It’s wonderful that so many freedom fighters and free speech advocates are making a point of visiting our shores this year to, as it were, spread the word. Konstantin Kisin, Tucker Carlson and now Toby Young have graced us recently with their presences, delighting local fans. Of course, prior to 2020, they may not have felt the need to do so. After all, it was only once the likes of Covid authoritarians Dan Andrews and Mark McGowan had decided to prove the wisdom of Clive’s James astute observation – ‘The problem with Australians is not that so many of them are descended from convicts, but that so many of them are descended from prison officers’ – that free speech champions around the world sat up and took notice. Prior to that, our reputation for straight talking and larrikin put-downs had been assumed to guarantee our right to freedom of expression. Falsely, as it turned out.

Tucker Carlson, who performed and was received like a rock star at Clive Palmer’s multi-city Freedom Conference events, was merciless in mocking the petty tyrants who govern our lives, insisting that they earn our respect rather than assume it. His basic premise is that free speech is the foundation of a free society and that by definition as you lose free speech you lose freedom and democracy. Motivated in part by his religious beliefs, he is adamant that if one individual seeks to limit or prohibit another individual’s thoughts or speech, they are establishiing a master-slave or owner-pet type of relationship where one being views his or herself intellectually and morally superior to the other. Any person submitting to censorship of their speech is, Tucker asserts, accepting ‘sub-human’ or inferior status.

Hot on Tucker’s heels, Toby Young, an associate editor of our UK magazine, is currently touring the nation to promote the Australian chapter of his Free Speech Union. (For tickets, or for more information, visit https://freespeechunion.au/news.html)

The Free Speech Union has already had great success in Britain, South Africa and New Zealand assisting individuals who have been ‘cancelled’ for whatever perceived speech ‘crimes’, often something as minor as an ill-conceived or innocuous social media post.

‘Freedom’ should be Toby Young’s middle name. He was the key instigator of the free schools movement in Britain, and has long championed free speech as a political tool, on social media and in his satirical writings. Needless to say, he has frequently drawn the ire of the humourless left for some of his more hilarious and politically incorrect observations.

Toby established the Free Speech Union to help cancelled individuals (he himself was one) find appropriate legal resources to fight their cases, depending on what may be required. Among other cases, the Australian FSU is currently helping Celine Baumgarten, who writes on Twitter/X under the name Celine against The Machine. Celine, a young woman from western Sydney, is being censored by the government’s eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant (who graced our cover last week and has yet to ask us for a copy!) for publishing details online of her concerns surrounding what she labels the ‘grooming’ of young school children. This involved an online commentary piece in which she raised her objections to and named a Melbourne primary school that was running a ‘Queer Club’ for students aged between 8 and 12 years of age. The information she published was publicly available and no children were identifiable in her video. Yet less than a week after sharing her video on Twitter/X, the video was geo-blocked in Australia at the behest of the e-Safety Commissioner. With the support of the Free Speech Union, Celine has filed an appeal to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal to have the decision reversed.

A key part of the story, and a somewhat sinister one at that, is that the eSafety Commissioner’s office relies on what they call ‘informal notices’ to social media companies to remove content that they deem harmful to individual Australians. The office then claims that no one can challenge these notices, since they are not ‘formal’ notices. The eSafety Commissioner has already responded to the AAT insisting no real notice was given. There is a hearing listed at the end of the month.

As was first noted in these pages by the brilliant satirist the late Bill Leak, ‘the process is the punishment’. This is where the Free Speech Union has proven so invaluable to so many people, both in informing them of the processes they will need to cope with as well as helping to challenge them.

The tragedy in Australia is that the Coalition has chosen to support the eSafety Commissioner, a creation of the unlamented Malcolm Turnbull. They are doing so because they would have us believe that they have swallowed the line that her role is purely to ‘protect’ youngsters from viewing unsuitable material online. Yet to date, her most high-profile attempts at censorship have been excruciatingly ‘progressive’ and politically left-wing and ‘woke’.

The great irony is that Celine, herself a proud bisexual woman, believes that what she is doing is helping prevent young children from being ‘groomed’ (i.e. indoctrinated and sexualised) with leftist ‘queer’ ideology. The ironies abound.