MAD is censorship for a time of crisis and war

The Australian Alert Service is the weekly publication of the Australian Citizens Party.

It will keep you updated on strategic events both in Australia, and worldwide, as well as the organising activities of the Citizens Party.

To subscribe to the Australian Alert Service, it's easy, and it's secure.

Lead Editorial

2 October 2024
Vol. 26 No. 40

The financial and economic breakdown of the global Anglo-American hegemon is driving us to the brink of world war. It is the preparation for that upheaval which is driving the crackdown by governments on our freedoms, as the Citizens Party has consistently warned.

Ultimately, only fixing the economy and defusing the war trigger can calm the global situation. That requires bringing forward the adults in the room in every nation, to reorient to already advanced solutions. At the 22-24 October BRICS Summit in Kazan, Russia, nations representing the majority of the world’s population will consolidate the elements of a new financial order, which is the only hope for us all.

Otherwise, the escalation to nuclear war will continue—sparked either from Ukraine, where the Anglo-American war party continues to push the targeting of Russian territory with long-range NATO missiles (p. 8), or the Middle East. Israel’s escalation, including the assassination of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in response to which Iran bombed hundreds of Israeli positions, and its ground invasion of Lebanon, was green lighted by the United States. The US defence establishment, according to a 1988 research paper, knew that if an emerging faction of Jewish fundamentalists seized power in Israel—those currently in Netanyahu’s government—the best-case scenario would be a religious war as devastating as the 30 Years’ War in 17th-century Europe; the worst, thermonuclear World War III (“The explosive dossier that exposes the end-times ‘Temple Mount plot’ driving the genocidal war in Israel-Gaza”, AAS, 3 March).

The only way to stop leaders rallying to solutions amid such a terrifying crisis is to black-ban those solutions.

Under the Misinformation and Disinformation (MAD) bill, nobody will be permitted to question the integrity of the financial system as the crisis worsens, to prevent “imminent harm to the Australian economy, such as the destabilisation of the banking system or financial markets”.

Truth is no defence. The bill’s Explanatory Memorandum cites the collapse of America’s Silicon Valley Bank in March 2023, which according to research was driven by “propagation of misinformation” on Twitter. But the research noted that “not all tweets were false, misleading or deceptive”. As the ACP has maintained, social media platforms will be forced to develop algorithms that exclude all such tweets—truthful or not—because there is no way they can determine which are legitimate or not in real time. This means you cannot and will not be warned of an impending financial disaster unless it is telegraphed by exempted “professional news services”.

Similar objections were raised by former deputy chief health officer Nick Coatsworth, on the bill’s clause to censor information causing “harm to public health in Australia”. Coatsworth wrote in the 30 Sept. Australian Financial Review that matters of public health are always subject to debate, with even expert opinions varying considerably, so establishing an “uncontested threshold for ‘verifiable truth’ in public health” is “not conceivable”. Coatsworth, despite receiving threats for fronting the government’s COVID-19 vaccination campaign, warned it would smother legitimate debate. The terms misinformation and disinformation, he said, “are employed by both left and right as a way to dismiss opposing viewpoints without engaging in debate”.

Such polarisation blocks the process by which effective policy, developed in consultation between leaders and the population, can be achieved. This is the process the ACP has unleashed upon the Australian Parliament with our campaigns (p. 9), a process denounced by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute—the leading propagandist for the Anglo-American war party—as foreign interference. In July 2023, just as a parliamentary inquiry began combing through a record 23,000 submissions on the earlier attempt at MAD laws, ASPI singled out the ACP for its role in assembling an effective opposition.

After discussions with MPs, Sky News Political Editor Andrew Clennell on 1 October declared the MAD bill “dead in the water”, but ACP will not stop until that is 100 per cent certain.

In this issue:

• Labor and Greens should beware double-edged sword of censoring social media
• What you can do
• British Intel’s censorship war goes global
• MAD Bill aims to make war propaganda unchallengeable
• Facing conflict with NATO, Russia revises nuclear doctrine
• A year of victories against the Money Power
• Bring back the Ghost of Albo Past riding high-speed rail

Click here to find out how to subscribe. For freely available AAS articles, click here.

Click here for the archive of previous issues of the Australian Alert Service