There is an old Q&A segment being resurrected on X between Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Jacqui Lambie where they debate the ideological value of Sharia Law.
Lambie is criticising Islam’s Sharia Law for its treatment of women and incompatibility with Australian culture while Abdel-Magied defended her personal interpretation of the faith.
‘Anyone who supports Sharia Law in this country should be deported,’ said Lambie.
Lambie also calls out migration:
‘I would rather look after our own backyard first, which we’re not, we’re actually taking from the poor … somehow, when we’ve got one-third of our pensioners … living on or below the poverty line something needs to be done and if that means we need to put a hold or ban on that for two years, to fill in that gap to make sure that those people in our own backyard get what is needed … you know, we need to look after our own backyard first.’
Her words are an echo of the conservative commentary we saw from ordinary Aussies who attended the weekend March for Australia rallies. Their grievances? Housing. Jobs. Cost-of-living. Safety. And cultural protection. Perfectly legitimate.
(No, we are not talking about the fringe neo-Nazis.)
These Australians put their feet on the pavement and raised their national flag out of frustration against a government whose relentless mass migration policy and concerted effort to destroy pride in the rich history and culture of Australia.
The Q&A video of Lambie criticising mass migration is from eight years ago, long before Albanese’s reckless decision to bring in over a million people.
One might presume that Senator Lambie would feel vindicated.
Instead, Lambie was interviewed on ABC News last week, appearing to blame anti-immigration sentiment on misinformation and disinformation spread online.
‘It is very unfortunate that there is a few Australians out there who believe their right is to go out there and protest and that that is going to make for a peaceful country. And if you want to go and support neo-Nazis then that is absolutely shocking and you probably need to go and have a good look at yourself in the mirror and probably get off social media, and stop reading the misinformation and disinformation that is going on. Once again, we are going off the topic here of what should be done is these social media companies need to be reined in. They need to be regulated. Nobody seems to have the courage up here to do that.’
The host seeks to clarify, asking, ‘So, you think a lot of this stuff is spreading through social media?’
‘Oh, absolutely, it’s spreading through social media. We’ve seen it with Covid. Absolutely shocking. And once again we have done nothing about the misinformation and disinformation that is floating around on social media.’
Let us address the topic of government censorship for a moment, because that is what Lambie is calling for when it comes to social media (and what the Greens and Labor will swiftly deliver).
Many in conservative politics who are hostile to the digital world might even cheer censorship along, to their peril. After all, the Misinformation and Disinformation bill came from the Liberals while plans to biometrically gatekeep the internet (due to start in December) was a Liberal idea which Labor ran with. To protect the kids, allegedly.
We have a working example of what a censored internet looks like, and it was anything but a Utopia of truth.
It is widely acknowledged that the biggest source of misinformation and disinformation during Covid was the government, followed closely by international health authorities.
Much of what they said was wrong, and they knew it was wrong from the start.
Almost half a trillion dollars was made by pharmaceutical companies during the pandemic with most of it sourced from public money. That money has left the country and can no longer be used on public projects. Censorship played a role.
A voluntary vaccine versus a mandated (or heavily coerced) vaccine represents a huge difference in customer numbers.
At the time, social media was not an unregulated Wild West, but rather a treacherous environment for speech policed by Silicon Valley interests in bed with governments spending public money while engaging in anti-democratic lockdowns, privacy infringements, dehumanising rhetoric, and abuses of body autonomy.
They broke every workplace convention, every privacy standard, and every freedom of movement norm. As for so-called ‘science’, it became the slave of Parliament.
Were some people having crazy discussions online? Sure. They do that down the pub, too. Humans have been fantasising about conspiracies since the first spark of fire and they will do so until the last cinder of civilisation dies out. It is not an excuse for government censorship.
We should at least learn the lesson: censoring the internet is exactly what the government tried during Covid and it would be a terrible idea to give them the liberty to do so again on the topic of mass migration.
Ms Lambie has complained in the Senate about the sort of phone calls her office received from people during the pandemic. We may inform the Senator that many of us were unsettled by her pandemic-era comments which included the following:
‘Those anti-vaxxers out there, the 20-30 per cent, the ones out there protesting on the streets and doing that sort of thing are going to find the rest of us are coming at you lock, stock, and barrel. We’re going to be putting the pressure on you fairly hard because the rest of us that are trying to do the right thing by the country and our kids and get vaccinated and do the right thing, I think for you, we’re going to start to get even more agitated and we’re going to start to get even more hardcore. And I think that’s what you’re going to see. Massive division out there. And it will be us on the front foot. That’s what I think’s going to happen. I think the tide is going to turn on those anti-vaxxers out there and they are really going to feel the heat.’
Imagine if she had said to any other group, the rest of us are coming at you lock, stock, and barrel.
Do not lecture us about free speech.
Let us return to her earlier spat on Q&A where the two guests ended up shouting both at and over each other in a live-action demonstration of what social media debates look like in print, until the host intervened.
Abdel-Magied: ‘This kind of rhetoric is what we saw pre-world war two. We saw it in the thirties. The same kind of othering. They. They are different. They are not like us. They do stuff that we don’t accept. I back you 100 per cent. We should look after people that are vulnerable in this country. I will back you to the hilt on that, but that is not mutually exclusive to being generous to those that are coming here.’
The Host: ‘Do you accept that some of the things you say can come across as being quite hateful to others?’
Jacqui Lambi: ‘To a minority. Well, that’s a minority but this is for the majority. This is what the majority want.’
Abdel Magied: ‘Oh gurrrrrl!’
Jacqui Lambie: ‘They want to feel safe, be safe, and Donald Trump, if he wants to put that … put those [migrant applications] on hold for three months he has every right to do so until he can work out exactly what is going on. If that’s going to keep America safer, just like it’s going to keep Australia safer. You’re playing the victim. Stop playing the victim. We’ve had enough.’
How is this different to the average Australian wanting to air their honest and true grievances about mass migration online without a Misinformation and Disinformation law allowing the government to censor their views?
‘You’re not doing anything! That’s the problem!’ Lambie said in the Senate recently, criticising a lack of digital censorship. ‘Facebook, with other social media companies, including YouTube, all they do is fan division and hatred within our communities.’
That is not true. Politics fans division. Occasionally social media reflects the problems of our society, but it doesn’t create them.
‘It’s just about money. They don’t give a stuff about who we are.’
Social media makes money. So does every other trade and service in this world. Find me one entity in our capitalist world more obsessed with public money than the government Treasury.
I’ll wait.
Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
