With thanks to Senator Gerard Rennick.
Bad turn Australia: Mute Fella Country!
By Gary Scarrabelotti
We can stop here and now. Or we cross the line.
And there it is, the boundary scored hard across the road we’ve veered onto: the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024.
To get up to scratch on it, here are a couple of leads.
The Bill
First, for background, you can’t go past the reports of that indispensable citizen journalist of our day, Rebekah Barnett. Start here. Then go here.
Barnett’s account is disciplined, tight and, if anything, understated. Which is what you’d expect from a top-notch journo.
Then, for something warmer and more damning, turn to Chris Berg in Crikey. It’s an exceptional piece in its economy and force of argument.
Anyway, what we are now talking about is a second draft Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.
The first had to be withdrawn last year because it triggered an avalanche of criticism for censorship overreach. The new version tightens up its language and reins in (somewhat) the excesses of the original.
My own thinking converges with Berg’s. The essential character of the legislation remains unchanged and (I’d add) its narrower specification of target issues underscores which debates the Albanese government is most anxious to restrict. The new Bill exposes, thereby, the social control agenda of the Albo régime with greater clarity.
Extracted at the head of this article is text from the legislation which sets out what these priority issues are. In this piece, I’ll focus on the most pressing purpose of the Bill – to clamp down on criticism of how the Covid ‘crisis’ was handled. And here Berg states the problem (almost) perfectly:
“The Albanese government has declined to institute a full enquiry into the Covid-19 policy responses of the state and federal governments. Something seems to be backward here. We are not getting a proper audit of what was true and what was not true during the pandemic, but we are getting laws that would prevent [alleged] untruths from being shared.”
Before we move on to my larger theme, there’s another thing about this ‘Mis & Dis Bill’ we need to consider. There’s subterfuge afoot.
The Bill attempts to disavow (implausibly) a government role in censorship by pushing onto digital platforms responsibility for direct censorial action.
In other words, government aims to enforce upon communications businesses a code of conduct which obliges them, under pain of financial penalties, to be the censors.
Meanwhile, you (I hope) and I are asking ourselves, “So, why are they doing all this?”
There are two questions here, as you can see: “Why do they want to censor us?” and “Why do they want others to do it for them?”
The first looks rhetorical. On it, a seasoned punter might hazard a bet. The second not at all. The answer to it is not immediately obvious.
Defying gravity
First up, let’s deal with the ‘obvious’ – or with what might not seem so to a mediocre punter like me. You see, it’s taken me a while for the penny to drop. My gravity-defying coin took a long, slow fall before it finally clinked into place.
Back in 2020, when the lockdowns began, together with mask mandates, business shutdowns and border closures, and when curiously similar measures were being applied in near simultaneity across the face of planet Earth, I said to myself:
“Something strange is happening.”
The co-ordination, the unity of purpose wasn’t normal. Though many were the players and authorities engaged, they were all goose-stepping, in tight order, to the same strident blare of trumpets.
“It’s as if a single mind were at work,” I thought.
The phrase, “single mind” stuck with me. More than that, it chilled me. My Instincts had already been roused by criticism of Prof. Neil Ferguson, his doomsday predictions and professional credibility. Now they bristled with intensity.
As if a single mind were at work.
Ferguson and his team at the UK’s Imperial College had predicted a dire death rate among Covid sufferers. But soon afterwards, specialists in the field began recalling his history of “crying wolf” when new virus strains appeared. At the same time, Ferguson was unwilling to reveal the methods used to calculate his numbers. Which raised the question: was he using techniques that had already proved flawed?
It was late April 2020 when that debate broke out. As it merged over May-June with the globally regimented lockdowns, I disembarked “The Narrative”.
Where I found myself, however, was not in a clear and certain place but on a dark and unknown shore. What lay before me was a forest of impenetrable events. From it, muffled and menacing signals reached the scanning and sifting of my animal senses. It took three more years before I figured it out.
Penny drops
During that time, I laid out mentally the pieces of a jigsaw in some sort of order but was hesitant to fit them into the finished image. What I feared was too awful to take-in whole.
When precisely everything came together, I’m not sure. But looking back, it could have been on a cold Canberra evening – on 31 May 2023 – as I sat slack-jawed in a meeting listening to the Covid stories of others. I wrote about that here.
Back to the present, it was a few days ago when I read a Substack by my friend and warrior-pundit Paul Collits. In it, he wrote this:
“Any remaining doubts that Covid was planned and coördinated should by now be well and truly gone. Two hundred countries don’t all march in lockstep by accident.”
That, precisely, is what I sensed back at the 2020 Covid beginnings but which, in a prolonged act of mental hesitation, I was either unable or unwilling to accept.
“Two hundred countries don’t all march in lockstep by accident.”
Stunning. Breathtaking. Dreadful. Words fail. But that ‘phenomenon’ – that Thing – is, ultimately, why Australia is now on the brink of making the Mis & Dis Bill 2024 the law of the land.
Forever Mirkwood
With the silent consent of the now-in-Opposition Liberal and National parties, the Albo régime doesn’t want us to see, much less to comprehend, what happened behind the thicket of events that hid from view the Covid reality. That gloomy Mirkwood must remain forever undisturbed by exploration.
Why?
Because, when you cut through and get behind it, what you find is a political class which, in fear and trembling, surrendered wholly to outside forces their elected responsibility to protect us and our country’s interests.
Lockdowns and masking, business closures and collapses, vaccine safety and effectiveness, vaccine injuries and excess deaths: these are the “data points” of betrayal. Which is why, very soon, you and I will not be able to speak about “the efficacy of preventative health measures in Australia” except in terms dictated by the political class itself.
Lockdowns and masking, business closures and collapses, vaccine safety and effectiveness, vaccine injuries and excess deaths: the “data points” of betrayal.
In short, the Mis & Dis Bill 2024 is the work of fear and self-protection. It’s been drawn up to hide what kind of people inhabit our ruling class and to prevent judgement on what they have done.
Finally, briefly, to the second question: why outsource censorship?
Mute the plebs
Like the “Covid response”, it’s a global “action plan”. The aim is to mask the creation of centralised state agencies of top-down speech control by enforcing upon institutions, at switch-points between the individual and the state, a culture of self-censorship and dobbing.
The nearer to you and me the state can locate the censors of speech and writing, the more carefully we will mind our Ps and Qs. And when we do that, the gulf between the rulers (up there) and us (down here) gets wider and wider.
This is the very thing they want: for themselves to be as far out of our sight as possible; and for us to be as mute and invisible to them as they can make us.
That, of course, is the fatal flaw in their design. It has the makings, ultimately, of revolution and mayhem.
That it never happens, we need to stop this Bill; to stop it dead; and to stop it now.