Wave goodbye to another set of freedoms with the new Digital Id

The then-Liberal-National government acted on these recommendations, but its version of the bill was to facilitate private organisations to issue their own digital identity cards, rather than the government.

Why has the government now decided to make the card a government-issued one, when the recommendation and the draft legislation was for a competitive system?

At one level one might say it is symptomatic of this Labor government that it wants to control everything and is suspicious of both private enterprise and competition.

At another level, it has been gnawing away at the independence of the citizenry, particularly the independence of thought, so maybe there is a long-term agenda of control here.

Two pieces of draft legislation, and one draft regulation, exemplify this tendency-the proposed draft Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023, the Online Safety (Relevant Electronic Services-Class 1A and Class 1B Material) Industry Standard 2024, as well as the Religious Discrimination Bill. The combination of these is to restrict what citizens can say, teach, and whom they associate with, depending on what is approved by the government, or worse, regulators.

Recent tragedies reveal how eager authorities are to 'protect' us

Almost as though to prove the dangers of these proposed laws, the Commonwealth "censor" eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant just days ago ordered Meta and X to remove videos showing footage from the stabbing incidents at Westfield Bondi Junction shopping centre, and the Christ the Good Shepherd church at Wakely.

I've seen this footage, as have many other Australians, and suffice it to say, were I the eSafety commissioner, they would still be up.

When it comes to horror, the footage I have seen from Gaza and Ukraine, and reproduced in the pages and on the websites of the major news sites, is more horrific than any of this footage.

And where is the justification for censoring the information that individuals can now access for themselves?

For a moment there, we all became citizen journalists, able to view events and make our own decisions, and now the government is trying to take our accreditation away from us.

Indeed, some of these clips are uplifting as they show acts of heroism as men throw themselves between attackers and victims, or tend to the wounded.

Ms. Grant only has powers over commercial entities, so I can still, for the moment, show the videos on my blog.