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Media diversity

Stephen Andrew statement on Media Diversity

Senator Sarah Hanson-Young, Chair of the hilariously named “Media Diversity” Senate Committee, has issued Sky Australia with a ‘summons’ to appear before her next Friday and explain how recent outbreaks of free speech at the mainstream channel were allowed to go unchecked for so long. Senator Young, who describes herself on Twitter as a proud “World Economic Forum Young Global Leader”, said yesterday that Sky News Channel’s ‘speech crimes’ urgently needed to be stamped out as:
“Australians are rightly worried about the promotion and dissemination of Covid lies and conspiracy theories that put lives at risk and undermine public health.” Sky News Australia just served a 1 week suspension from YouTube, for “violating” the platform’s “policies on coronavirus”. What those policies are or how Sky ‘violated’ them, no-one knows, but I strongly suspect our friends in Canberra were closely involved in the Tech Giant’s decision.
Morrison’s National Cabinet, which replaced Parliamentary democracy in Australia nearly two years ago, has become very chummy lately with the Big Tech Triumvirate of Google, Facebook and Twitter. Nowadays, Big Tech has the Government’s back on pretty much everything, which just goes to show that ‘covert’ Public-Private Partnerships work just as well as overt ones!
Greens’ Senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, also seems happy to run ‘defence’ for Morrison and his National Cabinet, as she champions the cause of State Censorship and the suppression of political dissent in Australia. Hanson-Young yesterday demanded answers from Sky News and the media regulator, who she accused of “sitting on its hands” for months. “If information is too dangerous for the internet, surely it’s too dangerous to be on our TV screens,” she huffed and puffed.
You have to wonder if the Greens Senator and her supporters ever stop to think, that doing the ‘dirty’ work of Australia’s powerful anti-free speech forces might one day come back to haunt the green movement and others on the country’s so-called ‘left’?
If they think this stops with conservatives, they’re delusional. The renegade News outlet, at least, still seems defiant, with Sky’s Digital Editor, Jack Houghton, calling the suspension and summons “an attack on the fundamental human right of freedom of speech”.
He cited UN Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which states: “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”
Whether that will be enough to save the Sky News rebels, however, remains to be seen.

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State coercion and lockdown

Stephen Andrew statement on State Coercion and Lockdown

Those in power know that if you make people desperate enough, you can get them to do almost anything. With vaccination rates stubbornly low – 15.7% as of yesterday – snap lockdowns and harsh restrictions are being used coercively by governments to enforce their will on an unexpectedly recalcitrant Australian people. As the political adage goes, if you want people to be willing to accept a solution, first you have to make them realise that they have a problem.
With each passing day, more and more extreme restrictions are being imposed, and the country’s leadership are stridently adamant that the lockdowns and strict measures won’t end till most of Australia is fully vaccinated. The PM, Scott Morrison, told Australians last month that phase B, the ‘transition phase’, only begins when the adult population has reached 80 per cent of people fully vaccinated, and any State wanting to move to the next stage will also have to have reached that target. The NSW Premier told the people of her State that the ‘harshest lockdown ever’ would be lifted at the end of August. Yesterday, she walked that back, saying only much higher vaccination rates would see restrictions loosened.
In Queensland, we have had three snap lockdowns already this year, with the most recent one extended another week by the Deputy Premier, Steven Miles. Miles told media that this could be the last lockdown, provided Queenslanders did the right thing by wearing masks, checking in at venues, getting tested for the virus and, yes, getting vaccinated. So eighteen months after ‘flattening the curve’, people are still being told that they aren’t allowed to seek and find basic social interaction, enjoy physical contact with friends and family or derive confidence and self-esteem from their work.
The impact of these coercive, cruel lockdowns, combined with the frightening dismantling of our rights and civil liberties, has been enormously destructive of public confidence and trust.
The damage done to social cohesion and people’s sense of happiness and well-being has also been profound. Many will take years to recover, if they ever do.
Whether they will ever forgive their Governments and those who led them down this road, is another question altogether.
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