Australia is quietly abandoning one of its most sacred inheritances: the right to speak freely. In its place, we are building a society where public discourse is policed, dissent is tracked, and criticism is treated as a threat. All of this is done in the name of ‘safety’ but paid for by you, the taxpayer.

Meanwhile, the signs of a creeping surveillance state are everywhere: banks interrogate you for withdrawing your own money, digital identity trials loom on the horizon, and lawful online dissent is being swept into the bureaucratic net under the guise of ‘harm prevention’.

Former Australian High Court Justice Brennan J, in the case of Nationwide News Pty Ltd v Wills (1992) 177 CLR 1 at [47] stated (inter alia):

‘To sustain a representative democracy embodying the principles prescribed by the Constitution, freedom of public discussion of political and economic matters is essential: it would be a parody of democracy to confer on the people a power to choose their Parliament but to deny the freedom of public discussion from which the people derive their political judgments.’

Taxpayers Paying for Their Own Muzzles

Behind closed doors, an industry of surveillance has emerged – funded by your taxes and authorised by unelected bureaucrats. According to documents released under Freedom of Information (FOI), the eSafety Commissioner has contracted third-party monitoring companies to track, log, and flag online content posted by Australians.

This includes tweets, posts, and commentary by medical professionals, journalists, sitting and former MPs, and lawyers – not because they’re inciting violence, but because they are questioning government narratives on Covid, Net Zero, Digital ID, and other state orthodoxies.

This surveillance is not limited to individual investigations. It functions as a continuous, open-ended search warrant, untethered to any specific threat, court order, or criminal suspicion. And it is not cheap.

The Surveillance Price Tag

According to Senate Estimates and public budget documents:

• The eSafety Commissioner’s budget has skyrocketed from $10.3 million in 2018-19 to $42.5 million in 2023-24 – a 262 per cent increase in just five years.
• In the 2023-24 financial year alone, over $5 million was earmarked for ‘industry engagement and regulatory response to harmful content online’ – a broad term that includes funding third-party social listening contracts.

Australians Forgotten

122,494 people were estimated to be experiencing homelessness at the time of the 2021 Census, an increase of 6,067 people (5.2 per cent) since 2016. The rate of homelessness decreased to 48 people per 10,000, from 50 in 2016.

Of those experiencing homelessness in 2021:

• 68,516 (55.9 per cent) were male, an increase of 1.6 per cent from 2016.
• 53,974 (44.1 per cent) were female, an increase of 10.1 per cent from 2016.
• Females accounted for 81.7 per cent of the 6,067 increase of people experiencing homelessness in 2021.

At the same time, 1 in 5 households is in mortgage stress. Over 26 per cent of renters spend more than 30 per cent of income on housing and 62.01 per cent are in rental stress.

While Australians sacrifice groceries to keep the heater on, their government is spending millions spying on tweets and social media companies telling them what is approved content for the community to see and hear.

Who Is Being Watched – and Why?

And it’s not just those with political or professional influence. Everyday Australians who dared to speak out about their personal suffering – those who lost loved ones following Covid vaccination, or who were injured themselves – have found their voices silenced or algorithmically buried. Thousands of workers who were terminated for refusing the jab have similarly been shut out of mainstream discourse. While their stories remain painfully relevant, their posts are throttled, their accounts flagged, and their grief ignored.

At the same time, dominant narratives on Climate Change and Net Zero saturate media cycles and policymaking, with little room for dissenting scientific or economic analysis. The space for reasoned debate is shrinking, replaced by enforced consensus.

We have seen this sort of thing before in history, where controlling the narrative was not just about silencing opposition, but about manufacturing compliance. When information is filtered, flagged, and forcefully aligned with state orthodoxy, society moves dangerously close to totalitarian mimicry under democratic guise.

FOI documents show surveillance efforts targeting:

• Sitting MPs and former MPs raising constitutional or economic concerns.
• Lawyers involved in human rights litigation.
• Doctors opposing Covid mandates.
• Journalists exposing public sector corruption or regulatory failure.

None of these individuals are breaking laws. Their ‘offence’ is being loud, credible, and inconvenient. The surveillance, framed as ‘harm prevention’, operates as a political filtration machine – quietly flagging those who challenge official narratives.

According to the eSafety Commissioner’s 2023-24 Corporate Plan, powers allow enforcement based on complaints – even if the content is not illegal.

A Constitutional Breach in Slow Motion

Australia’s High Court has recognised the implied constitutional freedom of political communication (Lange v ABC (1997) 189 CLR 520), a critical safeguard for democratic discourse. But the quiet rise of social monitoring regimes has chilled that freedom.

In Chapter 16 of the International Handbook of Whistleblower Research (Edward Elgar, 2014), I argued that protecting taxpayers from waste and fraud depends on encouraging dissent and disclosure. When those who challenge power are algorithmically silenced, truth withers.

Why should government place a higher cultural premium of concealment rather than transparency?

Behind the scenes, governments – including Australia’s – have established formal and informal back channels to social media platforms:

• Takedown Notices: Under the Online Safety Act 2021, the eSafety Commissioner can compel social media and hosting platforms to remove content, with penalties for non-compliance.
• Trusted Flagger Access: Regulators, including eSafety, participate in ‘trusted flagger’ programs, giving them elevated privileges to escalate content for removal or suppression.
• Coordination with Platforms: The Voluntary Code of Practice on Disinformation enables the Department of Home Affairs and ACMA to work directly with tech companies to limit the spread of flagged content – even if it’s lawful.
• Throttling and Shadow Banning: Reports show that accounts flagged by government sources are subject to reduced visibility, downranking, or shadow bans, where content remains online but is algorithmically buried.

These practices were confirmed internationally through the Twitter Files, where US government agencies coordinated content suppression across multiple platforms. Australia, as a Five Eyes partner, mirrors these practices through its own bureaucratic arms.

We Are Paying for Our Own Gag Orders

The moral injury is profound: Australians are paying to be silenced. Your taxes fund the departments, the tools, the staff, the private contractors – all to suppress the very voices calling for transparency, reform, and accountability.

We are told this is about ‘safety’. But it’s increasingly clear that this regime exists to protect the political class from scrutiny. Legal speech is treated as a reputational hazard to be scrubbed, not a democratic right to be upheld.

A Call to Courage

Australians must act.

Defund bureaucratic censorship, and repeal laws that allow unelected officials to act as truth police.

Demand transparency: Which companies are being paid to surveil citizens?

What are the metrics for suppression?

Reassert our foundational values: the ‘fair go’, open debate, and the right to dissent without being digitally gagged.

The eSafety Commissioner, originally founded in July 2015 to protect children from cyberbullying, has since been given unprecedented powers under the Online Safety Act 2021. That expansion must be urgently reviewed.

If we allow this trajectory to continue, the Australia we leave our children will be unrecognisable. It is not too late to reclaim our freedom – but only if we stop cowering to ever-harder government and start standing up for the liberties generations before us fought to defend.

Let Australians breathe free again.