Big Brother is coming. Or Big Sister with a penis who must be obeyed. The time for consultation has expired on Labor’s Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill and the government, with its Green and Teal cheer squad in the Senate, is ready to wave it through Parliament.

At this late stage is there anyone that can save us from Labor’s tender ministrations? After all, the purpose of the Bill is to protect Australians from the harms of misinformation. What could possibly be wrong with that? It is a bitter irony, but no coincidence that those who are most concerned about the damage done by misinformation are those who most actively engage in it. Naturally, the government does not agree. It offers the traditional conjugation of those in power: I inform, you agree, they misinform and must be fined into silence.

We are used to seeing those we admire and trust being sent to Coventry. Nobel laureate for physics in 2022 Dr John Clauser was to present a seminar on climate models to the IMF in July but his talk was ‘postponed’ after he dared to say he didn’t ‘believe there is a climate crisis’ and ‘the world we live in today is filled with misinformation’. Not only that, he told his audience, ‘It is up to each of you to serve as judges, distinguishing truth from falsehood based on accurate observations of phenomena’. With such heresies being uttered, is it any wonder that a misinformation bill needs to be rushed through parliament?

Then there was an article that was published in January, again by physicists in a physics journal, that observed that extreme weather events have not become more intense or more frequent as the temperature of the earth’s surface has increased and there was no evidence of a climate crisis. Naturally, after anguished protests from activists, it was withdrawn.

Clearly, this is no longer enough. The noose on free speech must be tightened. Climate misinformation is like discussing the weather with a clown – it may be chilly in Sydney but we are meant to roll our eyes in terror at the ‘era of global boiling’. Yet it is hard to see an exit from the climate lies when an opposing view cannot be published or even uttered without cancelling the critic however eminent.

The Covid pandemic has been worse because it is more intrusive and the stakes are higher. State governments are still coercing many essential workers to get Covid ‘vaccines’. Are they safe and effective? It is easy to provide hospitalisation, ICU, and mortality data by vaccine status. The New South Wales government did it for six months in the second half of 2022 until the results became too embarrassing to publish. In the United Kingdom, after a delay of six months, the Office of National Statistics provided an update on its report on deaths by vaccination status on 25 August. As the brilliant Norman Fenton, emeritus professor of risk at Queen Mary University London, pointed out on his substack, ‘These reports have been riddled with systemic flaws and biases which make an almost laughable attempt to cover up the fact that the Covid vaccines may be leading to increased all-cause mortality’. Within hours, the authors withdrew the report as erroneous and announced they would no longer be updating deaths by vaccination status.

Do the vaccines cause cancer or genetic mutations? No one can tell you because there was no oncogenic or mutagenic testing. What we do know from the latest report from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which came out this week, is that ‘the number of deaths due to cancer was 8.1 per cent above the baseline average in May 2023 and 1.7 per cent above May 2022. Cancer deaths in January to May 2023 were 7.4 per cent above baseline average and 0.9 per cent above the same period in 2022.’ That’s bad news because, as the ABS will tell you, deaths in 2022 were ‘significantly higher than usual’ and 2022 ‘is not considered to be a typical year for mortality in Australia’. It’s actually even worse than that because cancer is a pre-existing condition in 17 per cent of deaths due to Covid. That’s an additional 500 deaths so far in 2023 where a person was sick with cancer but died of Covid-19. These Covid deaths ‘with’ cancer could effectively add another 2 per cent to the cancer mortality statistics this year.

As for all-cause mortality, there were 16,348 deaths in May which is almost as many as there were in May 2022 and 15 per cent above the baseline average. This should not be happening; after a pandemic, mortality should be lower than normal as the excess mortality during the pandemic should have prematurely killed those closest to death. What is particularly worrying is that age-specific mortality rates were higher than the baseline average for both males and females aged 45 to 74 years as well as those aged 85 years and over. People aged 45 to 74 years are unlikely to be experiencing excess mortality from Covid which typically kills people in their eighties. So why are they dying? The two likely explanations are lockdowns and/or vaccines. Yet only the valiant backbench Liberal senators, the United Australia party, and One Nation are asking for an inquiry into excess deaths or a royal commission into pandemic management.

Belatedly, in opposition, the Liberal party has rediscovered the importance of free speech. Senator James Paterson, shadow minister for home affairs and cyber security, says Labor’s misinformation bill ‘should be thrown in the bin straight away’. According to him, ‘It’s been attacked by the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, by the Human Rights Commission, by civil liberties bodies, by the social media platforms themselves, by media organisations’ and ‘even the Australian Communications Media Authority (ACMA)’ has said criticism of the bill is ‘very valid’. Really? A blink and you could miss it.

The biggest win for free speech this week was driven by  Rukshan Fernando and Avi Yemini at Rebel News and Jack Houghton at Sky News who exposed the outrageous bias of RMIT FactLab, which persistently only ‘factchecks’ conservatives, particularly on the Voice. Even Paul Barry of the ABC’s Media Watch criticised FactLab’s bias. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has temporarily suspended FactLab although it emphasised this was because it lacked up-to-date accreditation from the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN). According to Rebel News, the supposedly independent FactLab is funded by Meta, and by IFCN, which is funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Foundations.

So is Facebook going to be a free speech champion? Perhaps best to do a few more fact-checks before anyone celebrates the end of censorship.