I am truly surprised. In fact, I am staggered. I thought there was not a single menber of parliament in Australia who would stand up for freedom and oppose censorship, such is the hysteria that seems to have gripped the nation. The particular issue that has unleashed this new dictatorship of the mind is the proposed ban on showing on the internet the vision of the horrific attack on the Assyrian bishop in Sydney by the idiot who took to stabbing the poor bishop during a church service.

The federal government at the behest of its Orwellian-named eSafety Commissioner had decreed that this was too horrific to be seen by the public and that it should be banned from being shown. And banned not only in Australia but worldwide. Only X, formerly Twitter, opposes this imperial decree.

I expected that all politicians, who of course know better than we know ourselves what we should be allowed to see, would join in the public hysteria to ban this particular vision. And, right on cue, with one exception, they all did. Naturally, the Labor party was first off the mark. The video is too terrible, they gasped, and the public should be protected from it by not being allowed to see it; a socialist party could be expected to join in, as they have. The Greens quickly signed up, with their usual position of being the public arbiter of morals and judgment provided you agree with them. Then, the backboneless Liberal party, who claim to believe in free speech except when they don’t, quickly followed suit.

But one MP refused to follow the censorious mob. That is Senator Ralph Babet, leader and sole representative of the United Australia party who has stood against the mob and the political horde and claims that this is nothing but an attempt to stifle freedom of expression, one of the most basic rights that we have and which, it seems, we are about to throw overboard. Senator Babet is right and deserves our praise and thanks for doing what he can to protect our freedoms, even if he is the only one of our elected representatives to do so.

So far, the eSafety Commissioner has been able to get an interim injunction to stop X from showing the video until there is a full and open argument in court from both sides to see if this temporary ban should be permanent. After all, the temporary ban was made without X being given a chance to argue that it should be left to adults to decide for themselves if they might watch the video or not. The case will come back to the Federal Court in a couple of days to make a decision that will be to support freedom of expression or allow state-dictated censorship.

I hope the Federal Court has the courage and commitment to principle to allow adults to see what they want to see, after making proper allowances for warnings in advance of what viewers are letting themselves in for if they watch the footage and after  proper protection being made for children if their parents, rather than the almighty state, decide they want to bar their children from watching it. But then, miraculously, one MP and so far as I know the only MP to do so, Senator Babet, has said that the video should be available to be seen by any adult who wants to see it.

The argument for censorship is pathetically weak. The eSafety Commissioner says that the footage is banned because it shows ‘extreme violence’. Extreme violence is a fact of life. It is no role of the government to protect the public from seeing reality if that is what they decide for themselves.

Indeed, it will be more effective in stopping violence if the public actually see it, as only then they will see just how horrific it is. To ban them from seeing it will simply lock them into the fantasy world of pretending that violence does not exist when we know that it does. It is no function of a government to hide from its citizens the reality of violence or the reality of anything else. If the public do not want to be exposed to it, they do not have to watch it.

Needless to say, another arbiter of public morals, Senator Jacqui Lambie, says that Elon Musk, who owns X, is a ‘friggin’ disgrace’ who ‘should be jailed’ and ‘a social media knob with no social conscience’.

Nonsense, for she is the social snob by wanting to ban adults from watching material they want to watch if as adults they decide to do so. Indeed, Mr Musk probably has a greater social consciousness than his critics by exposing violence and showing how anti-social it is. Anthony Albanese also says Musk has no social conscience and that the public want this footage banned. I cannot speak for them, but I venture to say that what the public really want is to be treated as adults and that, as they have shown so many times, they want freedom and, in particular, freedom to see, read and learn from the media that they choose to experience.

This ban is not only wrong but monumental and unprecedented in its scope. The video has been blocked from Australia by X itself, but the Australian eSafety Commissar wants it banned throughout the entire world, an extraordinary reach for any country to try to impose on others. It is outrageous. And how inconsistent: where are the lovers of freedom who are campaigning for their current darling, Julian Assange, whose claim is exactly the same as those opposing this terrible ban?

I hope we can do three things. Revoke the ban. Make the footage available to adults after appropriate warnings. And with all necessary mechanisms, leave it to parents to decide what their children should be allowed to see. That surely must be enough for the Mother Grundys. Senator Babet: keep up your fight for freedom of expression!