Dear Ttbn,

«Your sarcasm is unbecoming. In my lifetime, governments did not censor Australians.»

So? They just used other methods to harass the people - didn't they, for example, have conscription in your days and sent people forcibly to Vietnam? or didn't they demand much higher tax-rates than today? And am I wrong to assume that former governments sent your ancestors to Australia as slave convicts?

Governments are here to harm and persecute us, to make us suffer, only their methods can change!

Before the internet they had too many physical envelopes to open (and then repair) if they wanted to censor communications, it's not that they didn't want to, it was just more difficult then - I bet they didn't think of opening your physical letters even during COVID, so you could still have hidden your messages there, but really, if you want to avoid censorship, why not encrypt your E-mails?

Its a measure of how far we've fallen since over the past few years that news of this type just gets a shrug.

When the Twitter Files were released it seemed unlikely that the Australian arm of the medical SS would have been able to resist the chance to silence dissent. But little came out since the journalists looking at the debacle were USians and there was so much mayhem on that side that there was little interest or time to look at other jurisdictions.

But now we find that the bureaucracy was working to silence those who opposed government policy and doing it as a matter of regular policy. More than 4000 requests to suppress commentary were made to Twitter. Some of the stuff that was considered at that time to be so beyond the pale that it needed to be suppressed, is now considered fact eg the WuFlu was man-made.

So the government was working quietly behind the scenes to stop the population from seeing alternate views!! In what sense do we continue to claim to be a democracy?

All this was being done by a unit of the DHS called the "Social Cohesion Division". Let that sink in - the government has people dedicated to enforcing social cohesion which in layman's terms means adherence to government dictates.

Remember this was being done while we had a Liberal government (though not a liberal government). But one wonders how much the actual political class knew of this and whether it was simply undertaken by an increasingly independent bureaucracy.

2020 was a watershed year where Australian's agreed to trade freedom for safety....and got neither.

Yuyutsu

The things you mention from the past have no relevance to the topic of suppression of free speech.

I am a South Australian. We were all free settlers. There were no convicts in South Australia.

If you want to talk about every other thing that governments do, apart from suppression of free speech, start a thread. You are one of the parasitic non-performers here who rely on the few who start threads so that you can let fly - usually with little or no reference to the topic.

Mhaze

Your observation that: "Its a measure of how far we've fallen since over the past few years that news of this type just gets a shrug" is right on the mark. Governments get away with all sorts of things because people shrug them off. People definitely get the governments that deserve.

One of the latest outrages is the A.C.T government's attack on Christianity and in particular, the Catholics, is their threat to take over the Calvary hospital there. There is too much religious influence, the Leftist mob howls. I think they are talking mainly about the hospital's refusal to perform abortions.

A big shrug to that, I would think: few Australians who would be against the move - probably more than those who approve - will do the simple thing of signing the online petition that is available. Nothing to do with them, they think. They will still whine when other people say or think the same thing about something that happens to them.

Australians do not deserve democracy. They don’t use democracy. Take the non-stop whinger, Yuyutsu: rubbishes everything, but does sweet FA about it.

While we can still influence politicians with more care about how we vote; writing and emailing to our local members; speaking up against woke rubbish; rejecting the lies about the Voice and other top-down divisive ideas, we should all do so. Democracy has not been the natural state of things over the ages, and we are now losing it - because we do just shrug.

The mainstream media - government's little helpers - also suppress information, the latest being the fact that Donald Trump has just been completely cleared of the Russia conspiracy that the same media bruited about with gusto for months. There won't be a retraction or an apology from the Four Corners left-wing activist, Sarah Ferguson, who made a real feast of the lie - the 'story of the century'.

How about a doctor who has not been able to work and support his young family for 5 years because a SINGLE ANONYMOUS person made a complaint to the medical Gestapo about a comment he made on Facebook about Covid.

The mainstream will not let you hear anything that they don't want you to hear. You need to make the effort to get the truth - from alternative sources, like ADH.TV, the Aussie Wire, Rebel News, etc.

That's if you don't want Australia to eventually be like Communist China or Russia; and you can ignore ignorant boofheads calling you names. You can do it privately, anyway, and make your feelings known directly to the politicians you pay to serve you.

A lot of the "shrugging off" is caused by ignorance and lack of ability to look for the truth.

Statistics show that almost half Australians adults are in the 1-2 group of reading ability: primary school level. They might just be able to read a newspaper, but not the books and essays in which alternative and learned information is available. Some of these characters are actually proud of the fact that they don't read.

Dear Ttbn,

«The things you mention from the past have no relevance to the topic of suppression of free speech.»

The relevance is that this evil organisation (government) is not our friend, it is a predator and it would do whatever it can to prevent us from gaining control of our own lives.

Within our own times, before the internet, government used to allow free speech because:

1) our communications could only reach a few people, thus governments didn't fear that we could use words to revolt against them.
2) we communicated using physical letters, usually in envelopes, and it was just too difficult for governments to open that many envelopes (and then transparently reseal them).

Don't delude yourself that they ever allowed us free speech due to their good heart - their hearts were always black as coal, they just didn't feel their authority threatened by our communications... until COVID.