My apologies, Michael. There's so much talk of censorship at the moment that I was getting myself muddled. I'll modify my last reply to allow for your correction:

Michael,

I'm a little surprised to see you run with Paul’s comment so literally. His nod to the Eureka Stockade was laced with irony - especially his postscript about “no actual Aussies.” Your reply, though, treats it like a solemn baton-passing of national symbolism, alongside Thermopylae, Leonidas, and now a pandemic-era soup shortage.

The result is something closer to folk myth than historical reflection.

Your article already recast a modest protest as a symbolic act of national salvation. Now, you’ve added Eureka and even an earthquake for effect. It’s powerful storytelling, but not exactly rigorous history.

COVID wasn’t “the common cold.” It killed over 20,000 Australians and millions globally, overwhelmed ICUs, and left tens of thousands with long-term complications. No serious public health body in the world treated it like a seasonal nuisance, nor did chicken soup make a dent in transmission rates.

As for police tactics - yes, rubber bullets were used on 21 of August and again on 22nd September. That should be debated. But to equate that with Eureka - a fatal armed uprising - is to confuse civil disobedience with armed insurrection. And the fact that later protests attracted thousands without similar escalation suggests the early incidents were the exception, not the rule.

Michael,

In my experience, whenever someone opens with, "Let me try and understand your reasoning," a strawman usually follows - and this time is no exception.

//If there’s only a little or a lot of censorship, you’re saying that the censorship is not real, because it’s not totally successful.//

That’s not even close.

I haven’t denied that censorship exists in any form. What I challenged was your framing of anti-lockdown voices as "largely silenced" or "suppressed by the mainstream media," as though their perspectives were forcibly erased from public discourse.

That simply doesn’t hold up. Those voices were regularly featured on Sky News, circulated widely on social media, echoed on talkback radio, debated in parliament - and crucially, published right here. Your article is proof of that.

Yes, moderation exists on platforms like Facebook. Sometimes it’s heavy-handed. Sometimes it’s clumsy or inconsistent. That’s a valid discussion. But content moderation - especially when it targets demonstrable misinformation during a public health crisis - isn’t automatically censorship in the Orwellian sense you’re implying. Nor does moving to a different platform mean you’ve been silenced. It means you're still speaking, just somewhere else.

Scale and intent matter. If I write a book and one shop refuses to stock it, that’s not censorship. If the government bans it nationwide, that’s censorship. Equating the two flattens the term until it loses meaning - or worse, becomes a shield against criticism.

And if your concern is truly about the suppression of speech, I hope you're just as worried about book bans, the intimidation of journalists, and the prosecution of whistleblowers - all of which pose a far deeper threat to free expression than the fact-checkers at Facebook ever could.

Hi John 1405,
You must be older than me to have first-hand experience of the Vietnam War protests. Police using excessive force, laying trumped up charges, and politically motivated. Wow, who would have thunk? It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same.

You say you met someone who disagreed with Covid being a real thing, that the vaccine was a mind control drug, and it was all down to the illuminati. Personally, I’ve mixed with a lot of anti-lockdown protesters, and I’ve met plenty that go well beyond that. Easy to find some who suggest the earth is flat, who question the Apollo moon landings, and much else besides. I’m not talking about the protest leaders, such as Topher Field or Harrison McLean, etc. who are eminently well-read and well-grounded. But it takes all types.

However, what we experienced during the Covid era was beyond imagining. It sent people a little crazy.

Even this week, Victoria’s CHO Brett Sutton was interviewed on 3AW. He admitted there was a long list of things he had gotten wrong. ‘There's no shying away from the fact that you can't get everything right, as I certainly didn't,’ he said. These mistakes were so evident to every man and his dog. Having to wear a mask in a café when standing up, but not when sitting down. How does any sane person take that seriously?

It was so crazy, that it made the ordinary person wonder what the government was really playing at. Keeping babies masked while in their early stages of speech development? Keeping adolescents caged in their bedrooms for months on end? Sorry, this is obviously is not for our health. It’s for something else. The whole thing encouraged conspiracy theories.

Believing Armstrong never walked on the moon, or that the earth is flat, is kooky, but believing that doesn’t hurt anyone else. Believing that you can close down the economy for months and years, and then just turn it on again with a flick of a switch is kookier, and this definitely did does hurt us all.

John Daysh,
Thanks for your clarification. With that I’d say our positions on censorship are mostly pretty much the same.

I’ve always agreed with you that the topic was often openly debated at the time, although I’d add that from many angles, or within certain spheres, only one view, that being the government line was permitted.

Both major parties in Australia, Morrison and all the state premiers, had bought into the strict lockdown strategy, almost without question for that whole era. Labor never has public dissention from within their ranks, and only a few hearty rebels within the Coalition (e.g. Craig Kelly) dared challenge their party line. So, politically Australia was always full-steam ahead on the SS Lockdown. And it was only those few from the Coalition, and a few others from minor parties that ensured any type of rigour within our parliamentary debate.

You agree with me that some forms of discussion were moderated. The moderation on social media you say was sometimes heavy-handed, clumsy or inconsistent. I’d say it’s clear how things became a lot more open after Elon Musk purchased X. But to those I know, who were prepared to put reasoned and sane argument, only to see their Facebook pages banned, or YouTube channels taken down, it certainly felt to them like censorship, as though their perspectives were being ‘forcibly erased from public discourse.’

Personally, I had posts withdrawn from my class forum at my tertiary college, for not toeing the government line. There were senior doctors who were deregistered by AHPRA after offering professional opinions which disagreed with the government line at the time, opinions that today would be considered perfectly vanilla and standard, but weren’t in line with the then strict jab policy.

So I’d agree with you that there was a certain amount of debate in the public realm, but it wasn’t always open, and not at all within 7, 9, 10, ABC or SBS. It was sometimes a real struggle, which is partly why protesters felt forced to spill out onto the streets in numbers where they couldn’t be ignored.

John Daysh.
300 arrived to stand in defiance at the Shrine on 5 September, 2020. A modest number? Yes, rather, in comparison to 150,000. Big oaks grow from little acorns.

You might think 150,000 is insignificant. But we’ve never had an AFL Grand Final with that number. Not even the Vietnam War protests had that number. Arguably the biggest number of people gathered together for any reason in Australia’s history whatsoever. But it’s not about numbers, they’re just statistics. It only takes one man to stand up to a bully, and give others the courage to follow. That’s called the power of one.

Here are songs written to honour the courage of the Melbourne protesters:

We found our kind
Watching the bullets fly
We will not comply
We are the lions
We will fight
‘Till we die
(From the song ‘Lions’, written by Mandy Wragg, recalling King Leonidas, popular among freedom protesters, 2021. Clearly, a mixture of fact and metaphor, if you can handle that.)

As we stared down
The barrel of their gun
They don’t even know
We’d already won
(From the song, ‘The Spirit of the Anzac’, written by Melbourne musician, Ivan Bancroft, 2022, after Victoria Police shot at peaceful protesters at Melbourne’s most sacred memorial.)

John, I said to you what’s important is who had it right. Even on 3AW this week, Victorian Chief Health Officer, Brett Sutton expressed his regrets looking back, conceding many measures intended to stop the spread of Covid-19 were ‘probably never necessary’. No kidding. You admit that now? There were those with the wisdom to point this out at the time, but you wouldn’t listen.

We could debate this forever, if we were inclined. But what this really needed was a thorough enquiry. But our Labor and Liberal pollies who were in charge at the time desperately avoided any Royal Commission, as they know how they’d come out looking in hindsight.

John, thanks for your critique of my article. I know you don’t like it. But I’m genuinely satisfied that it accurately and honourably portrays those people involved.

Michael Viljoen

Hi Michael,

"The largest gathering in Australia occurred in Centennial Park, May 1932, where hundreds of thousands gathered in response to Jack Lang's dismissal from office". According to my Old Man, who was there on the day, he being a staunch "Langite", the number was put at 250,000, at a time when Sydney's population was about 1.2 million. In today's terms that would equate to 1 million people in the same place..