Limits on speech imposed by government will never affect those whose thinking is in line with that of the great and the good. They don’t need free speech protections. (Put on a personal level, no one ever demanded the suppression of speech about themselves that said ‘hey, buddy, you’re just a terrific, witty, insightful guy with George Clooney looks’.)
And so the benefits of a very wide scope for free speech are that it gets dissenting ideas out there and that it’s never wise to allow insiders to arbitrate what speech can be uttered. The two most powerful defences in favour of a wide-ranging scope for free speech (to my mind at any rate because, lacking the religious gene, I don’t buy the whole natural rights worldview) are these. Firstly, there’s the John Stuart Mill argument that as much speech as possible in the crucible of competing ideas moves society ever closer towards optimal choices, not just because nonconformist views are sometimes right (and we all know that’s true) but because even when the dissident is wrong his views force those with establishment views to better understand and fine-tune their own outlooks. Or secondly, the straight-out cost-benefit argument that the dangers and harms of too much speech are vastly outweighed by the dangers and over-reach of big government and the administrative state policing what speech is allowable, knowing what we do about human nature and the desire to suppress views one finds unpalatable. Notice that both those free speech defences are grounded in a simple, consequentialist cost-benefit calculation. Both, I think, are powerful, though I am somewhat in the minority in thinking the second of those is the strongest of the arguments for free speech.
Be that as it may, think now about Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. I’m going to be blunt and say straight out that I profoundly disagree with her censorious worldview and I simply cannot understand why Peter Dutton, the leader of a political party that professes itself to be committed to free speech principles, defends her. (Okay, having watched Scott Morrison’s even more enervated, enfeebled and factually wrong “free speech never created a single job” understanding of free speech at work, I can understand that this is no longer disqualifying to lead the party of Robert Menzies. So I understand it as a fact about today’s Australian political world. It just massively disappoints me.)
But leave politics out of it. Go back to Ms Grant, a.k.a. our ‘eSafety Overlord’ – though lord knows why this body or position even exists. Remember when she wanted to suppress a true online video of an Islamic extremist stabbing a Christian bishop? Let me ask you all this. If there were a video of an openly white supremacist walking into a Melbourne mosque and stabbing an Imam, do you think that Ms Grant, or anyone in the Australian government, would want to suppress that? Or would try to impose a worldwide ban on it? Yes, yes, yes it’s notoriously hard to prove a counterfactual scenario. But I’m about as certain of the answer to that hypothetical as I am about anything – namely, that ‘no, the eSafety Commission apparatus would not have tried in any way to suppress that sort of video where the white supremacist was the violent thug. Readers can decide what they think for themselves. For me, the crucial factor is often ‘how does this speech/video affect the insiders’ or government’s worldview?’ And anyway, surely in both cases it’s good for society to know the true facts, even if some harms follow?
Moreover, it’s pretty obvious to any thinking being that three or four decades of steroidal multiculturalism policies have brought with them quite a few downsides. (Don’t take it from me. Take the word of a host of Anglosphere politicians on this, including wokester former UK PM David Cameron.) Put more bluntly, significant social problems and downsides have been caused by decades and decades of large-scale mass immigration together with the gradual diminishing of assimilation policies and the now ubiquitous failure to teach youngsters the (to me quite obvious) true fact that Australia and the Anglosphere have produced amongst the best places to live in human history – heck, even just to teach them a soupçon of patriotism and love of country. And we have a generation of politicians across the political divide responsible for this mess. And they, and the insider class generally, do not want speech that shows the bad consequences of these past policies. (And by bad outcomes I mean more than just the rather significant economic costs of mass immigration of low skilled people from cultures quite distinct from ours that has seen Australia deliver what? Seven straight quarters of per capita GDP decline?)
So speech and videos – even true videos of actual facts – that undercut the establishment’s rosy ‘multiculturalism has been an undiluted good’ message are deeply disliked. (See Britain and Southport and the whole Rotherham grooming gang disgrace for more evidence of this.) Governments and their administrative state actors want that sort of talk – true talk – diminished, downplayed, suppressed and if possible cancelled. It makes them look bad. But if some true event supports the authorised, rosy picture, something like the view that the bad guys here are white working class Neanderthals, well the desire to suppress that really doesn’t exist.
Or put differently yet again, governments find it near impossible to be ‘content neutral’ as the American First Amendment jurisprudence helpfully articulates the matter. And so too, generally, do the tribunals and commissioners these governments – across the political divide – put in place. If you didn’t realise this during the two and half years of Covid lockdown governmental thuggery (and by governmental I include the police, the public health caste supremos, the editors of top medical journals, the upper echelons of the universities, the list goes on) then nothing will open your eyes. Again, notice how much the sceptics, iconoclasts and dissidents got right about the wrongs of lockdowns and how much governments got wrong – to the point that Mr Trump’s Cabinet nominee Dr Jay Bhattacharya to this day rightly notes that the biggest source of mis- and dis- information about Covid came from government. But it was the views of sceptics that the government establishment tried its hardest (sometimes successfully) to silence.
So Mill was right. The cost-benefit calculation shows that giving government agencies the power to suppress speech is pretty much always a greater long-term evil than suffering any short-term harms of allowing the speech. Our eSafety Commissioner is woefully wrong-headed. In Australia and Britain and Canada we have a huge problem with politicians not understanding or caring about free speech. There is this irony however, one that will drive the bien pensants to distraction – the politician in today’s world with the greatest commitment to free speech is one Donald J. Trump. And it’s not even close......The full article is published HERE
Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.
And so the benefits of a very wide scope for free speech are that it gets dissenting ideas out there and that it’s never wise to allow insiders to arbitrate what speech can be uttered. The two most powerful defences in favour of a wide-ranging scope for free speech (to my mind at any rate because, lacking the religious gene, I don’t buy the whole natural rights worldview) are these. Firstly, there’s the John Stuart Mill argument that as much speech as possible in the crucible of competing ideas moves society ever closer towards optimal choices, not just because nonconformist views are sometimes right (and we all know that’s true) but because even when the dissident is wrong his views force those with establishment views to better understand and fine-tune their own outlooks. Or secondly, the straight-out cost-benefit argument that the dangers and harms of too much speech are vastly outweighed by the dangers and over-reach of big government and the administrative state policing what speech is allowable, knowing what we do about human nature and the desire to suppress views one finds unpalatable. Notice that both those free speech defences are grounded in a simple, consequentialist cost-benefit calculation. Both, I think, are powerful, though I am somewhat in the minority in thinking the second of those is the strongest of the arguments for free speech.
Be that as it may, think now about Australia’s eSafety Commissioner. I’m going to be blunt and say straight out that I profoundly disagree with her censorious worldview and I simply cannot understand why Peter Dutton, the leader of a political party that professes itself to be committed to free speech principles, defends her. (Okay, having watched Scott Morrison’s even more enervated, enfeebled and factually wrong “free speech never created a single job” understanding of free speech at work, I can understand that this is no longer disqualifying to lead the party of Robert Menzies. So I understand it as a fact about today’s Australian political world. It just massively disappoints me.)
But leave politics out of it. Go back to Ms Grant, a.k.a. our ‘eSafety Overlord’ – though lord knows why this body or position even exists. Remember when she wanted to suppress a true online video of an Islamic extremist stabbing a Christian bishop? Let me ask you all this. If there were a video of an openly white supremacist walking into a Melbourne mosque and stabbing an Imam, do you think that Ms Grant, or anyone in the Australian government, would want to suppress that? Or would try to impose a worldwide ban on it? Yes, yes, yes it’s notoriously hard to prove a counterfactual scenario. But I’m about as certain of the answer to that hypothetical as I am about anything – namely, that ‘no, the eSafety Commission apparatus would not have tried in any way to suppress that sort of video where the white supremacist was the violent thug. Readers can decide what they think for themselves. For me, the crucial factor is often ‘how does this speech/video affect the insiders’ or government’s worldview?’ And anyway, surely in both cases it’s good for society to know the true facts, even if some harms follow?
Moreover, it’s pretty obvious to any thinking being that three or four decades of steroidal multiculturalism policies have brought with them quite a few downsides. (Don’t take it from me. Take the word of a host of Anglosphere politicians on this, including wokester former UK PM David Cameron.) Put more bluntly, significant social problems and downsides have been caused by decades and decades of large-scale mass immigration together with the gradual diminishing of assimilation policies and the now ubiquitous failure to teach youngsters the (to me quite obvious) true fact that Australia and the Anglosphere have produced amongst the best places to live in human history – heck, even just to teach them a soupçon of patriotism and love of country. And we have a generation of politicians across the political divide responsible for this mess. And they, and the insider class generally, do not want speech that shows the bad consequences of these past policies. (And by bad outcomes I mean more than just the rather significant economic costs of mass immigration of low skilled people from cultures quite distinct from ours that has seen Australia deliver what? Seven straight quarters of per capita GDP decline?)
So speech and videos – even true videos of actual facts – that undercut the establishment’s rosy ‘multiculturalism has been an undiluted good’ message are deeply disliked. (See Britain and Southport and the whole Rotherham grooming gang disgrace for more evidence of this.) Governments and their administrative state actors want that sort of talk – true talk – diminished, downplayed, suppressed and if possible cancelled. It makes them look bad. But if some true event supports the authorised, rosy picture, something like the view that the bad guys here are white working class Neanderthals, well the desire to suppress that really doesn’t exist.
Or put differently yet again, governments find it near impossible to be ‘content neutral’ as the American First Amendment jurisprudence helpfully articulates the matter. And so too, generally, do the tribunals and commissioners these governments – across the political divide – put in place. If you didn’t realise this during the two and half years of Covid lockdown governmental thuggery (and by governmental I include the police, the public health caste supremos, the editors of top medical journals, the upper echelons of the universities, the list goes on) then nothing will open your eyes. Again, notice how much the sceptics, iconoclasts and dissidents got right about the wrongs of lockdowns and how much governments got wrong – to the point that Mr Trump’s Cabinet nominee Dr Jay Bhattacharya to this day rightly notes that the biggest source of mis- and dis- information about Covid came from government. But it was the views of sceptics that the government establishment tried its hardest (sometimes successfully) to silence.
So Mill was right. The cost-benefit calculation shows that giving government agencies the power to suppress speech is pretty much always a greater long-term evil than suffering any short-term harms of allowing the speech. Our eSafety Commissioner is woefully wrong-headed. In Australia and Britain and Canada we have a huge problem with politicians not understanding or caring about free speech. There is this irony however, one that will drive the bien pensants to distraction – the politician in today’s world with the greatest commitment to free speech is one Donald J. Trump. And it’s not even close......The full article is published HERE
Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University.
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