The pathetification of Australia

Britain arrests about 12,000 people a year for what they post online. That is roughly 30 a day, mostly under laws against ‘grossly offensive’ or ‘harmful’ messages. Most are ordinary citizens whose words offended somebody, somewhere.

Canberra has studied that record and decided to import it.

The draft Digital Duty of Care Bill would order every platform, search engine, app store and AI service to deliver a ‘safe online environment,’ on pain of penalties of 60,000 penalty units, a sum near $20 million. The bill never says what ‘harm’ means. Section 25E states that harm can be caused by material or conduct, and that is the entire definition. The content arrives later, from a Minister who may extend the categories by instrument and from an eSafety Commissioner who writes the standards, issues the directions and names and shames the offenders.

The list already includes material that ‘promotes’ any criminal offence. For children, it includes material that encourages ‘hostile attitudes towards women or gender equality’. Whether a given equality policy is wise is a political argument, and the draft settles it by classing one side as harm.

Orwell understood that a state which treats words as injuries has already claimed authority over thought. The draft also lets the Commissioner run false identities and generate material through them, overriding any other law, with no cap, no outside approval and no duty to disclose. Nothing in it stops those accounts being used to shape what Australians believe.

Consider the journalist. A reporter who runs a leaked document, gives a hearing to a protester, or repeats a claim before officials confirm it cannot know whether a bureaucrat will later call it harm. The draft has no defence of truth and no public-interest exemption for reporting. The bill lets the executive decide which true material is too harmful to see, and gives platforms every incentive to over-comply. Liability attaches only to leaving material up, so deletion is the safe choice. No censor signs an order.

The purpose of all this machinery is to make the state a nanny to an entire nation. The people who built the dams and ran the mines, are to be shielded from sentences.

That is embarrassing. It is also the first step. Today the state shields you from a harmful post. Next comes a harmful opinion, then a harmful question. Every time you accept the protection, you lose the right to object to the next round, because you already agreed that officials know better than you what you can handle. Freedom is a claim, and a claim lapses when the person stops making it. A people that begs its government to keep it safe has already signed the surrender.

The bill ranks safety from words above truthful journalism, above truth-telling, above the relentless pursuit of what is real. That is the Pathetification of Australia: a people who settled a continent, now handed a bureaucrat to tell them which words are safe.