desire to watch this swivel-eyed follower of the ‘Prophet’ get dispatched to meet his 72 goats (you can’t make these clowns happy, can you? They claim they want to be ‘martyrs’, then they get mad when you oblige them): I’ll be content knowing justice has been done. And, being the adult that I am, I’ll choose not to watch it.
Because, contrary to the deranged witterings of the authoritarian political class, that’s exactly how it works. If I don’t want to watch Question Time, I don’t log on. If I don’t want to watch midget scat porn, I don’t look it up. If I don’t want to watch a livestreamed execution: ditto.
And, by the strange black magic apparently unavailable to the political class, I won’t in fact be forced to see it! Amazing!
But that’s not what the issue is, here, of course. Even the dim bulbs in Canberra know that nobody is forced to watch things they don’t want to. What the real issue is, is the authoritarian eKaren types using this as a stalking-horse in a censorious power-grab. Well, grabbing even more censorious power than they’ve already given themselves.
Enter our beloved eSafety bureaucracy, an outfit that never met a foreign server it didn’t want to seize by the scruff of the neck. Having previously tried, and hilariously failed, to scrub footage of Sydney clergy stabbings from every computer terminal between Perth and Patagonia, the commissars are wringing their hands once more.
“While eSafety does not have powers to proactively prevent a live stream from occurring online, online services have responsibilities under Australia's online safety regulatory framework to protect users from harmful material,” a spokesperson said.
Translation: we cannot actually stop the internet from being the internet, but by Gaia we will threaten Silicon Valley until they turn the whole world into an ABC toddler programme (with two Dads for every theyby, of course).
The usual chorus of pearl-clutchers has chimed in right on cue. From Greens manatee Sarah ‘Sea-Patrol’ Hanson-Young demanding the government “take whatever action is necessary” to stamp out the ‘barbarism’, to sanctimonious hand-wringing from the usual Liberal ‘moderates’, Canberra has decided that grown adults cannot be trusted with a mouse and keyboard. The federal government soberly informed us that ordinary Australians “rightly expect” their computer screens to remain spotless nurseries, safely insulated from harsh reality by the tender mercies of the state.
Of course, the academic claque was wheeled out immediately to inform the plebs that this administrative inadequacy is precisely why we must hand Canberra even more dictatorial control over our modems.
Dr Barnet said it highlighted the need for the government’s Digital Duty of Care Bill, which is being introduced into parliament this week, as it will require platforms to take steps to reduce the risk of harm to users on their sites.
Whenever the apparatus of state censorship finds itself frustrated by technical reality, the prescription is never humility. It is always a brand-new omnibus bill, stuffed to the gills with powers to silence inconvenient news, punish dissent and unleash an army of literal state-sponsored sock-puppet accounts to manufacture consent online.
The pretext is always the same: protecting the delicate sensitivities of the kiddies. But the end game is naked political control. They don’t give a damn about Nidal Hasan’s firing squad: what terrifies them is the prospect of citizens seeing unvarnished reality without Canberra’s approved spin.
