Free speech in Australia

Toby Young

I was rather pleased to be pulled aside by Australian Border Force when I arrived in Brisbane as a guest of the Free Speech Union of Australia. I was in the country to give a series of talks, and the organisation’s previous invitee, Graham Linehan, who is second only to J.K. Rowling in the trans activists’ pantheon of hate figures, had caused no end of controversy. Not only had it taken him six weeks to get a visa, but several of his speaking events had to be reorganised at the last minute after activists persuaded the venues not to ‘platform’ him. I was looking forward to comparing notes with Graham on my return to England, boasting about all the attempts to cancel me, and being interrogated by Border Force seemed like a good start.

Alas, the officer stared blankly at me when I told him I was the founder and general secretary of the British Free Speech Union and didn’t seem remotely worried that I might be a dangerous rabble-rouser. His only concern was that I might be paid to give after-dinner speeches, something my visa didn’t allow. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘No one’s going to pay to listen to me drone on about free speech.’ He eyed me up and down and, with unseemly haste, decided I must be telling the truth.

I have only been to Australia once before when my late father, who was about the same age as I am now, brought me along for a two-week lecture tour of his own – and he was paid

The first thing that strikes a British visitor to Australia is how much more prosperous the country is. Your GDP per capita is about 40 per cent higher than ours, but that doesn’t quite capture the difference since if you take London out of the equation our GDP per capita is lower than that of Mississippi, America’s poorest state. This really hits home when you visit our smaller cities – places like Plymouth, Peterborough and Hull  – and I was expecting Australia’s less well-known state capitals to be similar. But not a bit of it. Hobart, for instance, reminded me of Kentish Town, an affluent part of North London that our current Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, hails from. Wherever I went, from Adelaide to Perth, I noticed how there were far fewer homeless people compared to London. It was also a relief to be able to wander around Sydney checking Google Maps on my iPhone, something Londoners have learned not to do thanks to an epidemic of mobile phone theft.

After two weeks here, I was glad I hadn’t brought any of my children with me. One look at this land of opportunity and they would have refused to come home.

The Australian people seem more exuberant and self-confident than the British, too. We seem to be permanently in the grip of a national identity crisis, with most young people having been taught that slavery was an invention of the British Empire, which was an unalloyed evil. You have your fair share of guilty white liberals, of course, and your schoolteachers seem to be as mesmerised by critical race theory and ‘decolonising the curriculum’ as ours. But the woke mind virus doesn’t seem to have infected quite as many people here as it has in Britain, one reason why the Yes side in the Voice referendum got less than 40 per cent.

But those Australians who still place some store in the values of Western civilisation need to wake up if they’re to preserve them from the progressive left. Take free speech, for instance. In the past five years, it has come under serious assault, particularly with the passing of the Online Safety Act, which resulted in the creation of the e-Safety Commissioner and the appointment of Julie Inman Grant as your censor-in-chief. Her attempts to cleanse social media of any opposition to radical woke dogma need to be vigorously resisted – and the Australian Free Speech Union is leading the way on that front. It’s particularly important that Anthony Albanese’s government is stopped from passing an anti-misinformation bill, which would give the e-Karen carte blanche to start throwing ‘takedown notices’ around like confetti. To give you a clue of what content she would order X and Facebook to remove, the Yes side in the Voice referendum blamed their loss on ‘misinformation’.

I met some heroic defenders of liberty on my tour of Australia, but few more impressive than Ron Manners, the 88-year-old mining magnate and long-standing libertarian who has supported a plethora of free market think tanks. On my last night in Australia, I spent a lovely evening with Ron and his friends at Chez Pierre in Perth. I don’t know if I succeeded in persuading him to give some money to the Free Speech Union of Australia – it needs to raise enough to hire a CEO who can build it up into a national powerhouse – but it was a fine way to end my two-week tour. I left convinced that the spirit of liberty is still strong in your marvellous country.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/australian-diary-73/

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