Fight over censorship the new war we must be ready to wage
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But w, as our government decides only to allow you to look at what it deems appropriate, we need to fight for freedom more than ever.
In the dark, no skilled photographer can fully capture the crowds’ enormity. They said 40,000 at Canberra’s war memorial, thousands more at every city and town cenotaph, greater than any protest for any agenda hijacking social media.
We flock for solace in an Australia we don’t recognise wearing this shade of red, stabbings in shopping centres and churches, and murders of mothers.
The one day of the year when a Maori man belts out both New Zealand and Australia’s national anthem a cappella before a game of two-up, the Dungutti soldier plays the didgeridoo to the nation with no guilt-laden Welcome to Country, where both men and women shiver in the catafalque party as the temperature plummets below 1C and no one mentions gender quotas.
A population, exhausted by the ongoing moralistic lectures, flocked to the memorials because of a guttural national need to recognise why we are free and remind ourselves, in prayer, hymns, the ode and the lyrics of Advance Australia Fair, that freedom has to be fought for.
The vet in the beret with his glasses and deep, handsome lines, you know what he gave, who he lost – we saw it on the news, in archives and museums, his emaciated troops, surviving on rotten rice and luck.
But now, as our government decides only to allow you to look at what it deems appropriate, we need to fight for freedom more than ever.
This new generation of veteran struggling with what’s behind their eyes don’t have wrinkles. The veteran in the V-neck, not yet greying, explaining the hell of defending Australia in a way that the esafety Commissioner would remove.
He pulls those thrown to death by people smugglers from the ocean by their arms and is left holding just their arms.
He learns to recognise human remains by an algae that forms on the sacrum, submerged in the sea but still getting the sun.
His mate had fingernail scars from a woman he tried to save in an ocean storm, hit by a broken boat, in his arm until the day he killed himself to end the memory of failing her despite diving down deep again and again.
This is the reality of a war fought on Australia’s seas.
We dance around it now. We talk about mental ill health because talking about how veterans feel is palatable; seeing what they saw, how they saw it, is not.
We were censored from their horrors.
Now we have the Albanese government, apparently supported by the Coalition, hellbent on never returning to government as they
acquiesce to another Labor policy, on a mission to censorship, to remove the livestreamed video of a Christian bishop attacked as he delivered his sermon.
They don’t try to take the hellish images of Gaza, of poor, injured children off the internet.
They want you to be compelled to show compassion for them, so why doesn’t a Christian congregation, or a boy in the navy, deserve the same?
This week, a community-run page on Facebook had a post removed for misinformation.
It read: “Opinion: @australianlabor with zero social license continues to spin to spend billions to damage our pristine coast
with turbines made in China, tonnes of concrete, and kilometres of cable to generate unreliable electricity for ever-increasing demand. Destroying our economy and environment to save the planet, we deserve and can do better than more taxpayer destruction.”
Meta marked it as misinformation and removed it.
The war on censorship is not about protecting you.
It’s about strangling out opinions political leaders fear because they go against the narrative they wish to seed.
Renewable energy is cheaper even though your bills are going up, and it is better for the environment despite
videos of forests blown up to build wind turbines.
In taking down the church video, the wider message is a young Islamist was trying to kill a bishop because of his beliefs. Any reporter knows they need dramatic pictures to go with that, but try to find someone who doesn’t agree with the disgruntled former Twitter employee and esafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant to take it down.
We have pictures of Australian soldiers emaciated if they survived the worst war camps, such as Ambon, but no photos or videos of what they endured inside those camps exist because torturers never wanted anyone to know.