One of the most compelling denunciations of the Albanese government’s misinformation bill has come from the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, John Ruddick.

In an interview on Spectator TV on 7 July (watch it online at watch.adh.tv), Ruddick described the bill as a desperate attempt to gag dissent. This project, he pointed out, actually began under the Coalition over opposition to measures adopted during the Covid outbreak.

He says, with justification, that much of this dissent has since been shown to be correct. The gag, he warns, is no longer about Covid, which is all ‘in the rearview mirror’.

Rather it is to be used, he believes, to silence dissent over a range of issues including the Voice, global warming, and transgenderism. The aim is to suppress dissent by terrifying the people who run social media with massive fines.

When asked why the government is being so heavy-handed, he answers emphatically, ‘Because they can’t win the debate.’

This is true. They are losing the Voice debate. When transgenderism is discussed among the rank and file, there is invariably outrage about the use of medical measures which amount to child abuse.

When the significantly increased electricity bills arrive, the grid is shown to be unreliable, and the riches and advantages flowing to Beijing are revealed, Australians will be angry at the way they have been betrayed by the political establishment.

It is important at this point to understand that since the advent of Donald Trump and then Covid, declarations of misinformation have become major ideological tools for the new far-left communists embedded in powerful US institutions and spreading across the West.

Rick Brown, one of Australia’s leading political strategists, recalled recently on ADH TV Keynes’s warning that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.

And an open Western democracy which is in the process of abandoning religion is open to ideas. It seems that the more fanciful they are, the more they are successful, at least among the elites. If you doubt that, think of those eminences who cannot define a woman, who will state with a straight face that a woman can have a penis and that breastfeeding is not limited to women. And in addition, who will accept that politicians can change the temperature?

One of the early manifestations of the use of misinformation as a political tool was over Hunter Biden’s laptop and the sale of access and influence into the highest echelons in Washington. Just before the last presidential election, fifty-one former intelligence officials put out a public statement that the laptop bore ‘the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation’. The current Secretary of State sounded out the media on this. Much of the mainstream and almost all social media suppressed the story. Polling suggests that the suppression could well have changed the election result.

One thing is clear. The charge of misinformation was itself misinformation.

In his recent maiden speech, Ruddick was himself the target of a misinformation declaration. His speech was posted to a small YouTube website. After just over one hundred people viewed it, it was taken down because of so-called ‘medical misinformation’.

Ruddick says he didn’t even say that ivermectin works. Rather he referred to the fact that the discoverers had been awarded a Nobel Prize and that prior to Covid, it had been prescribed countless times.

The Libertarian reaction was simple.

They told the world that YouTube didn’t want Ruddick to be heard. In a classic case of the Streisand effect, they turned the tables. The speech was seen by over a million people worldwide on US and UK sites. It is now also being allowed on other Youtube channels.

Rather than going to the Privileges Committee, Ruddick thanked YouTube for getting his message out so successfully.

He says that as a result, he realised something noted here, that to gain approval for the vaccines without their being fully tested, it had to be demonstrated that no alternative treatment was available.

Hence the incentive for Big Pharma to denounce ivermectin. The question is not so much why social media joined in, but why governments in Australia, both Coalition and Labor, did so too, and, as Ruddick says, ‘lying to us endlessly’

And why did so much of the mainstream media elect to be government messengers rather than making the powerful accountable?

The core theme of his refreshingly different maiden speech was, ‘We Libertarians are plotting to take over – so we can leave you alone.’

Despite the Domesday Clock, Ruddick thinks the King is performing well and looks forward to his visit next year on the 200th anniversary of the NSW Legislative Council, Australia’s oldest legislative body. He hopes to emulate the Greens who, he says, are Australia’s most successful party. Marshalling the 12 per cent who vote for the smaller right-wing parties, he wants to pull the Coalition that way, just as Labor is being pulled to the extreme Left by the Greens.

Explaining why he eventually left the Liberal party he remains a strong proponent of the Menzies legacy, which still appeals to today’s forgotten people who instinctively know that freedom of political speech is the cornerstone on which the very existence of democratic society rests.

Now it is self-evident that you cannot put everything into a written constitution, especially one essentially about bringing six self-governing colonies into one nation. As Ruddick says, the founders assumed that free speech would continue after federation. Accordingly, the High Court has found that among the significant implications in the Australian constitution, alongside the Westminster system and our ancient inherited separation of powers, is the freedom of political communication.

It is against the separation of powers and our freedom of political communication that the misinformation bill will be tested.

It is elementary that despite the government’s bizarre attribution of ‘reserve powers’ to ACMA, it is neither vice-regal, nor a legislative body, nor a court.

This is the sort of bill one would expect Beijing to ram through the Hong Kong legislature, hardly one for a democracy.