What hope is there for freedom of speech, when even members of a party supposedly founded on the ideals of classical liberalism are jumping on the censorship bandwagon? Because, strip away the attempts at emotional blackmail, that’s precisely what former Liberal MP Nicolle Flint is proposing.
To an extent, Flint’s stance is understandable, given the hateful vitriol constantly flung at her by the left, online and in parliament and the media. Such relentless vilification is clearly indefensible.
But that doesn’t justify strangling the public sphere in ever-tighter regulations and suffocating Australians under yet more nanny-state laws. Laws which will only ever serve to empower the radical left and grind the rest of us under the boot-heel of state-enforced censorship.
Here is my plea to federal parliament as sittings commenced for 2023: fix the online abuse of women. The future of our democracy depends on it. So, too, does women’s success in public life and, more fundamentally, their society-wide safety.
Where to start with this farrago of pearl-clutching, dangerous nonsense?
We can start with the false premise that only women suffer from online abuse.
In terms of journalists, the ABC’s Leigh Sales, former Nine presenter and now Sky News host Erin Molan, the Seven Network’s Natalie Barr and Guardian Australia’s Van Badham have documented their experiences.
The Australian
There’s no small irony in citing the like of Van Badham while wittering about “abuse”.
Badham, for instance, viciously smeared the children of Greens senator Peter Whish-Wilson, whom she dubbed “creepy”, and whose classmates she dismissed as “little fuckers”. That’s just the least of Badham’s litany of vitriolic abuse against anyone she dislikes.
Language Warning:
“Greg Hunt is an insult to the word ‘cunt’.” “Tony Abbott … a lying, sexist cunt.” “YOU STUPID CAREERIST FUCKING SELF SERVING SHITTIPEDES YOU ARSEHOLE KNOB GREASER SHITBUCKET CUNT FARM CUNT CUNTS.” “YOU FUCKING ARSEHOLES YOU STUPID PACK OF CUNT ARSEHOLE SHITS YOU FUCKS YOU MOTHERFUCKER DIMB CUNT WANK FUCK SHITS.”
Auspolhate
Is this the sort of abuse Flint wants to stamp out? Or does it not count as abuse when women do it? The likes of Badham also give the lie to Flint’s claim that men “rarely face the constant threats of rape, sexual assault, and sexualised and misogynistic abuse”.
I suggest that Flint create a sock-puppet account, posing as a non-left-wing male, and go on Twitter. She’ll soon be disabused of her cosy assumptions.
She’ll be regularly slandered as an “incel”, “basement dweller”, “rapist”, “paedophile”. She will be threatened with assault and murder. She’ll be doxxed (private, identifying information published, with the intent to incite violence), subjected to bomb threats, and swatted (where attackers send fake “active shooter” calls to emergency services, prompting a heavy police response — swatting has resulted in deaths of innocent men).
Does any of that sexualised abuse count? Are the men beaten and killed for their online opinions “unsafe” enough for Flint to care about?
In fact, a recent survey found that two-thirds of all Australians, male and female, reported harmful online experiences over the past year.
These simple, inconvenient facts alone are enough to demolish Flint’s call for more censorship.
Federal parliament can create protections for women under the Sex Discrimination Act, similar to section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, making it an offence to harass, intimidate or abuse a woman based on her sex according to the reasonable person test. This would get to the essence of online and in-person abuse – the hatred of women – and yes, I have omitted the section 18C words offend or insult, for now […]
Second, parliament can amend the Criminal Code 1995 to specifically include women as a protected group, meaning the Australian Federal Police would have to afford women a greater degree of care and protection.
Third, parliament should immediately commission a parliamentary inquiry to examine other regulatory mechanisms to keep women safe online, starting with those suggested by Ginger Gorman in her groundbreaking book Troll Hunting (2019).
The Australian
All of these are frankly appalling ideas and completely antithetical to the ideals of liberalism that Flint supposedly espoused as a member of the Liberal party. A great deal of the respect I had for Flint has gone out the window.
At a fundamental level, her proposals are based on a concept of “freedom” which is contrary to liberalism. Liberalism is founded on the concept of negative liberty: that is, “freedom from”.
This is the bedrock of the US Founding Fathers: protecting liberty from constraints governments inevitably wish to impose.
Instead, Flint’s proposals are grounded in what is called positive liberty: the “freedom to”. That is, freedom is only what the state will allow its citizens to do. “Freedom to” is inherently authoritarian, because it presupposes that the state, not the citizen, must tell us what we are allowed to do, rather than us telling the state what it cannot stop us from doing.
Finally, Flint is cluelessly naive if she can’t see exactly how such laws will pan out.
Just like the strangling plethora of “vilification” laws we suffocate under already, such legislation will be weaponised to silence anyone and everyone whom the left establishment disagrees with. In Australia, conservative Aboriginal figures like Warren Mundine, Jacinta Price and Anthony Dillon are regularly subjected to barrages of openly racist abuse from the left. BFD readers need only consider the media-political pearl-clutching over even the mildest criticism of Jacinda Ardern, while conservative figures were grotesquely vilified with impunity.
If Nicolle Flint had her way, the left-establishment will be handed a colossal new cudgel with which to bludgeon the rest of us into silence.