Covid censorship tyranny: fear and control used to ‘keep us safe’

What we saw with our own eyes during the pandemic pandemonium was bad enough – a pregnant woman arrested in her own home for daring to dissent online about lockdowns; police herding people off beaches and out of parks; rubber bullets fired at construction workers protesting against vaccine mandates – but the secret actions of government revealed this week are equally disturbing.

Under Coalition and Labor federal governments Australians have been subjected to covert, online censorship on Covid-19 related matters – and it is still happening.

That this has not escalated immediately into a national scandal tells us much about the way the political/bureaucratic/media class has colluded in a mutually beneficial orgy of fear and control since the early days of the pandemic. Sadly, it also reveals how complacent and compliant the public has become, enabling and encouraging the erosion of basic liberties.

We’ve simultaneously experienced the tyrannies of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. Police powers, blocked borders, lockdowns, rings of steel, school closures and curfews delivered an authoritarian, Orwellian subjugation, while it was Aldous Huxley who foresaw us buying into the fear porn and distractions, dobbing on our neighbours, meekly accepting the rules, propaganda and censorship.

It is only because dissident Liberal senator Alex Antic pursued Covid-19 censorship through a Freedom of Information application that we know the basics of what transpired in online information surveillance. But we still do not know the full details or extent of the government’s social media thought control.

To December last year the Department of Home Affairs had intervened 4213 times with digital platforms to have pandemic posts removed. We know that not all bids were successful; we know very little about what was deleted; but, worryingly, we know it is still occurring and will continue until funding expires at the end of next month.

Thanks to Elon Musk’s exposure of the Twitter files, Barcelona-based journalist Andrew Lowenthal has been able to reveal a small sample of the federal government’s interventions on that platform. One tweet showed Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews sporting a medical mask emblazoned with the words “This mask is as useless as me.” Our government’s submission to Twitter argued this amounted to “potentially harmful information” that contradicted “official information on face mask efficacy”.

The scientific basis of this call is highly debatable, and censoring such a view was an attempt to silence a medically important and contentious debate that never should have been banned during the pandemic.

We cannot ignore the political context either and the possible aim of shielding the premier from ridicule. Canberra clearly was also keen to ensure public debate allowed no room for dissent, and delivered only meek compliance with its extraordinary interventions.

It is outrageous that such a harmlessly contrarian post could be censored secretly by government. There has been no transparency or accountability on these matters.

Other tweets the government asked Twitter to delete include an observation that then health minister Greg Hunt had used “emotionally manipulative language” and one ridiculed people over queueing for seven hours to take a Covid-19 test. Our government even asked Twitter to take down an overseas tweet retweeted into “Australia’s digital information environment”.

The arrogance and unaccountable overreach of government here is breathtaking. Not only were they on a mission to “keep us safe” but also to protect us from any debates about their methods for doing so – presumably the politicians and bureaucrats believed open debate of contentious medical and public health decisions might have turned a locked-down and acquiescent population into an unruly mob in festering dystopia.

Asked about the revelations in Senate estimates this week, Emergency Management Minister Murray Watt said he was “comfortable” with this digital censorship, which was a “really good thing”. Watt said it was about “governments providing and ensuring the Australian public receives information based on science rather than … on the fringes of the Twittersphere.”

Yet this is not about disseminating government information; this is actually about meddling online to ensure nobody can question or disagree with the government’s proclamations. We are talking about crucial issues such as vaccine efficacy, risks and mandates, as well as masks, lockdowns, border closures and other measures that were highly contentious in scientific debates at the time and on which in some cases the official lines subsequently have been proven incorrect.

We were constantly told, for instance, that there was a community benefit in vaccination for those who were not vulnerable because it would prevent infection and transmission – we were constantly told about the “pandemic of the unvaccinated”. But from early on it seemed this was not true and so it has been proven.

Yet it seems this vital debate, too, must have been covertly curtailed through this secret government censorship. With political consensus from the major parties, media buy-in and public debate corralled, where was the opportunity for proper consideration of pandemic response alternatives?

That politicians who would claim to be liberal-minded or conservative would defend this overreach is extraordinary. Yet, with very few exceptions, politicians of all stripes defend these secretive and unaccountable intrusions on free speech or turn a blind eye (either that or all their strident protests are being censored from their Twitter accounts).

The mechanics for this insidious intrusion on our free speech belong to counter-terrorism measures. Civil libertarians have long argued that laws introduced to combat terrorism could curtail freedoms more broadly – in this case they have been proven right.

The Home Affairs Department runs an online surveillance function to spot terrorism and violent extremism material so it can work with the digital giants to have it taken down. In the early days of the pandemic, the Health Department – presumably at the behest of the cabinet – tasked Home Affairs to watch out for Covid-19 misinformation too. How very convenient.

Across six years there have been more than 13,000 requests to delete material, with more than 9000 of them related to terrorism and extremism. But in just under three years there have been more than 4000 related to the pandemic.

Lowenthal has accessed 18 emails to Twitter focusing on 222 tweets, which must be the tip of the iceberg because the department says most of the requests went to Facebook. He notes the public servants doing this undercover fact-checking repeatedly misspelled the word extremism in their job title, which is less than reassuring.

The unit conducting this work could have been named by George Orwell himself – the Social Cohesion Division. Alarmingly, the email correspondence refers to the government and the social media platform as partners and deliber­ately invokes the Five Eyes terminology of our intelligence sharing with the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.

The world’s most prominent Twitter files reporter, Matt Taibbi, has written about the revelations under the headline “Australia’s Creepy Covid Cops”. And the leading lockdown and vaccine mandate critic, Stanford University epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, welcomed the reports as some “sunshine” in Australia after “three long years”.

Taibbi wrote that the Department of Home Affairs emails “show a stricter, more nakedly dystopian approach to speech control” than was seen in American intelligence communications.

“Australian authorities in these emails are seen trying to cast a wider net over potential speech violations than we’re used to seeing, targeting hyperbolic language (eg a claim that PCR tests are ‘shoved up into your brain’), jokes, tweets from people with literal handfuls of followers, and medical recommendations that were either merely controversial or later proved correct,” Taibbi wrote.

Yet in Australia, who cares? My report on Monday hardly set the world on fire. Ben Fordham followed up on 2GB the following day, and Antic joined me on Sky News but he has not been inundated with interview requests.

Antic got more media attention back when he tried to turn up to parliament without proof of vaccination. One of the few politicians to highlight his revelations is One Nation leader Pauline Hanson, who continues to call for a Covid response royal commission.

This was not the only censorship that occurred during the pandemic. Social media activists and anti-News Corp campaigners weaponised the digital giants’ pandemic rules and the edicts of the World Health Organisation to challenge what Sky News put to air.

At Sky my colleagues and I had to waste huge amounts of time and energy haggling with lawyers about what facts, opinions and dissent we could share while ensuring compliance with the broadcasting codes of practice or without having our videos banned from digital platforms (some clips were taken down and many others not posted to comply with the platform policies). The public debate suffered and crucial information was either suppressed or downplayed.

We are talking about scientific experts questioning vaccine efficacy, disagreeing with mandates, suggesting more liberal lockdown and social distancing strategies, and discussing the potential of alternative treatments. These were vital debates, with some of the dissenting views proven correct over time – yet they were constantly thwarted.

Not only was this an affront to freedom of expression, it probably prolonged the unnecessary suffering of many citizens. It might have cost lives, too, with too many healthy young people convinced to get the jab on the basis it would deliver a community benefit.

We had governments drastically overreact to the pandemic with illiberal bans on travel, lockdowns, school closures and the like. And all the while they overtly and covertly suppressed dissent.

This is another reason we simply must have a full national royal commission into our pandemic response. Anthony Albanese promised an inquiry from opposition and confirmed this intent in government but has done nothing about it. Neither the major parties nor most media are agitating for this. Perhaps they would rather not examine their three years of co-operation in fear and control.

We must fight back against this insidious trend of censorship in public debate. It is already being leveraged to stifle discussion of global warming and climate change policy, as well as debate on the Indigenous voice.

The unimpeded and unendorsed expansion of government power, unauthorised contraction of citizens’ rights and unannounced restriction of media freedom might have done more harm to our society than the virus. It is a dramatic demonstration of the fragility of our hard-won democratic ideals and a reminder that freedom can be wasted on the free.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/covid-censorship-tyranny-fear-and-control-used-to-keep-us-safe/news-story/3644892b46f7c7775f9eeef5159a2042

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Energy dreams trump reality

Michael de Percy challenged Chris Bowen in person at the Sydney Institute regarding whether or not the government had a Plan B to keep the lights on if their Plan A fails. No coherent reply was forthcoming, and it looks as though the best we can expect from Bowen are more subsidies to keep the coal fires burning.

The official energy story is not likely to have a happy ending. The time has come for a new energy narrative based on realism and concern for the welfare of people and the planet. Let’s be energy realists and responsible stewards of the environment.

Energy realism rules in China and the rest of the developing world where they scramble for all the coal, oil, and gas they can get. Meanwhile, the nations of the West emulate the mythical farmer who incrementally reduced the rations of his workhorse until it died. We run down coal power and gas until there is not enough conventional power and parts of the grid are likely to die on nights when there is little or no wind.

Britain and Germany have passed that point and they are rapidly de-industrialising. Their collapse is cushioned by power from neighbours like Norway, France, and Poland who are well-served with conventional power.

Australia has recently reached that point, but we don’t have the benefit of extension cords. Our cushion is de-industrialisation as billions of dollars of investment in power-intensive industries has been outsourced to the US where energy is much cheaper.

We will be in dangerous territory if another coal plant closes while demand is boosted by population growth and the electrification of cars and households in places like the ACT where gas is banned.

The official Plan A is to increase the amount of wind and solar capacity, plus battery, however, we know that while renewable energy can displace coal, it cannot replace it.

The exit from coal is not accelerated by increasing penetration on good days because it is limited by the lowest level of output on nights with little or no wind, as a convoy travels at the speed of the slowest vessel.

Turning to the moral case for fossil fuels and the petrochemical industries. They enable people to live lives of ease and comfort that were inconceivable for the masses in the past. They are the basis of modern life, providing thousands of products that are ubiquitous in modern society. These include items that we use practically every minute of the day from putting on our makeup and cleaning our teeth to undergoing medical treatment. Imagine the pharmaceutical industry without petrochemical products.

From the Heartland Institute challenged the United Nations after the climate conference COP 27 in 2022:

The UN needs to have a plan to be able to support the demands of the eight billion on this globe for all the products and infrastructures that exist today that did not exist a few hundred years ago.

Efforts to cease the use of crude oil, without a planned replacement, could be the greatest threat to civilisation’s eight billion.

That is demonstrated by the overwhelming dominance of fossil fuels in the total energy use for Britain. (Electricity accounts for about a third of total energy consumption.)

Alex Epstein is a leading protagonist of the new energy narrative. In 2014 he published The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels and last year he released Fossil Future to explain that hydrocarbons and nuclear power are cheaper than (firmed) intermittent energy. They are reliable and have less environmental impact.

As for the environmental credentials of ‘clean energy’, look at the trail of environmental and human damage from the beginning to the end of the life of batteries, turbines, and solar panels. The cleanliness of ‘clean’ energy is one of the Big Lies of our time. Wind and solar power are not cheap or energy-efficient, after taking account of the energy required for mining, transport, processing, construction, and disposal of the hardware at the end of the line.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/change-the-narrative-change-the-game/

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The renewables backup problem

In the Snowy 2.0 project,‘Florence’, the gigantic tunneller, has fallen through some soft ground and become hopelessly stuck. She is now wedged in tonnes of earth and rocks and appears to be immovable.

But who can forget the promises made by Malcolm Turnbull, then prime minister, about the potential of Snowy 2.0? Pumped hydro would be one of the missing jigsaw pieces that would enable a deep penetration of wind and solar generation in our electricity grid. It was going to cost around $2 billion, although this had the same credibility as the original estimates of the cost of the NBN, which were devised on a drink coaster.

Moreover, the figure of $2 billion never included the cost of the additional transmission needed to hook the project up to the grid. That would cost more billions and would be subject to fierce local opposition as the required pylons and cables cut an ugly swath through rural land.

Even so, those were the salad days for the project. Water would be pumped up during the day to the upper dam – electricity prices would be cheap and generated mainly by renewable energy – and released when needed to the lower dam, thereby generating electricity. OK, there’s a lot of energy lost in the process and, of course, no new electricity is actually generated. And given the capital costs, it’s not clear it would ever generate a rate of return. But what the heck, when you are saving the planet.

We were told that Snowy 2.0 would act like a giant battery, providing needed backup to intermittent renewable energy. The nominal capacity was around 2,000 megawatts, about the size of a standard coal-fired power station, although it would only be able to operate for several hours each day. It was to be ready in 2023-24, which now sounds hopelessly optimistic.

The most likely scenario now is that the project will be completed by the end of the decade and the total cost, not including transmission, will be around $10 billion. Let’s not forget that stuck-Florence is costing an arm and leg because this type of specialised machinery – she was built in Germany – is leased and daily fees will still be ticking over. One way or another, the operators will find a way around the Florence problem.

The bigger picture is this: renewable energy will simply not work without sufficient backup and it’s the backup conundrum that has everyone stumped. Even if Snowy 2.0 had gone well, it is only a tiny part of the backup solution. The trouble is that Australia’s topography simply doesn’t lend itself to multiple pumped hydro projects.

The Kidston project in far-north Queensland has been nearly a decade in the making and this was starting, by chance, with two dams at different levels that existed because of a former mining operation. The biggest capital contribution to the project has come from governments, with the investors contributing a smaller amount. When it is eventually finished, it will help power households in the area but any cost-benefit analysis would show that this project should never have gone ahead.

The hope of the side was always batteries, the bigger the better. But the assumed technology leaps have simply not occurred. They provide a few hours of power and do help with stabilising the grid through frequency control. But given the components required to build these batteries – think lithium, cobalt, nickel – and the shortage of them, it’s not clear that batteries are a universal solution. They also remain expensive, in part because so many countries around the world are following the same path: renewable energy plus batteries.

Gas plants are the obvious solution, but they of course emit carbon dioxide. While closed-cycle gas turbines are much more efficient than the open-cycle ones – they use less gas and emit less carbon dioxide – it is the latter which are best designed for backup because they can be cranked up at short notice to cover shortfalls from renewable sources. In other words, to make solar and wind viable means of generating electricity, they need to be backed up by relatively emissions-intensive gas plants. You know it makes sense.

It’s also important to note here that the buildout of land-hungry wind and solar means that any existing coal-fired plant is made obsolete before its time. That is because these plants are simply not designed to provide backup power; rather they are designed to provide continuous power with constantly turning turbines. When made to provide backup power, their operating and maintenance costs skyrocket.

The fact is that even the pious Climate Change and Energy Minister, Chris Bowen, cannot make the wind blow or prevent the sun from setting. Even in his true-believing world, there is a need for backup power. Building more and more solar and wind installations doesn’t overcome this problem and is highly inefficient of itself.

A number of countries, including the UK, Canada and France, have become very lukewarm about nuclear energy but are now having second thoughts. These governments are committing to substantial investments in new nuclear installations, which are not necessarily well-designed to provide backup but can do so without any emissions.

Over time, these governments may conclude that it’s just easier (and cheaper) to go fully nuclear and forget the turbines and solar panels. After all, these renewable installations wear out quickly – probably off-shore turbines last only 15 years – and will need to be replaced. This will leave Australia in a pickle, with a motley collection of wind, solar, gas plants, ugly big batteries and possibly Snowy 2.0, adding up to unreliable and expensive power.

Just perhaps a future government will see sense and take a different path that involves nuclear power. This could be about the same time that Florence is finally rescued from her uncomfortable resting spot.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/florence-gets-stuck-in-a-pickle/

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The silencing and vilification of women and girls

Edie Wyatt

The UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem has issued a statement voicing concerns about the silencing and vilification of women and girls who are attempting to engage in debate about the human rights of women and girls.

Ms Alsalem said that ‘women and girls who emphasise the specific needs of women born female and who call for and engage in discussions around the definitions of sex gender and gender identity and the interaction of rights’ should be able to ‘express themselves and their concerns on these issues in safety and in dignity’.

It shouldn’t be an astounding statement, but it is, and at a time when the Australian government is ramping up censorship toward the very people Reem Alsalem is refereeing to, gender-critical activists…

Let me take you back, if I may, to the dark days of November 2022. I was still in a Twitter dungeon, banished from the bird app for stating that men pretending to be lesbians is rape culture. My appeals were falling on the deaf ears of soon-to-be unemployed community safety moderators.

It was as if the ABC knew they would be facing the dark shadow of women like me emerging from the musky underworld to say the things in the light that should only be spoken of in the dark.

The headline read, Australia’s eSafety commissioner writes to Elon Musk concerned about Twitter’s direction. In the story, our ABC warned about the risk of jeopardising ‘safety online, and allowing misinformation to flourish’. The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, was pictured next to Musk, who was referred to in the article, and by Grant herself, as the ‘chief twit’.

‘If the first week of the chief twit’s tenure is any indication, I think they have a bumpy ride ahead of them. It’s said that content moderation is not rocket science but in some ways it’s more complex and nuanced than that,’ Ms Inman Grant said.

According to feminist publication Reduxx, the eSafety Commissioner has now begun a ‘censorship rampage’. Reduxx claim that they were told to ‘censor or delete an article’ by the eSaftey Commissioner, before having it hidden from Australian audiences. I have no idea if that is true or not, but if it is true, that raises potential infractions of Australian law.

For engaging in political action in the gender debate, Kirralee Smith also allegedly found herself disciplined by the eSafety Commissioner, allegedly having her Facebook page deleted. She has now received attention from the NSW police, with the issuing of an Apprehensive Violence Orders to Smith.

The UK’s Daily Mail described Smith as a ‘campaigner fighting to “keep blokes out of women’s sport”’. You would never see Smith described that way in the Australian media. The national broadcaster covered the issue, their headline read, ‘Football Australia to accelerate trans-inclusive high performance policy following anti-trans harassment cases in NSW.’

Gender-critical feminists like me, now happily tap away on the bird app, while facing the very real prospect that the Australian government censor or a member of our state police will punish us for our words.

Last week a notice was given to my friend and former breastfeeding counsellor Jasmine Sussex by Twitter, advising her of an Australian law infraction. I met Jasmine in person just over a year ago at a Brisbane radical feminist conference, but she first contacted me in 2021 when I wrote an article in The Spectator Oz titled On “Chestfeeding”.

At this time Jasmine’s long relationship with the Australian Breastfeeding Association (ABA) was ending in some level of pain and bitterness. As I wrote in my article, the ABA was collaborating with an organisation called Rainbow Families. The result was the adoption by the ABA of some gender identity ideology-based practices that Jasmine found problematic and dangerous.

Jasmine raised concerns with the ABA, that the inclusion of men in their purview meant an alignment with very shoddy and experimental medicine, just to name one of the many red flags that she raised. Jasmine lost her position as a breastfeeding counsellor and has become entrenched in activism on the gender identity vs sex issue.

Reem Alsalem said that she is concerned about the reprisals women face for speaking on this issue such as ‘censorship, legal harassment, loss of jobs, loss of income, removal from social media platforms, speaking engagements and the refusal to publish research conclusions and articles’. I now know dozens of women in Australia who have faced these kinds of reprisals because they refuse to yield the factual definition of sex.

Women like Jasmine speak up because they can’t turn from what they see. In the world of breastfeeding, the inclusion of gender identity ideology in women’s support infrastructure, is leading to the assumption that male people can produce milk suitable for an infant, and these males should be supported in the pursuit of feeding an infant from their body by the entirety of the medical profession, including birth and lactation specialists. Apart from the coercion that is required to implement such a practice, the process by which endocrinologists are getting human males to exude a substance from their nipples, seems to be ethically debased and scientifically unsupported.

Jasmine Sussex and a Brisbane women’s rights activist recently took to Twitter to highlight the disturbing promotion of males feeding infants through an untested chemically induced process. Both women have received notices that their tweets are in violation of Australian law, and the tweets are now hidden from Australian audiences.

When I raised this issue on Twitter recently, a trans activist posted a study in response, as an argument for the support of men ‘chest-feeding’. It was called Case Report: Induced Lactation in a Transgender Woman and it involved experimentation on an adopted human infant.

Isidora Sanger, who is a medical doctor and author of Born in the Right Body, says that the study is not only unethical but ‘fraught with incomplete and misleading information, disingenuous analysis and undeclared conflict of interest’. In what could be a warning to health professionals in Australia, Sanger said the study is ‘an example of how transgender health clinics prioritise emotional needs of trans-identified males over the welfare of women and children’.

If what the women are saying in the censored tweets is true, endocrinologists could be conducting unaccountable experiments on human infants in this country, and there is not a news outlet in the nation that would cover this using actual words that mean what they say.

The smoke and mirrors of ‘inclusive’, ‘queer’, and ‘diversity’, mask an unpalatable tale of misogyny and abuse of power that is told only when we are permitted to use words with correct meanings. The reality is that gender identity cannot survive without linguistic subterfuge and the broadscale censorship of women declaring their bodily needs and political interests.

Reen Alsalem said in her statement:

‘Sweeping restrictions on the ability of women and men to raise concerns regarding the scope of rights based on gender identity and sex are in violation of the fundamentals of freedom of thought and freedom of belief and expression.’

How we allowed Australia to lag so badly in the human rights of women and children is baffling to me.

Alsalem also raised concerns about the smearing of women who are organising politically to raise issues of the protection of women and girls, specifically their smearing as ‘Nazis’. Our national broadcaster is leaning heavily into this narrative, with a story recently published about neo-Nazi groups, strongly linking them to women who organise to fight against gender identity laws.

Former Attorney General of Queensland Shannon Fentiman refused to meet with groups of gender-critical women when changing legislation for birth certificates, saying openly in Parliament that such groups ‘cloak their transphobia in the guise of women’s safety’.

Having been involved with such Brisbane-based women’s groups, I find it strange that Fentiman would believe that a bunch of left-leaning, gainfully employed, middle-aged women have decided to risk their jobs, social standing, and physical safety to meet in secret, pool their resources, and engage in political action, with the single objective of picking on a minority group that have no firm definition.

After being in this fight a few years, I can report that trans activists are some of the meanest, nastiest individuals I have ever encountered in my life, and no woman would pick a fight with them without serious consideration. The most aggressive of the activists, stripped of identity signifiers, are mostly straight white men.

We are facing a failure of democracy and a corruption of liberalism and a time when we have a chronic dearth of liberals. The recent problems with John Pesutto and the Victorian Liberals show just how quickly the testicles of the Australian Liberal man will shrink back into his body when he is threatened. It has become obvious that some Victorian Liberals are fleeing for safety in appeasement to gender identity ideology in the face of aggressive state power, or what we used to call tyranny.

Maybe we should send the Victorian Liberal ‘moderates’ away from their Melbourne Pinot Grigio swilling mates for a few days to attend John Stuart Mill Camp, where they could listen to On Liberty on repeat and be subject to images from the Russian gulags, just to remind them what the people of Victoria pay them to be in favour of, and what they are meant to be against.

I hear political commentators regularly citing ‘the trans issue’ as a fringe or minor issue, but if the state can re-define the sex of our body, the role of a mother, and the purpose of a baby, and we are not permitted to critique that, we have already yielded essential liberties. Liberties that we need to politically organise and bring our requests to the state that we fund, to the liberal democratic state that is supposed to be accountable to the people, including women people.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/05/the-silencing-and-vilification-of-women-and-girls/

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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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