Introduction: Hello everyone, my guest this week is Alan Davison. Alan is the Academic Lead at the Governance and Public Affairs Centre at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney. He is also the president of the Australian Free Speech Union. Alan and I will be talking about some of the most pressing threats to free speech in Australia and elsewhere. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Alan Davidson.

Iona Italia: So first of all, Alan, before we get on to broader questions about free speech, which I do want to get to later in this podcast, I’d like to start by talking about some of the Australian context. First of all, ASIO, which stands for the Australian Intelligence and Security Organisation, is that correct?

Alan Davison: The S comes first before the I, but yes, that’s right.

II: The Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation have recently declared that antisemitism is the greatest threat currently facing Australia, which is quite extraordinary given that ASIO is usually concerned with the actions of hostile or potentially hostile foreign nations like China, for example.

Perhaps partially in response to that, there has recently been a new bill proposed for a new hate speech law that will specifically target antisemitic speech. And the background to this is a number of alarming incidents that have happened here in Australia, particularly since the Hamas attacks on Israel on the 7th of October of 2023.

It began with an incident in which a crowd on the steps of the Sydney Opera House were chanting, I think it was “Gas the Jews,” but other people have said they heard “Fuck the Jews” or “Where’s the Jews?” And that happened on, I believe, the night of the 9th of October—after the Hamas attacks but before retaliations from Israel had even begun.

Then we’ve also had a series of incidents with antisemitic graffiti with swastikas and “Fuck the Jews” spray-painted onto synagogues, primary schools, Jewish people’s residences. We’ve also seen cars fire-bombed and swastikas spray-painted nearby in some Jewish neighbourhoods in Sydney and also, most recently, one of the most recent incidents is that two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Western Sydney, an immigrant-heavy, Muslim-heavy area of Sydney, were caught on camera talking to an Israeli interviewer in their nurses’ uniform, boasting about having killed Israelis at the hospital and threatening to kill more Israelis if they came into the hospital for treatment. And even more shockingly to me than what happened with the nurses themselves is the fact that following that incident, over sixty local Muslim organisations have come out in support of the nurses.

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And I’m not sure if he was a teacher or support staff at a school in Western Sydney who was placed, I believe, on home leave for his social media posts in support of the nurses. Following that incident, there was a huge protest in support of this school worker with crowds of people chanting Allahu Akbar, and he has since been reinstated. So that’s the background to ASIO’s quite extraordinary statement that antisemitism is the biggest threat facing Australia. And the response to this seems to have been to propose new and more draconian hate speech laws. I’m guessing that you think this is a bad approach to the problem and I definitely agree with you on that, but can you talk us through why this might be the wrong response to what is clearly quite a serious problem?

AD: Thanks, Iona, and thanks for that background leading up to this. So I think firstly, it’s understandable that vulnerable communities, especially the Jewish community who have been the target of these attacks, many might feel that stronger hate speech laws targeting antisemitism might be the way to go because they will provide an enforceable means to clamp down on those expressions of antisemitism, such as marching, various other signs, symbols, and intimidation that’s done through that lens.

My concern, and I think the principle position of the Free Speech Union, which I can discuss in general terms, and then we can go into the specifics of antisemitism, where it stems from and what we might do about it. Our position is that we need to be very cautious about clamping down on free speech and expression broadly conceived. And if there are concerns around things like hate speech, antisemitism specifically, but indeed any targeting of a particular group or a series of protected characteristics of a group, we need to ask ourselves, are there better mechanisms for addressing that? Most obviously through something like counter-speech, that is the sort of vigorous, very public, very open and well-evidenced counter-arguments towards those positions, or indeed the discussion of where those views of antisemitism might stem from.

And on that particular point, I think there’s a risk that antisemitism laws and clamping down on hate speech as it’s perceived risks being a very short-term solution that simply ends up obfuscating the actual much more concerning underlying problem, which is: Why and who are those people and communities where antisemitism is so rife?

Now the challenge is, of course, that depending on which particular tract of antisemitism we’re talking about. I think there’s an agreed openness within Australia, but if we’re talking about antisemitism from the far right, the neo-Nazis, et cetera, everyone seems very comfortable talking about that because, you know, young skinheads being idiots and having hateful beliefs, they’re a good target. What is, I think, much more concerning, and this relates to, I think, Director [Mike] Burgess’s statement from ASIO is that if antisemitism or a good portion of antisemitism in Australia is actually stemming from certain elements within Muslim communities, it is exceptionally hard to have an open conversation, evidence-based, reasonable, about the antisemitism strains within certain elements of the Muslim community without being accused of Islamophobia.

And the trouble with hate speech laws and clamping down on them is that Islamophobia has become a very effective tool, particularly used overseas. We’ve seen its use in the UK and again, a term promulgated by certain Muslim activist groups to almost quash any discussion in the general community about strains of antisemitism within Muslim communities and particularly within an Islamic worldview that may well hold Jews in general in a particular position and a particular disdain and a particular hatred. If we clamp down on hate speech, so-called, it runs the risk of actually making conversations about: Where does this antisemitism exist? What communities does it exist within? Why does it exist in those communities? And why hasn’t it been more effectively challenged over the years?

It makes all of those conversations, which are, of course, very hard conversations, but it makes them increasingly harder. So in actual fact, stronger hate speech laws, anti-hate speech laws, anti-vilification and so on and so forth, will actually risk running the risk of obfuscating conversations about who is holding these beliefs, why are they holding them. And in fact, even if they talk about what bad people believe. And so we have potentially large cohorts of people that genuinely believe those beliefs.

II: Yeah, for me the biggest takeaway from the Bankstown nurses thing was the kind of confidence which the nurses seem to express in saying these things. I think that they were probably—joking is a little bit wrong, the female nurse in particular seemed extremely upset in a very earnest way—but I personally do not believe either of those nurses have killed anybody. But they were talking with a kind of off-handed confidence that one talks with when one feels that one’s opinions are widely shared. What I felt watching the video—the video itself was even a little bit funny, the male nurse even seems a bit campy. It’s like “I [makes throat-slitting gesture] the many, many Israelis who have come to this Western Sydney hospital. I killed so many of them and I sent them to Jahannam.” It’s ludicrous, right? I actually doubt that he’s even treated any Israeli patients. I would be very surprised if there have been any Israeli patients at the Bankstown Hospital over the past six months. I haven’t seen stats, but I’d be very surprised. But it was the kind of confidence that they both seemed to have that what they were saying was something that many people would agree with. That was shocking to me, very shocking.

They were, of course, completely right in that confidence, as we’ve seen from the number of people who came out in support of them. So the problem, in a sense, is not what’s said. It’s not that these two nurses said those things. That was bad, especially because they are nurses who have a duty of care, who are in a position to genuinely harm people. I think they should certainly never work in a hospital again. I’d like to see quite harsh penalties for the nurses. But the problem is not so much the nurses and what they said. The problem is what people think. The problem is their agreement with this. And the problem is not what people say or don’t say publicly but what they say to each other in private, things that we can’t police with hate speech laws. The problem is what people actually think and feel.

AD: Yes. I’ve got a couple of observations there and I think the point you’re getting to: Was that incident a bug or a feature of the system? And I do note with some irony that whenever there’s a prominent incident in Australian society that’s often widely covered by the media of someone saying something misogynistic, racist, whatever, that many people on the progressive side of things come out and say, look, there you go, a further example of this well-known public person, person in a professional role, saying something that shows how Australia is so inherently racist, which comes from its colonial roots.

Even if it’s an isolated incident, they say no, it’s not an isolated incident, it is representative of systemic X, Y and Z. And yet it’s strange that those same people don’t seem to offer that same argument when we have a couple of Muslim health practitioners saying—you quite rightly point out in such a blasé way, like they would say this at the dinner table or amongst their friends in a totally open way—there’s no one jumping on the bandwagon to say: What if this one particular incident is simply, in a very concerning way, representative of a much more widespread set of views within the communities or the groups [in which] those two individuals tend to mix?

There seems to be a surprising lack of curiosity or indeed, if there is an interest in why did they say those things?, then the excuse becomes, well, because they’re all victims of Australia’s rampant Islamophobia. So it’s like no matter what evidence or what particulars get presented to people of a certain mindset, there’s always a way of explaining it away. It’s basically an untestable proposition that no matter what an individual says, it somehow can always be explained away either as this is not representative or if it is representative, it’s simply an outcome of their victimhood of being subject to Islamophobia, either one.

Of course, if it’s a claim, it should be tested. And the trouble with the conversations we’re having is that the weaponisation of the slur of Islamophobia, which is almost a nonsensical term, it’s phobia of Islam, really the correct term should be anti-Muslim sentiment. But the slur of Islamophobia has been so effectively weaponised in the UK, in the US, and I think demonstrably in Australia, particularly by certain advocacy groups that seem to hold a lot of sway, that it makes it incredibly difficult to look under the hood, to actually start talking about why are there communities—not of course across the entirety of Australia, they tend to be clustered in certain areas. Why are there communities that may hold these views? And it doesn’t even have to be the majority. The question we need to have is: Even if it’s a minority, what’s an acceptable minority? Is it ten percent, twenty percent, thirty percent? Who gets to decide?

So again, when we hear the counterclaim, oh, this is just a minority view, most Muslims of course don’t think this, that may well be true. It’s an empirical question after all, we should be able to test it. The question is: Is it acceptable in Australia that anything other than the most marginal percentage of people hold these views and can be so blasé in talking about them?

II: Yeah, and we should note, of course, that many Muslims and actually, many people on the Free Palestine Left as well, use the words Israeli and Jew completely interchangeably. Those are pretty much synonyms for them.

So when they’re talking about killing Israelis, they don’t necessarily mean people who are specifically from the country of Israel, even though that would also be totally unacceptable. They probably mean Jews.

AD: Yeah, and that’s something that’s been pointed out by many scholars and is also empirically based through multiple studies and commentary. I’m thinking of the great reformist Muslim scholar, Bassam Tibi, who has written on this matter for many years regarding Islamism or what some people might call political Islam. That is, not radical and violent Islamists, but those that want to see an overthrow or a secession of open liberal democratic societies into an Islamic law-based society. He’s pointed out for many years that within many of these hardcore Islamists, the distinction between Israel, Zionists, Jews, doesn’t matter. They’re all basically part of Jewry. And they’re also associated in this Islamist mindset with the evils of westernisation, Western culture, and, of course, America. These are empirical matters that can be tested.

So I suppose the question is in Australia, particularly: Have we been having those conversations? Who is doing the research? There’s a wealth of research on Islamophobia, and I’ve written on this and critiqued this myself in a scholarly paper a few years ago. There’s a wealth of material on Islamophobia, so-called, and the evidence for it. But there’s very little work that’s being done on genuine antisemitism within Muslim communities with anything like the same interest. And I think these recent incidents are raising a more general awareness that maybe these are dark undercurrents that exist within some elements of the Australian community and that we haven’t been having a conversation about these things because it’s practically off the table to even go down that route. And of course, the problem with it being off the table for any serious research or public discourse is that the few people that are left talking about it are often people that are pretty unsavoury and not necessarily representative of genuine concerns.

II: Yeah, it does seem that there are two problems to the hate speech laws. One is that if we create a draconian hate speech law against antisemitism all that will do is make it more difficult for us to tell how much antisemitism there is in Australia and who the main culprits are, where it’s coming from, et cetera, because people will just keep a little quieter. But that doesn’t mean that they will change their views.

And the other problem is: I think that we don’t want to give ammunition to people who say that all they’re doing is criticising Israeli government policy or taking an opinion about a conflict that is happening in a foreign country between two foreign, non-Australian groups because that is clearly a motte and bailey argument that many are using. It should be perfectly legitimate for them to be criticising Israel, etc. And I’m not even going to particularly push back against that. Because what I’m more concerned about is your attitudes towards Jewish people in Australia, nothing to do with what’s going on in the Middle East. Quite separate from that.

And if we have this kind of overarching antisemitism hate speech law, that is likely to get abused and there’s likely to be mission creep, as there is always with hate speech laws. And that will just give cover to people who are genuinely antisemitic, who will be able to say, well, I’m just prevented and censored from saying what I want to say, which is legitimate criticism of Israel because I’m going to be arrested for antisemitism.

AD: Yeah, look, I think as a matter of principle and a matter of democratic functioning, it’s better to know what people are thinking through what they’re saying because that’s the easiest way to know what they’re thinking, or at least what they appear to be thinking. So clamping down on speech is a very superficial response and non-solution to the much more concerning issue of: What are people thinking? Why do they think those things? What is the basis for why they think those things; what are their belief systems and attitudes? Where do they come from? And is it acceptable that such belief systems and values are unchallenged in a 21^st-century open liberal democracy like Australia? I think they’re perfectly fair questions that we could ask of any group. And in fact, we should ask of ourselves: Australians should ask ourselves all the time.

That takes us into the murky ground of multiculturalism policy, multiculturalism initiatives, and a whole range of other things which are going to be very, very politically explosive to deal with. But the hate speech response and the anti-vilification response, I think will make things much worse, not easier.

II: Yeah, absolutely. I see it making things much worse on the other side as well. Almost whenever Australian politicians talk about antisemitism, they talk about Islamophobia at the same time. We need to be against antisemitism and Islamophobia. It seems to be impossible for them to focus only on antisemitism. At least ASIO is focusing only on antisemitism.

And part of the reason that we’ve got here is because the social and professional penalties for talking frankly about Islam have been too great. And the people who are most qualified to talk about this and who are most likely to be thoughtful and careful and trying to avoid racism and bigotry, those people have been effectively self-censoring. And as a result, we haven’t had any serious discussion about this and this is how we’ve got to this problem in the first place.

AD: I think that’s a fair reading of the situation. And the risk of what’s happening at the moment is increasing the legislation and powers to address the symptoms of that is going to make it much, much harder to address the causes of it. And I think it’s perfectly reasonable to say these are very challenging things to talk about because there are no shortage of actual racists in our country as with anywhere else. And it’s important that they don’t have the platform here for what should be a much more general conversation of great public concern regarding social cohesion, our democratic functioning, so on and so forth. It’s important that that conversation can be held in the mainstream by reasonable people that have nuance and sensitivity. But if there’s a vacuum there, we know who’s going to fill that vacuum.

II: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it won’t kill us if people are racist—what will kill us is if we’re not able to have open conversations about things, and we’re not able to confront problems honestly. If our response is always, well, people are upset about this. And so they’re saying really intemperate things. So what we need to do is shut people up.

That is first of all a very unstable strategy and I think that’s a strategy that’s just going to empower the far right. And it’s also extremely condescending. People’s anger might be expressed in ways that we don’t agree with and don’t want to see. But nevertheless, at the same time, we have to unpick and address some of the anger that people are feeling and understand that some of that anger has legitimate causes.

AD: That’s right. And I think again, it’s a symptom of a certain mindset that seems dominant at the moment that some anger is justified and some anger is not justified. But the reasons for explaining one way and the other are incredibly superficial, if not circular. So in other words, anger from a marginalised group or a group that’s been a victim historically of colonisation or whatever is somehow always justified or always a manifestation that is legitimate, quite separate from the actual power dynamics, threats, and risks that are the current context. So the problem is, if you’re always silencing a certain group of people, no matter how reasonable or well evidenced their point is, in favour of a group of people who have been historically identified as marginalised … I should note that Muslim communities, depending on the particular form of Islamic beliefs they follow, they are actually the majority in many countries and you only have to look at the suppression and violence towards groups that are non-Muslim or indeed even some Muslim groups within those own societies. It’s not like racism or various forms of the mob don’t exist across all countries in in all domains, it neither legitimises nor delegitimises any particular point of view because the allegations of widespread Islamophobia to having a conversation about Islamic belief systems and their relevance to Australian democracy, political representation, equal rights of the sexes and so on. We should be having that conversation based on its merit, not based on who positions themselves as being victims because there’s many places in the world where these very same communities that are claiming to be victims are in the ascendancy and they apply all kinds of discrimination and misogyny within their own communities and countries that are the concern of any reasonably minded person. So I think we really need to decouple on the one hand, the legitimate sense this community risks being marginalised and attacked by others. Perfectly fair point.

But we need to decouple that from there are still discussions to be had based on their merits and legitimacy that we need to leave aside who is positioned as a victim in the hierarchy of victimhood. And we’re having a lot of trouble having those conversations in Australia. And of course, it’s not just on a particular religious or cultural background. It could be in any domain.

II: Yeah, I found it quite striking that I recently went to an event that was about the history of Australian immigration. It was called “Australian Immigration from 1788 to 2060.” That’s not a misprint. They were projecting forward into the future. And it was at a right-leaning think tank.

The two speakers were both very gung-ho about immigration and Australia does have the highest rate of immigration in the world, I believe [Editor’s Note: this is untrue, but it has the highest rate among peer Western countries.] And also of any Western country, the highest number of people who are born abroad. One third of Australians were not born in Australia. Of course, I’ll include myself in that group. And at one point, one of the speakers, it was during a kind of to-and-fro discussion, so in between the two formal speeches, there was a little bit of chit chat. And it was only in the chit chat that this topic was mentioned. One of the guys said in passing, there are some bad things about immigration. For example, immigration leads to antisemitism.

He said that in passing, it was never mentioned again until I brought it up in the Q&A session because I thought it was quite an extraordinary thing to say. It was offered almost as if … I don’t think the guy really meant it in this spirit at all. I’m not accusing him of antisemitism to be clear or of minimising that. I think it’s more that he got distracted by other topics and never returned to it. But in context, it almost seemed like there’s nothing we can do about it. It just comes with the territory. I am concerned that I hear people, politicians talking about a rise in antisemitism in Australia. And I think it’s honestly more accurate to talk about an influx or an importation.

And that is not to say that there isn’t homegrown antisemitism. I was recently in Adelaide for a Quillette event and we actually encountered, my colleague encountered, a neo-Nazi march in Adelaide on Australia Day, which is really disgraceful and disgusting. But there were like twenty of those clowns. Neo-Nazism is thankfully not a mass movement in Australia and it’s not a growing movement. But this, the issue of antisemitism among Australia’s Muslims is a potentially growing problem.

AD: Yep. And I think there’s good data from around the world to show that in the various forms that antisemitism comes to be, it’s linked to community attitudes and otherwise, it’s important to, on the one hand, not underestimate the threat from extreme right-wing antisemitism, simply because some of those disgraceful fools like their guns. And so there is probably a disproportionate by headcount risk that does manifest. And of course we would expect our authorities to be keeping a very close eye on them to make sure that their access or potential access to weapons and other things that could harm people. We would hope that they’re putting a lot of attention into that and I’m sure they are. But in a way that’s the easy one to categorise because the vast majority of Australians, no matter what background, can look at those people and go, you’re a disgrace, you in no way represent a whole range of values and reasons why we’re here in Australia and Australia is successful. And if they occasionally say something that is factually correct, that’s like saying, wasn’t Hitler a vegetarian? Now, that’s not an argument for vegetarianism and Hitler’s vegetarianism is not evidence for the benefits of vegetarianism. So again, just leave that aside.

I think what’s a much more gnarly problem and definitely has our politicians stumped at the moment for a variety of reasons is that there is the likelihood of an importation of antisemitism attached to certain migrant communities that are coming here. And one of the things that we’ve set up in Australia is we’ve set up this idea being a country that seeks to embrace a wealth of different identities and to support them. And the whole idea of assimilation is now a dirty word. So in other words, you come here with your identities, with your culture, with your religious beliefs, et cetera, you’re warmly welcome to Australia. Don’t do anything wrong. But by the way, here’s our democratic process, et cetera, et cetera. It’s well known and on record, including by prominent Islamists, that they’ll get on the democratic train in order to help undermine democracy. In other words, the democratic system provides them a very useful tool to which to ultimately undermine democratic, liberal, open societies. Because in the view of some, and maybe a minority, but possibly an influential minority, the very existence of a liberal, democratic, open society is in complete opposition to an Islamist worldview of the perfect society. Now, there will be obviously—and this is not just throat clearing—there will be obviously many Muslims that we might characterise as moderate, who are very happy and very comfortable being in a liberal, open, democratic society where they can do what they do and they’re untouched.

II: They need protection from the Islamists.

AD: And indeed that’s the point. I think one of things that’s not discussed is that hardline Islamists are often perceived by moderate Muslims, who may well be the majority in certain contexts, they’re actually a threat to them as well. And the classic case would be: There’s funding for a mosque to get built somewhere. But the first question is: Where did that funding come from? Was it from Qatar? Was it from a proxy group?

Was it from people associated with the Muslim Brotherhood? So first question, where did that mosque come from? And then the next thing is, where did the person come from that now heads up that mosque? And are the views of that person representative of the more moderate, multiculturally aware, reasonable, liberal Muslim community that’s within? Now there’s been some very interesting work done by some Muslim scholars in Australia, not widely distributed but done, actually speaking to the risks of when something like a mosque is set up and funded, someone is brought in that is actually not really representative of the attitudes of that broad, very well acclimatised liberal community, and in fact works against that community in the sense of galvanising an Islamist worldview that is not really representative.

We see this happening in other countries. Germany would be a great example with its Turkish migrant population in going through cycles where Islamist proxy groups overseas will fund and drive Islamist worldviews in countries that are actually very liberal and democratic and make or push members of Muslim communities and especially if they’re younger members looking to have their identity reasserted, especially if they do encounter actual racism, it’s obviously very attractive. So these are all discussions we need to be having in concert with and in support of the many moderate Muslims within our society who actually need protection. The catch-22 they’re in is if they call out or cooperate or raise these concerns, they risk fraction within their own communities. And of course, they risk the blowback from the more hardliners in their communities. So these are problems that we need to be able to talk about in very open, evidence-based ways that allow us to have conversations about: What are the pros and cons of certain rates of immigration? How can we test the attitudes and commitment to a genuinely multicultural, democratic, liberal, open society from those that we bring here? All of those questions are legitimate things to be asking. And what we’re seeing is downstream of all of that happening. People seem to be surprised when we have these appalling outbursts of antisemitism and they want to clamp down on those anti-Semitic acts, when really the real question is: Who are these people, why do they believe what they do, why haven’t we been talking about it for the last ten, twenty, thirty years?

II: Yeah, yeah. Part of why haven’t we been talking about it—by “we,” the people who should be talking about it are not just you and I on the Quillette podcast, not just people who are in heterodox media, in the heterodox media space, or who are individual podcasters, or who have Substacks, or who are tweeting, but people who are in government at the SBS, ABC, and other Australian major media organisations, on live TV news, and at universities. And those are precisely the spaces in which people are keenest to self-censor.

So, I do want to return to legal questions later, but first I wanted to talk to you about the state of free speech at Australian universities. How much self-censorship is there among academics? How much genuine freedom of intellectual inquiry is there? And what are the things that are mitigating against that?

AD: Well, short answer is I suspect high levels of self-censorship, although we’ve yet to see the data for that. And whilst there are policies in place that have been practically enforced upon the universities as the result of a review that was done a few years ago called the French Review into free speech, while universities must commit to freedom of academic inquiry, which is not quite the same as free speech, but park that for the moment.

That provides the necessary, but of course not sufficient, condition for open inquiry and debate. I think the attitude from many leaders within universities is firstly, we’ve got our policy that enshrines the freedom of academic inquiry. And by academic inquiry, I mean the freedom to pursue research topics, disseminate the findings of that research, talk about your research no matter what that research is, if it’s part of your job as an academic. That all sounds good. So they reassure themselves that freedom of speech or at least freedom of inquiry is being upheld. And of course, we also get the occasional incident where a rogue academic, including the wonderful Holly Lawford-Smith, down in Melbourne University, who writes for Quillette.

Holly’s a wonderful philosopher and very deep thinker, where she can run afoul of various activists and do-gooders on the university campus and the university will muscle up in support to say, no, we support this person. those occasional instances where a university does support a heretical or heterodox academic—and of course that’s to be supported—they might well give comfort to university leaders and the public more generally that everything’s okay.

I suspect everything is not okay by far and we can look at the evidence for that by a whole range of things. Most importantly, the fact that there’s a whole range of critical discussions about wicked social problems that cannot be had in universities, which are of course upstream of a whole lot of other things. That’s where universities that train our journalism students, they often train our public servants, people in government. So a whole lot of stuff comes downstream.

And I’m very much of the view, based on my own qualitative—admittedly not quantitative—work of talking to many academics, both senior and junior, over many, many years, that self-censorship is rife because the disincentive to step outside the Overton window of certain agreed framings or lenses under which to undertake research will simply be crippling for your career. And while there’s the odd exception, those exceptions actually prove the rule. They don’t prove that everything is healthy.

So I think the universities are in a dire situation, which is particularly distressing to me because they have an absolutely fundamental role as a sense-making institution in society. It’s where the most difficult, contentious ideas should be examined with nuance, with evidence, with logic, with reason, all those good things that you expect the academic intellectual machinery of a university to bring to bear. And in many disciplines, that is absolutely not the case. They are simply workshops or production factories for churning out the same set of assumptions, the same set of templates, but applied to various different questions. So as a result, a whole lot of really critical issues, including the pros and cons of multiculturalism, for example, are simply not addressed. What is addressed is Australians’ rampant racism towards … but the actual question of, as an empirical fact: Is multiculturalism working well and by what measures? is barely addressed. So I think universities are in a dire situation.

II: So what’s caused that? What are the mechanisms that are preventing topics from being discussed openly?

AD: Look, that’s a fascinating research question in itself. What has caused the current state of universities? I think there are intersecting and colluding factors that on the surface might seem to be in opposition to one another, but in actual fact, create this ugly manifestation, this parasitical relationship that we have across various stakeholders within the universities. First of which, the most obvious one and the most well documented certainly in America by the work of several organisations over there is that in disciplines like sociology, humanities, arts, et cetera, they were always sort of left-leaning, had been historically. Having said that, the Left weren’t in the complete majority, but they were strongly. If we look at trends over the last ten or twenty years from data from the states in particular, we see an enormous shift leftwards, even to the extreme progressive left, people that actually want to see full Marxist revolution in the country or in society, and so on.

So I think there’s been a progression and a political sorting, as is almost inevitable once a certain ideology and people promulgating that ideology become increasingly dominant, they will continue to sort and sort and sort. People will be attracted to work with them, other people will be turned off, opportunities for research funding, PhD supervision and jobs is all dependent upon the orthodoxy that has developed through there. And in some disciplines, the strain of advocacy over or activism over scholarship has always been very strong. So I think that trend has always been there.

Additional to that and separate in some ways, but in a very unhealthy relationship with it is the massification of education and the new managerialism in leadership. Universities are corporations with brands, with reputations. They all looked distressingly similar, of course, pick up any university strategic plan. You’ll probably see the same five things mentioned. And of course, most prominent amongst them will be social justice. Now, social justice, of course, is a very, very difficult, contentious term if we’re thinking about what it means in practice. And most universities, certainly in Australia, have committed themselves full-heartedly to social justice agendas. Now, the thing about the term social justice is that it creates a very nice umbrella for a whole lot of activist causes and agendas that fit with that social justice brand and of course it discourages a whole lot of other people, research topics, or others that don’t … So if we look at the neoliberal managerialism of universities where they’re corporate, if we look at the risk aversion, if we look at the universities that are enormously bloated in their administration and leadership and how they’ve got to that point, you can see a bizarre symbiosis occurring between the social justice activists that constitute a large body of academics within certain disciplines and the university leadership who might not even like some of these views—may or might not—who can say, hey, look, we’re doing social justice because we have days where our staff are encouraged to go and march down the street with Black Lives Matter hashtag or Save the Planet hashtag or whatever it happens to be.

So in other words, it almost offsets or outsources what appears to be a commitment for public good and the common good, which I believe the university should have, it outsources that to a bunch of people who have a very activist and advocacy view of what universities should be. They’re basically social engineering schools to make the right kind of people that think the right kind of things that are in the technical sense of the word woke. They are awake to the injustices in society. So you can see all these things colluding with one another. And on top of that, universities are now taking in, as they are globally, many, many thousands of more students than they ever used to. Now, you don’t have to understand too much about the bell curve to know that with the massive rise of young people coming into universities, they are simply not as well equipped for the depth of intellectual inquiry that universities were at least initially set up to do. Now, that is a broader question, should universities be doing that or not, but it’s not really a question we’re having, we’re talking about. Universities are still acting under the pretence that they are places of wonderful intellectual rigor, critical inquiry, critical discussions, critical thinking, et cetera, et cetera. And yet somehow to a mass, an absolute mass of students who may well or may well not be equipped to undertake that kind of work.

II: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit, Alan, about the e-Safety Commissioner and what is going on here in Australia with that? So there’s an extremely attractive middle-aged woman [Julie Inman Grant] who has been appointed to keep Australians safe, it appears, from things that we might read online—an extraordinarily condescending and just an uncivic project. I don’t want to blame her specifically. Obviously, this is a wider governmental decision. But can you talk a little bit about what the e-Safety Commissioner has been up to and what is going on there? Why do we need an e-Safety Commissioner?

AD: All good questions. Let me try to go through a little bit of background. So the e-Safety Commission was set up as a statutory office. It comes from government legislation and it was established by the Online Safety Act, which went through Australian Federal Parliament in 2021. And that Online Safety Act is very reflective of similar online safety acts that have been happening globally. So in a way, Australia is in lockstep with a series of those things.

So the e-Safety commissioner and her—let’s say, office—works under the powers of that act. And one of the most important powers it has is to give a removal notice to social media companies for posts or content. Now, of course, there are many instances where some government authority having the power to order a social media company to remove content is absolutely appropriate. We’re thinking of child abuse materials, violent videos, et cetera. There is indisputably work to be done. It’s more a matter of who should be doing it and under what guise.

Now, while the e-Safety commissioner has power to send, let’s call it a formal removal notice or takedown notice. What has come to light recently in a case that was heard in the Administrative Review Tribunal, which is a federal body that reviews decisions by governments, politicians, and people working on behalf of government, is there’s been a very concerning case that’s brought to light the lack of transparency around what the e-Safety Commissioner’s office has been doing in practice. And the case that’s come up most recently relates to a content creator called Celine Baumgarten and her social media handle, I think is Celine against The Machine, terrific social media handle. She posted something on a couple of different platforms last year, one of which was X raising concerns and criticising a so-called queer club at a primary school, a young person’s school, I think in Victoria.

A complaint was received by the eSafety Commissioner’s Office about that post from someone associated with the person that was named in that post. What happened eventually was the e-Safety Commissioner or a member of their staff sent a notice to X to have it taken down. The problem is this, there are two ways in which X and indeed other social media platforms can receive complaints. One of which you might call a general or open or informal complaint. Someone just writes in to say, I think what you’ve posted is in breach of your terms; it constitutes a breach of X, Y and Z. And then there’s another much more formal or legalistic mechanism or platform within X. And that is an actual legal takedown where the person sending in the request, it’s actually a directive from someone from law enforcement or who is legally entitled to direct, in this case, X to take it down.

Now what happens in practice in this case, the case of Celine Baumgarten is that someone in the e-Safety Commissioner’s office used that latter mechanism, the legal takedown, and identified themselves as an appropriate legally authorised person to take down that post, but it didn’t actually meet the threshold even under the Online Safety Act of allowing it to be directed to be taken down. So, Celine eventually got wind of this because X took it, the people at X who did take it down and they geoblocked it in Australia took it to be a proper formal legal request to take down that post. As it turns out, the e-Safety Commissioner’s office was not directing a legal takedown. It an informal concerns have been raised; you should look at this thing to see if it’s in breach, et cetera. But X took it to be because of the way that it was submitted and the person that had submitted that takedown, essentially a takedown notice. Now, the e-Safety Commissioner argued in the Administrative Review Tribunal that it was only an informal takedown. There was only an informal notice to raise concerns about the post. The federal court judge that headed that tribunal basically disagreed and said, whatever your intention or state of mind when you thought you were doing that, it had the effect of being a legal takedown notice or direction.

Now the thing with a legal direction to take down something is that the person whose post has been taken down has the right of essentially appeal or for it to be reviewable. They can then challenge through the Administrative Review Tribunal the decision, they can ask for evidence, process, et cetera. So what was happening is in effect in the eyes of the Administrative Review Tribunal, the eSafety Commissioner has been using informal notices to in effect be taken or received as formal takedowns. But if they’re formal, you have the right of review. If they’re informal, no one has to know anything about it. And what this has brought to light is a widespread practice of the e-Safety Commissioner’s Office. This is in the view of the administrative review tribunal and the judges there. They’ve been effectively muscling in, threatening or imposing what seems to be a legal right for them to do. They have the legal obligation to do this, to provide directions for takedown. But in fact, the mechanism they’ve been using is just we’re just saying it’s an informal note.

So what it means is that dozens, hundreds, possibly thousands of people have had their posts taken down through this informal process which completely lacks transparency. You might not even know why it’s been taken down, who took it down, who was the person that complained, what is my right to find out, why. They’ve been doing that now for some time and this ruling basically puts all of that at risk and basically says that if you’ve had your post taken down through this mechanism, you actually have the right of review, which is essentially the right of appeal.

So it really highlights two things. One of which is there’s the Online Safety Act itself and how it identifies what is online abuse, online harm, various thresholds. So that’s the legislation, which of course is a matter of discussion and good legal minds looking at it, which hopefully will come out of this. But then the more concerning thing in many ways is how these bodies who are responsible for enforcing that legislation, how they are acting in practice and what this case has demonstrated that, in practice, the e-Safety Commissioner’s Office has been arguably way overextending its rights and obligations through using what they have called essentially informal notices, but have been taken to be, and in fact are legally in the minds of the administrative review tribunal, legally enforceable takedowns.

So it muddies the water enormously about the scale and scope and legitimacy of this kind of online censorship. And that’s why this case is so important, but it has barely been covered, as you may have noticed yourself, Iona, in the Australian media. It has been covered even by the Wall Street Journal because it is actually a landmark case, if you like, in how these online safety mechanisms and government agencies work, but barely any coverage in Australia at all.

II: So the post, the original post was about a queer club at a primary school, am I correct? So she was saying, Why do we need to have a queer club at a primary school? So that was considered objectionable speech by the e-Safety Commissioner.

AD: They responded to a complaint about that from someone associated with parties involved in it, yes.

II: Yeah, and they in effect upheld the complaint. The other thing that I read about the e-Safety Commissioner is that some social media posts are also being geoblocked for Australia, i.e., there are some things that you can see elsewhere in the world, but we’re not allowed to see them here in Australia, which also seems extraordinary to me. Just a total lack of respect for your own citizens.

AD: So there’s concerns both ways: material or content that’s posted by Australians, admittedly with an overseas carrier, and material that’s posted overseas being seen by Australians. That’s why this decision has important global ramifications because delineating where the scale and scope of the e-Safety Commissioner’s work should begin and end and the parties involved, it has global ramifications for sure.

II: It’s also clear to me that when people do censorship, there is no such thing as a neutral censor. There’s no one who comes from a politically and ethically neutral position to censor things based on some very straightforward criteria, or very rarely. We could think of exceptions, for example, someone is under eighteen and they’re posting sexual content, we take that down. But that’s not what’s actually happening here. What’s happening with censorship always is a thumb is being placed on the scale in one direction or the other.

There seem to be a number of topics in Australian society, from my perspective as a relatively new arrival to this place, that just don’t make any sense from the point of view of someone from elsewhere in the world, the way that they are discussed. The clearest and most obvious one is the discussions of nuclear power—things are said that just do not make sense in terms of physics. And that’s something I have talked about here and I’m going to be talking about more in a future episode, so I don’t want to go into that in too much detail. Also, issues to do with Indigenous Australians, Aboriginal Australians, or whatever word you want to use. There’s a massive unwillingness to talk frankly about controversial issues and even issues that aren’t controversial elsewhere in the world like nuclear, which have become controversial here for whatever reason. And part of that has got to be due to this culture of prissy censorship and self-censorship.

AD: Yeah, I think it hurts our Australian sense of larrikinism and sticking it to the boss that in actual fact we’re not really like that at all. And I think there’s a concern that despite how we pretend to be rugged individualists—at least that’s The Man from Snowy River myth, in actual fact, that’s not the way things work at all. And in fact, certainly in the public square, I think we’re very conformist and very timid. And there’s probably a whole lot of reasons for that, but certainly one of the key players in opening up that public square for more vigorous debate are our universities. And I think we can attach the timidity of our public square to the ineffectiveness writ large of the universities in this country.

II: So what are the biggest, what are the most frequent sources of pushback that you get towards free speech advocacy here in Australia? What are the biggest criticisms and how do you counter those?

AD: Well, the biggest criticisms are familiar. They occur elsewhere, particularly in liberal democracies. One of which is free speech gives an umbrella for hate speech, which, well, yes, maybe it does, but the issue is then it doesn’t mean hate speech—even if everybody agrees it’s hate speech—it doesn’t mean to say hate speech should be unaddressed or they shouldn’t be pushed back on. It’s just a matter of what is the best mechanism.

That’s one part. The other part is what you call hate speech is actually very debatable. Calling something hate speech doesn’t make it that thing, giving it a name doesn’t make that thing. And that I think there’s a reluctance or has been a reluctance to open up the idea that the allegation of hate speech, a bit like the allegation of Islamophobia, which is like a manifestation, a subset of it, it is so easily thrown around and it is so easily weaponised that they become very effective tools and there’s very ineffective pushback. And I think we’re still very much under that cloud. So that whole thing about free speech provides an umbrella or free range for hate speech has been repeated here, but with Australian flavours to it regarding multiculturalism, immigration, our colonial past, so on and so forth. So it has a local flavour to it, but in actual fact, at the heart of it, the arguments against free speech are those that have been repeated well, for hundreds if not thousands of years indeed. So they’re not actually new, but they just have a particular manifestation.

II: Yeah, I mean, one pushback that I hear a lot is that there’s so much misinformation out there. So we need censorship in order to stem the tide of misinformation. And it’s true that there is an enormous amount of misinformation and it seems as though we do have some effective means of crowdsourcing the corrections to misinformation so that the experiment that’s been going on in Twitter with Community Notes, I don’t know if Community Notes is going to survive on Twitter, but the idea being that you allow people to annotate certain posts on Twitter and then you can vote on whether you think the annotation is accurate or not and if enough people from a wide enough range of the political spectrum agree that the annotation is accurate that annotation will then be affixed to the post so it will say for example if the post has false information, there will be a note underneath saying readers have voted that this note will be here or effectively means that readers have voted that this note will be here and are pointing out that this information is factually false and it usually comes with links and evidence so you can go and see on what basis people are claiming that the information is false. It’s an extremely useful way of countering misinformation without needing to just go around deleting things.

To me, the big problem with the misinformation stuff is that if you place that in the hands of individuals or of some small individual committee or government department or a quango, if the correction is not broadly sourced from a very large number and wide range of people, then then there’s no way of telling whether the correction is itself correct or whether the correction is just misinformation as well. What doesn’t make sense is to have somebody who is a misinformation officer, which basically means that you are setting yourself up as an expert on what is true. And that’s absurd hubris and is bound to be exploited for political purposes.

AD: Indeed. So look, a bit like hate speech, even if we acknowledge that misinformation and disinformation is out there, the next question is how pervasive and how influential? Next question is: What are the best means that can be resourced adequately to address it, whether it’s through crowdsourcing. And remember that [Mark] Zuckerberg recently came out with the position from Meta that the factchecking side of things was being disestablished and they were relying on crowdsourcing. So is crowdsourcing an efficient way? Even if enough people agree on what is misinformation, disinformation, and it’s a bad thing, then what’s the mechanism to address it?

And then running deeper, as you alluded to there, Iona, who gets to be an arbiter of the truth? And in some cases, what might be deemed misinformation might turn out to be true, it might turn out to be merely inconvenient for the dominant powers in question at the time. And of course, it can easily be weaponised later with the changes of political tides and attitudes. So it’s an incredibly problematic and complex issue to address. But I think that having the factcheckers and the czars of factchecking around misinformation, disinformation has proved itself to be highly contentious, also incredibly difficult to sustain on a scale that can address, say, online content globally. That’s just incredibly difficult. So there’s a whole range of challenges around that.

And the research that’s been done from various, I think it’s The Future of Free Speech, a not-for-profit organisation overseas, has shown that in a whole lot of cases where alleged misinformation and disinformation has been taken down, in the study they did, the vast majority of it can be shown to be overreach. But the other question is genuinely damaging potentially disinformation and misinformation may well be exaggerated in order to create the incentives to do something about it. Now doesn’t mean to say there’s not the possibility that some very damaging disinformation may lead to something, that’s not the case. It’s more a matter of—as with the hate speech and anti-vilification laws, we need to be very careful about the correct proportion, what is sustainable, but most importantly, what are the unintended consequences of these kinds of laws and commitments?

II: Well, one of the unintended consequences, it seems to me, is to erode people’s faith in the government, the media, and the universities. And that makes them even more vulnerable to misinformation and disinformation because they’re scraping around trying to decide what they think and believe. And because it’s so clearly ham-fisted, things like the e-Safety Commissioner are such clearly ham-fisted measures, it just destroys the establishment’s credibility in many people’s eyes.

AD: Absolutely. And obviously there’s some well-cited and probably tired examples now, but the lab leak hypothesis for COVID would be a great example that when it was first mooted as a very real possibility about how COVID came to be, it was, on the one hand, considered racist because you’re somehow anti-Asian if you suggested it.

But on the other hand, we had a wealth of government and official agencies coming out saying this is disinformation, so on and so forth. Now, even if that’s one isolated case, it’s one isolated case with global ramifications, including the ramifications down the road for people’s trust. I think many people would now agree, including intelligence agencies and many, perhaps many more scientists and commentators, that the possibility that COVID was the result of an actual lab leak is at least a viable option to put on the table and screaming that someone’s a racist or a conspiracy nut was never the right response. So that kind of thing has a lasting impact on people in institutions. And we could cite other examples as well, Russian interference in [Donald] Trump’s first election and so on and so forth. There are other examples where there’s a pile-on to say this is misinformation, this is bad, this has no credibility and then there’s a gradual pull back around, actually maybe, maybe, and then things are sort of forgotten. But of course, I think the general population might remember a lot more than our so-called experts do.

II: Yeah, yeah. I actually think that COVID had a zoonotic origin, but nevertheless, the lab leak hypothesis was always a valid and reasonable hypothesis. And it was always a technical scientific discussion that could be had and needed to be had. And the efforts to silence that point of view were, again, so ludicrous and so clearly authoritarian that the upshot, the result of it was if anything to make that view more popular. It’s really odd because it didn’t even, in a sense, matter all that much politically which was true. It’s important to try to find out what the origin of COVID was, but there’s no reason why people should feel that one hypothesis is hateful and the other is not hateful. Yeah, that’s just extraordinary.

AD: Or that one is racist and the other one is not racist. Again, these sorts of identity and morality markers that get attached to truth propositions is symptomatic of the sort of identity politics environment that we’re living in at the moment. So it’s just another manifestation of …

II: Yeah, we should be talking about, for example, when it comes to policies like, say, the Voice to Parliament referendum, which was a proposal made by the government and put to a national referendum that Aboriginal Australians would have … well, part of the problem of the referendum was it wasn’t exactly clear what was being proposed, but some kind of additional permanent committee that would advise on parliamentary matters. And this is clearly a question of policy, i.e., what makes sense policy-wise, what makes sense constitutionally, what makes sense symbolically, etc. And I disagreed, in fact, with the Voice, but at Quillette we published articles that were both against and in favour. There were legitimate arguments in favour as well but it very quickly became distorted into this slander of if you don’t agree with this, you’re racist.

And once you get to that kind of level, it becomes impossible to discuss serious issues seriously. You need some freedom to consider things fully and to speak frankly and to think aloud and to discuss consequences and to discuss cases that are inconvenient to your political point of view without it immediately degenerating into these people who say this are on the side of good, these people who say that are on the side of bad, so let’s try and silence the bad people or shame the bad people.

AD: Yep, absolutely and it ties into our earlier conversation around antisemitism, Islamophobia. These are in many ways empirical questions if we’re at all prepared to look at them, but you run the risk of being slurred. And I think the great tragedy for the public square in Australia—noting that the public square is a virtual public square often—is that precisely the symptoms you’ve just diagnosed are, I would say, as prevalent in universities from academics as anywhere. They are oftentimes instructing students towards good people believe this and follow this series of theorists. They can cite a couple of sentences from [Michel] Foucault or [Herbert] Marcuse or something like that. Bad people believe this—and in fact, if they even talk about what bad people believe. And so we have that false moral clarity about the role of intellectual engagement already embedded in our students, arguably even earlier than universities, arguably even in schools, such that genuine critical inquiry and open debate becomes incredibly difficult because even voicing a question or questioning something about the evidence or the rationale can now be framed as you are a morally bad person. And unfortunately, that’s coming from our university academics, not just from obvious partisans out in the world.

II: Yeah, yeah. Alan, is there anything you wish that I had asked you that I haven’t asked you or anything you feel we should emphasise that you haven’t had a chance to emphasise?

AD: Look, I think it’s been a terrific and wide-ranging conversation. Thank you so much for having me on. I think now we’ve covered heaps and look, there’s much more to talk about, but it might need to be for another time.

II: So tell us how we can support the Free Speech Union of Australia.

AD: So look us up online. Free Speech Union Australia will take you to our website. For those of you that are on X, we’ve got X, same thing, Free Speech Union Australia, we’re on LinkedIn and we’re on Facebook. I know perhaps many people don’t use LinkedIn, but it’s good for professionals and academics, so I’m certainly very active in the LinkedIn side of things there. Please check us out, follow the work that we’re doing, consider becoming a member if you can, it’s not perhaps for everyone to become a member but please check us out and the great work that we do and also check out and do a search for that recent success that was supported by the Free Speech Union through gathering funds and legal support. The Celine Baumgarten case with the eSafety Commissioner again that should come up pretty easily with a search as well so check out what we do and see if you think it’s worthwhile and consider joining.

II: Thanks very much, Alan.

AD: Thanks, Iona.