The greatest gift of all... Free speech

Matt Canavan I 14 December 2024 I Spectator Australia

According to lore, Santa’s elves live to be hundreds of years old. In theory, Santa should have no problem communicating with his trusty workers via his iPhone despite Australia’s social media ban for children under 16. In practice, however, that ban is set to be enforced through draconian face-matching technology which may struggle to correctly age the baby faces of Santa’s little helpers.

Notwithstanding these technical issues, there was a mad rush, worthy of last-minute Christmas shoppers, during the last Australian parliamentary week to pass the ‘world-leading’ ban on social media. The Bill was released on a Thursday. Australians were given 24 hours to make a submission by Friday – and despite the tight deadline an astounding 15,000 people did so. On the following Monday, a Senate hearing was held. On the Tuesday, the Senate report was released. On the Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed the Bill. And, on the Thursday, the Senate rushed the Bill through with just a few hours of debate.

It remains a mystery why politicians can’t seem to act with such alacrity to approve major, job-creating investments or cut government spending. If we can establish a social media ban in a week, why does it take more than ten years to approve the average mine?

Some even suggested this urgency was needed so that kids could not abuse the dreaded devices they may receive from Santa’s elves in a few weeks’ time. These people were fortunate that they were not subject to the misinformation laws – which were comprehensively defeated earlier in the week – as the social media ban would not take effect for another year. Little Johnny will be free to jump straight on Snapchat with his new iPhone, for this year at least.

But Christmas Day may be cancelled next year. It would not be the first time that a parliament has sought to restrict or cancel Christmas tidings.

In 1645, the English Long Parliament banned Christmas because it was seen as a Catholic plot to encourage sin and sensual delights. The ban was more observed in its breach as people flouted the law and continued to serve mince pies and sing carols. By 1656, parliamentarians were complaining that they were being kept awake by the sounds of Christmas parties next to their lodgings!

Something similar will no doubt happen with the social media ban. Over the next ten years we will hear from our modern-day puritans bemoaning that children and parents are simply ignoring the diktat of their parliamentarian betters and that something more draconian must be done to enforce the will of parliament.

Our current panic over ‘misinformation’ and new forms of media is not that dissimilar from the ‘pamphlet wars’ of the 1600s. That century saw the rise of the printing press to enable distribution of controversial and blasphemous materials to the masses.

Two years before the Long Parliament banned Christmas, they passed ‘An Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing’. That law ruled that ‘Nor other Book, Pamphlet, paper… shall from henceforth be printed, bound, stitched or put to sale by any person or persons whatsoever, unless the same be first approved of and licensed under the hands of such person or persons as both, or either of the said Houses shall appoint for the licensing of the same.’

They did so because they wanted to suppress ‘the great late abuses and frequent disorders in Printing many false, forged, scandalous, seditious, libellous, and unlicensed Papers, Pamphlets, and Books to the great defamation of Religion and Government.’

In other words, the Long Parliament wanted to control ‘misinformation’. History today is repeating as our modern day nobility panic over their loss of control. In the 1600s dangerous ideas such as freedom and individual liberty were virally spread through pamphlets. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense was printed as a pamphlet and one section of it reads like a report of Kim Williams’ address to the National Press Club last week:

‘Men who look upon themselves born to reign, and others to obey, soon grow insolent; selected from the rest of mankind their minds are early poisoned by importance; and the world they act in differs so materially from the world at large, that they have but little opportunity of knowing its true interests, and when they succeed to the government are frequently the most ignorant and unfit of any throughout the dominions.’

Despite all of the concerns of the establishment of the evils of the printing press revolution, the printing press led to a boon in human development through the spread of ideas for liberty and democracy. Likewise today establishment conservatives remain perturbed by a worldwide web they have little understanding of.

The truth is that conservative voices are winning online and winning handsomely. Conservative governments have tried unsuccessfully for a generation to temper the left-wing propaganda fed to our children at schools. Finally, we have an antidote through the rise of YouTube, TikTok and X, where kids often learn that the Crusades may have actually been an understandable response to Muslim imperialism, that Franco’s monarchist forces were responding to the rape of nuns by criminal communist gangs and that Greta Thunberg’s Malthusian poverty prescription is a far less attractive ideology than Elon Musk’s mission to colonise Mars.

And what do we do?! We join the left-wing mob and ban children from accessing such seditious content. ‘Johnny, I have told you a thousand times, turn off Joe Rogan and practice your acknowledgement of country again!’

The social media ban may prove to be as ineffective as a prohibition of Christmas. Yet you can see that the state may resort to ever more draconian measures before they admit defeat. Fortunately, we managed to get an amendment into the social media ban that rules out you being compelled to use a digital ID to verify your age.

However, that is something that may easily be overturned in a desperate attempt to enforce the unenforceable. To my knowledge our elves remain safe, as the North Pole is yet to roll out a widespread digital-ID system. But one is beginning here and we must remain vigilant against the threat of further state control of what we can say, read and listen to.

Matt Canavan is a Liberal National party Senator for Queensland