When it comes to global competition, Australia likes to punch above its weight. The world war on free speech is no exception. Under Anthony Albanese, Australia is going for gold according to  Professor Michael Shellenberger, chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free speech at the University of Austin, Texas.

Shellenberger says Australian’s Misinformation and Disinformation (MaD) legislation is ‘terrifying’ and says he’s ‘never seen anything like it’. Speaking to Ben Fordham on 2GB he explained, ‘We’ve seen some really bad censorship efforts around the world in Brazil and Ireland, but this would effectively allow the government to criminalise virtually anything…’ leading to ‘a very arbitrary form of rule where basically whoever’s in power would be able to arrest their political opponents for things that they say’. Take a bow, Mr Albanese. Beating the boys from Brazil and the Irish inquisitors is no mean feat.

When it comes to exposing censorship, Shellenberger is second to none. As reported on these pages on 8 April 2023 it was Shellenberger, along with former New York Times opinion editor Bari Weiss and former contributing editor to Rolling Stone Matt Taibbi, who were invited by Elon Musk to draw back the veil on the internal operations of Twitter and exposed – coining the phrase –the ‘censorship industrial complex’, a huge operation run by current and former US government officials from a host of agencies including the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security who outsourced the censorship of social media to NGOs and academic think tanks to avoid violating the US First Amendment.

The enterprise started after the election of Trump in 2016 to prevent his re-election and seamlessly morphed into the industrial-scale censorship of our postmodern pandemic and the enforcement of the new woke orthodoxy in all its endlessly metastasising permutations. Its tentacles reached beyond the US to Britain and thanks to the efforts of the World Health Organisation similar operations were spawned in Europe and, as reported in these pages on 27 May 2023, in Australia.

Albanese has been waging a war not just on free speech in general but on Musk in particular when the latter pushed back against a demand from eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to globally censor a video showing a teenager repeatedly stabbing Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel during a live broadcast of a service at the Christ The Good Shepherd Church in western Sydney.

Albanese said he found it ‘extraordinary that X chose not to comply and are trying to argue their case,’ called Musk an ‘arrogant billonaire’ who not only ‘thinks he’s above the law but also above common decency’ and pontificated that ‘social media needs to have social responsibility with it’ and ‘Mr Musk is not showing any.’

Musk was undaunted. He dubbed Inman Grant the ‘Australian censorship commissar,’ thanked the PM ‘for informing the public that this platform is the only truthful one,’ and won the skirmish when Federal Court Judge Geoffrey Kennett ruled that the Safety Commissioner’s demand went beyond what was ‘reasonable’ because it would amount to Australian law being applied worldwide.  Inman Grant made a ‘strategic decision’ to end the proceedings.

Yet Albanese was undeterred. His revised MaD Bill is intended to censor ‘opinions, claims, commentary and invective’ expressed on social media anywhere in the world. Yes, you read the right. Clause 3 of the bill specifically provides for ‘extra-territorial operation’ to censor content ‘outside Australia’ so long as the content is ‘provided to end-users in Australia’. That’s why Shellenberger put Australia’s censorship ahead of any other on the planet.

Albanese rushed the bill through the Lower House the day after the Melbourne Cup when most Australians were watching the second coming of Donald Trump and hopes to have it passed in time to censor Christmas, or at least the next federal election.

Unfortunately for Albanese, there’s just one hitch. His world-beating Bill is being killed off in the Star Wars Cantina that is the cross bench of the Australian Senate. Senator Gerard Rennick, a staunch free speech advocate, had always opposed it. But the independent senators who usually swing to the left confirmed they wouldn’t support it either. After Senators Tammy Tyrell and David Pocock said they would oppose it, Senators Fatima Payman and Jacqui Lambie delivered the coup de grâce on Friday 15 November. This week Senator Lidia Thorpe hopped on the bandwagon and lucky last was Senator David Van.

Unfortunately, opposition to the legislation is sometimes less than principled. Senator Thorpe opposes the bill only because ‘white-dominated institutions’ will be the arbiters of truth and they will ‘further erase, suppress and misrepresent First Nations narratives and activism’. Would she support black – or Blak – censorship ?

Senator Lambie opposed the legislation because JLN supporters ‘don’t like it’ and thinks ‘handing the power to social media companies to regulate “truth” is risky’ but she still wants to ‘address misinformation in a balanced way’. Is that a call for more ‘balanced’ censorship, whatever that is?

Senator Van, a disgraced former Liberal, said that he thought, ‘At first glance, the bill seemed to be a reasonable approach to tackle harmful content on platforms’. Really? Fortuitously, a personal meeting with Shellenberger persuaded him that ‘there are such significant defects in the bill that means it should not pass as drafted’. Is that support for censorship, just not in this form?

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the bill on Monday 25 November but will probably not call for a vote rather than face the embarrassment of a defeat. Yet even if Labor withdraws the legislation that may not be the end it.

This Bill was originally conceived and drafted by the former Liberal minister for communications, Paul Fletcher. Even if the Senate buries it, it may yet rise again. Labor, or Liberals in the mould of  Fletcher, might be tempted to draft another iteration. For some, the itch to silence the views of those with whom you disagree is hard not to scratch.

Craig Kelly, a refugee from three political parties on the right, has called for the next election to be fought on free speech and called for a referendum to insert into the constitution a US-style first amendment to protect it. Even if the Biden administration tried to circumvent it, ultimately they couldn’t. After the assaults on free speech in Australia – and indeed in Britain – it sounds like a good idea. But sadly not yet one whose time has come.