Look, I realise that this Albanese government is adopting policies that give every impression that it wants to destroy our agricultural sector. And its intentions as regards our mining sector may be even worse, despite Big Mining basically keeping this country afloat. Albo et al. are changing labour relations laws to make way worse what at least half-worked. (There was at least some flexibility, though not nearly as much as you’d find in virtually all other Anglophone countries’ labour relations laws. Canadians like me are staggered when they arrive here and learn that two-bit, pseudo-bureaucrat tribunals overseeing a 120-year-old outdated labour law system abandoned everywhere else – jettisoned even by New Zealand in the 1980s – have a hefty hand in deciding on, and imposing, wages and conditions that result in thousands of pages of rigid rules that even the ABC, the two big grocers, charities and the most left-wing employers you can imagine cannot help but breach on occasion. Good luck trying to design a more productivity-killing labour relations system than Australia’s.)

Meanwhile Team Albo thinks it’s a virtue that government spending is so high it’s the only thing keeping us out of a recession.  (Why not then just jack government spending up to 80 per cent of GDP, Mr Chalmers, if this is some good in itself?) And this in the context of six quarters of GDP per person decline – a massive recession at the level that matters: how each individual is doing. The idiocy of the Keynesian outlook that focuses on the fictional unit of ‘the entire economy’ and hence can go up simply by importing per capita world’s highest numbers of immigrants, all while making individuals poorer and poorer, has never been clearer. Throw in lingering and impoverishing inflation. Add in what are virtually the democratic world’s highest electricity prices and highest minimum wage laws. Mix all this with an out-of-control NDIS welfare scheme gone mad. Then remember our woeful labour relations system, more dreadful productivity statistics, and an education system that aims to indoctrinate while delivering results that five years ago had us behind Kazakhstan only for us today to aspire to those outcomes. And finish it all off with the remnant effects of the thuggish, authoritarian lockdowns that have produced citizens who think they are entitled to work from home, who think government can just dole out money for nothing, who have been immunised against the huge costs of ever-increasing government spending, and who (for many) simply do not trust the elites because, as the great Stanford University epidemiologist Professor Jay Bhattacharya has said repeatedly, ‘governments were the biggest source of misinformation and disinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic’.  (Remember that for what comes below.)

It’s not a pretty picture. So you can see why some people might be tempted to focus on those pocketbook issues and ignore what is happening on the free speech front. It is imperative, however, that we all must resist that temptation, especially Team Dutton.

Exhibit A is the revamped Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill that Team Albo delayed at the end of last year. Be clear. In terms of free speech this revamped Bill is even worse than the truly awful earlier version. In the guise of ‘keeping Australians safe’ (and tell me the Liberal MPs who showed basically zero concern for free speech all through the Morrison years will not succumb to this Orwellian propaganda) it will bring about a truly chilling effect on free speech. I have never seen anything like it in an advanced Anglosphere country. The Australian Communications and Media Authority (Acma) gets huge power over social media platforms. The pretence is that Acma won’t be able to take down content but it will be able to impose huge fines on them – so the Bill basically forces social media platforms to act as government censors or close down in Oz.  The definition of ‘serious harm’ is now so wide it envelopes ‘harms’ to the Commonwealth, plausibly covers opinions the boffins just don’t agree with, and certainly includes opinions about public health and the economy. I’d say this Bill would cover basically all of the disagreements about government policy that swirled around during the pandemic – all those many claims that were sceptical of government’s thuggish rules; sceptical of the ‘there are no age differential effects of the virus’; inclined to believe there were far higher Covid vaccine adverse events than exist with established vaccines. You know, all the sceptical claims that were later proved correct – hence Professor Bhattacharya’s ‘governments were the biggest source of mis and disinformation’ assertion. Individuals can be fined too in certain circumstances. Oh, and the information request powers can (and will) be misused. Heck, imagine what Team Albo would have done in the Voice debate with these powers.

Put bluntly, this Bill would deliver a tool to be used against opinions that differ from the government line. Elon Musk has lambasted it as the sort of law a fascist government would enact. That’s not much of an exaggeration when the Bill covers information that is factually true but that some fact-checker (directly or indirectly) for Acma happens to label as misleading or deceptive because it lacks context. (Any bets how often that needed context demands alignment with the sceptical, libertarian or conservative outlooks rather than the usual establishment political left? The answer will rhyme with a fiddling Roman emperor.) And, no surprise here, the legacy media, academics and (implicitly) government itself will be exempted from the censoring strictures of this Bill.

Be clear. This Bill has to be stopped or repealed. This shows you what happens when the Libs cave in on earlier inroads on free speech as they did with the Section 18C hate speech laws. The inroads just keep on coming. I want Dutton to win. I think he can. But if he and the Libs don’t come out and unequivocally state: 1) that they will oppose this Bill and 2) that if it gets up anyway they will pledge to repeal it, then I won’t vote for them and neither should you. The ghastly and diabolical state of our economy is no warrant or justification for standing silently by as our free society is attacked in the platitudinous name of ‘keeping us safe’. We don’t need government to keep us safe. It’s far more likely to keep politicians safe but us unsafe. Just ask John Stuart Mill, Winston Churchill and anyone with a functioning brain.

By the way, there are other exhibits showing Team Albanese is the most anti-free speech government in memory. There’s a supposedly ‘watered down’ Hate Speech Bill that will make it easier to prosecute people while adding way more ‘protected’ categories. Think of being charged for misgendering someone, say. This seems to mimic UK-style ‘prison time for expressing your views online’. And remember, even if you’re acquitted, the process is the punishment. Also, there’s a mighty speech-enervating Privacy Bill. And all of the above will come with a hefty helping of selective prosecutions – look out conservatives!

So Messrs Dutton, Taylor, Ley, Paterson, Littleproud, Hastie, et al, we need a spirited attack on this Misinformation Bill and the other speech-gagging Bills. Try to revive those dormant Liberal party first principles. Or if principles mean nothing to you, how about this: fight for free speech or watch your excellent chance to win the next election go down the toilet. And rightfully so.