In this episode of Australia Censored, award-winning journalist and Washington DC correspondent for The Australian newspaper, Adam Creighton, talks with Institute of Public Affairs Director of Law and Policy, John Storey, on why Australia has lost its reputation as a freedom loving country.
John and Adam discuss the recent decision by Australia’s eSafety Commissioner to seek to censor footage of a knife attack of a bishop in a Sydney church, the Murphy v Missouri United States’ Supreme Court case focused on the First Amendment, and the debate over the whether there are benefits of a constitutionally enshrined bill of rights.
Australia Censored is a series which brings together leading thinkers to discuss the federal government’s proposed new internet censorship laws, the importance of freedom of speech, and how the political class and elites are trying to silence mainstream opinion online.
The solution to misinformation is free speech, not unelected and unaccountable bureaucracies with vague powers which grant them the ability to determine what Australians should and should not be able to say, see and think.
Below is a transcript of the show.
Adam Creighton:
There’ll be some clause, some little section that says whenever the Public Health Officer declares an emergency, which is a bureaucratic decision, then basically no one has any rights.
No one knew that these clauses were in these bills, but they were. And so I think the realisation should have been that our governments, our state governments in Australia, and the federal government are extremely powerful when they want to be. And they don’t need more powers, for God’s sake. I mean, they’ve got enough, plenty already.
John Storey:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Australia Censored. I’m John Storey, the Director of Law and Policy at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Today, my guest is Adam Crichton, an award-winning journalist, and the Washington correspondent for The Australian newspaper. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Creighton:
Thanks very much for having me, John.
John Storey:
Adam, I want to get your perspective from the other side of the Pacific. I was in the United States a few months ago, and something that struck me was the damage that’s been done to the reputation of Australia, because of the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The lockdowns and the brutal images of repression, of protests and mandates, particularly in my home city here of Melbourne.
People who found out that I was Australian would almost treat me like I was someone returning from a war zone. It was like, “Oh, how did you go? How were things over there? Did you manage all right?”
And many admitted to me that they’ve got a new perspective on Australia and Australians. The sort of larrikin, fun-loving Crocodile Dundee, Steve Irwin image of Australians has changed in their mind, and they think of us as a scared, compliant and authoritarian people, which obviously as an Australian, I found a bit sad.
Australia has been in the news for all the wrong reasons recently, internationally as well, because of the recent litigation launched by our eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant against Elon Musk’s Social Media Company, X.
Now, this has to do with the terrible footage of a knife attack in the Sydney suburb of Wakely, where a bishop was stabbed live on camera in a church.
Now, that footage was ordered to be censored by the eSafety Commissioner, and has led to a fight with Elon Musk.
Now, I think this episode has some major problems. I think that there’s some genuine issues around, yes, the content is graphic, and that’s a problem, but there is also the need to know or the right to know what’s going on in the Australian community.
Another factor in this matter has been the perceived selectiveness of what gets censored. So, in this case, this violent footage has been censored from the internet, but there is plenty of other stuff that’s even worse that doesn’t get censored.
And some people have commented on things like the footage of the death of George Floyd that’s still freely available online. The graphic footage of the war in Gaza is freely available online.
And it plays into this perception of censorship, that what gets left up and what gets taken down comes down to the whims of the person in charge of the censorship, and their own political perspectives.
But what’s really made this case internationally significant, is that the order by Inman Grant to censor this footage wasn’t restricted to Australia.
X has agreed, and is complying with what’s called the geo-blocking of this footage, which basically means if you’re located in Australia, you can’t see the footage, but the rest of the world can.
Now, the problem from the eSafety Commissioner’s perspective, is that some Australians use VPNs, which lets them mask their location, and so they could still see the footage if it’s available internationally.
So, her response in classic, regulatory overreach, is to ban it globally, which X has refused to do. And she obtained an injunction, which has now been overturned. And the judge’s reasoning, if I can very loosely paraphrase him, is that it’s just crazy that an unelected, unaccountable, single bureaucrat in Australia could make a decision to block content for the eight billion people in the world. What ramifications would this have if other countries chose to go down that same path? And obviously this has had some international ramifications.
That’s a bit of a long-winded intro into getting your perspective, Adam, on the perceptions of Australia, and the Australians as a free-loving society, and what your thoughts are on this case in particular?
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, well, just on my thoughts on how Americans views of Australia have changed, and I think they have changed, as you say, I think their image of Australians was very much that kind of one formed in the 1980s, really, with Crocodile Dundee when we were very young.
But nevertheless, that’s really endured. And I think you mentioned Steve Irvin as well. I think there’s the association with dangerous animals, the outback, so a people maybe that are willing to put up with risk. But I think that image has been sorely challenged.
And indeed, one anecdote springs to mind. In late 2021, I was in New York for a job. I went up there, and the door man at the hotel I was staying at, he heard my accent. I think I was talking on the phone, or something.
And I walked out of the hotel, and he followed me, and said, “Excuse me, sir. Excuse me, are you Australian?” And I said, “Yes.” And then he said, “Man, what is going on?” Well, he actually used an expletive that I won’t repeat. But he said, “Man, what is going on with your country?”
And that really struck me. But this was when Victoria was going insane. This is late 2021. I was shocked myself watching it from over here. I couldn’t believe what was happening. The rubber bullets, the protests, it was just complete madness.
So, obviously he was seeing that too. And a lot of those images of Australia went viral on social media.
So, the information space is so much more democratic now. So, the major editors of newspapers and TV channels, they can’t control it anymore. And so these images of Australia spread throughout social media. Ordinary Americans were seeing them, and I think they were shocked.
And I think this latest case is just another example to basically confirm their new view of Australia.
I mean, there’s lots of mockery of the job of eSafety Commissioner online in the U.S. It is kind of a funny title, and somewhat ridiculous by American standards.
I mean, you just, you put it, you have some bureaucrat in Canberra who can arbitrarily decide what’s safe and unsafe? And that’s quite aside from the inconsistencies that this case showed up.
I mean, I was very happy that X rather seems to have scored a win in the Federal Court in Australia with Justice Kennett, who quoted more or less, saying that it was not “reasonable” for the Australian government to demand that X take down those clippings for the whole world.
And it seems so definitive. I mean, I’m no lawyer, but it seems like the government lost, and they all have to… I mean, it just seems so definitive, the ruling, that I don’t know if they’re going to bother appealing.
So, they’ll have to pass new laws, which of course we’ll probably get to you later, they’re trying to do.
So, I think a short term win, I think for free speech in the government’s loss against X.
And just on the image, anyway, I mean, there was no blood. You couldn’t even see the knife. I mean, of course it was terrible to see. It’s a real assault, but there’s so much stuff on the internet already, things like that.
And I was really struck at the time too. There had been a couple of cases of self-immolation in the U.S. recently. One young airman outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, and then more recently a man outside the courthouse in New York where Trump’s trial’s occurring. And they both burned themselves to death. And there’s plenty of footage of it, and it’s all on the internet.
And I must admit, I kind of wish I hadn’t have watched it, because I can’t get it out of my head. It’s just so horrible. And it’s so graphic. It’s real.
And my point is, I would’ve thought that the Australian government wouldn’t want people to look at that, rather than this other, this so-called terrorist stabbing, or whatever. It just seems very targeted.
And it also seems very targeted to X itself, because that image of the stabbing was available on other platforms, I believe, and still is. And yet the government never sought to punish those other platforms.
And I do know that Grant, the Commissioner, she used to work at Twitter, so she may have had a falling out with Elon Musk, let’s say. I mean, I’m just speculating, but it just seems very strange just to go after one platform for this one image.
John Storey:
Yeah, Adam, it seems to me that in the very name, eSafety Commissioner, it’s very sort of infantilizing the idea that we need to be made safe online. But I think you hit on a point, the key problem with censorship-
John Storey:
The key problem with censorship or these new misinformation laws that are being proposed is that who gets to decide? And Julie Inman Grant has a track record of pushing the usual, fashionable causes like climate change and indigenous issues and the rest of it. And it just seems no coincidence that when it’s a demographic that, the political left, for example, tend to mollycoddle, they’re all over the censorship. But if it was a different demographic, they’re all for, “No, the public needs to see this. And we need to have an honest conversation as a society.” So the immolations about Donald Trump, “Well, we need to talk about how bad Trump is and people need to see how he’s upsetting people,” which I don’t disagree with. I think I don’t want that censored from the internet.
And also it seems that the one platform that is devoted to free speech, Elon Musk, X, is the one platform that gets the most attention, which I think is rather telling, but having just bagged Australia for a little bit. I don’t want to let the country you’re residing in off the hook just yet. The governments in the United States have been, in a different way, guilty of influencing social media companies to take down certain content, and they’ve been accused of, in the Twitter files, of that being partisan and political. And there’s a prominent Supreme Court case on foot at the moment. Could you tell us a little bit about the background to that case and how that case is going?
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, sure. Certainly, it’s a very important case and I think it should be getting more coverage than it is. I would say one of the most important Supreme Court cases of a few years, I would say, at least. And they only hear where it matters. So it’s called Missouri versus Biden. Now that’s generally what it’s referred to as. It’s had a few name changes over the time, but there’s already been the oral argument. So just to start from the end, just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court justices, they heard the oral argument, so Biden versus Missouri on this particular case, and the verdict will be out in just a few weeks actually. So we’ll know the conclusion.
So this trial started back in 2022 when there are a lot of disgruntled academics in the US, scientists, doctors who were saying things about COVID that were taken down from Twitter, and Facebook, and other social media platforms.
And at the same time, you had senior officials in the White House, including the president, saying things like, “Facebook’s killing people for not taking these things down.” And I think the Surgeon General said, “If platforms don’t take down misinformation, we are going to deal with them.”
And these are public statements, right? So semi threatening type statements being made by various officials. And so these academics suspected, and actually two states, Missouri and Louisiana, Republican states, very sympathetic to the doctor’s arguments, they decided to join the case too. That gave it more heft, I guess. And fortunately, for those who were sensitive, the district court in Louisiana agreed to take up this First Amendment case, the argument being that the government had been pressuring social media platforms to take things down, and that is unconstitutional in the US because First Amendment very clearly says the government cannot abridge free speech.
So the governor, of course, at the time said, “No, we’re not coercing, we’re not forcing them to. We’re just suggesting,” which [inaudible 00:14:00] easily, right? So this becomes kind of a semantic issue to some extent, but I think an important one.
So anyway, the judgement brought down by the district court judge in Louisiana last year, on the 4th of July, very interestingly, so you get a sense of where the judges are politically, that’s when he brought down his decision was scathing federal government. I mean scathing. I mean this is just one judge in district court, and he basically agreed with those who were censored, and he literally ordered all communication between federal government and social media to cease like just like that, overnight, which it’s kind of a reminder of how powerful judges can be in the US, I think much more than in Australia, because they can tell the government what to do based on this document, which is higher up the government, whereas we don’t really have that in Australia the same extent.
So anyway, the government was furious. Biden administration furious, obviously with this decision. They appealed it to the 5th Circuit, I think. And anyway, a panel of judges agreed with the lower court, more or less, so they were even more furious. And they’ve taken it to the Supreme Court now. And that’s where it currently is, like I said. So the intellectual debate that the Supreme Court judges heard, because you can listen to it when it occurred a few weeks ago, it was two, three hours in the morning, and you’ve got the chief solicitor for the Biden administration and the chief lawyer for the protagonist, I guess you’d say, whatever it is, plaintiffs. And basically they’re trying to work out the line between significant encouragement and coercion.
But I have to say, and I’m friends with some of these doctors, Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, who were censored, and I know the lawyers socially, so I’m quite close to the case. And they were very disappointed with how the oral arguments went. They thought, going in, that they will get a six-three decision, or seven two decision in their favour, because of the lower court decisions.
But listening to the questions of the various justices, even some of the so called right wing justices seem sceptical. And that’s part of a long tradition of the Supreme Court ultimately deferring to government. And we have that in Australia too. Just to go back to the eSafety case, I was shocked, actually, that the federal court ruled that way because normally they side with the government, so that was a good thing.
But anyway, so we are all just waiting now. And normally the Supreme Court brings down its decisions all in one big batch in the last week of June. So it’s almost certain that in four or five weeks, we’ll know the outcome. And it’s got huge ramifications. Huge, right? This is basically about whether the federal government in the US can basically apply pretty hefty pressure to private entities to do their bidding when it comes to speech. And we just have to see where the Supreme Court draws the line. But there’s the great anecdotes.
Thanks to the discovery process in the US, we’ve got all these emails from senior officials to Facebook to Nick Clegg, who was I think, chief of communications at Facebook, the former deputy Prime minister of Britain, lots of private emails between him and the White House. And he’s basically saying, “Look, we wouldn’t do this unless you told us to,” so it’s all very explicit.
And then from the White House, you get very threatening language too. “Do this, or we might consider changing the rules or taking an antitrust action.” That’s the implication, right?
So anyway, the justices are going to have to wade through the hundreds of pages and reach a decision. But if it fails, if the government wins, it’s a dark day, not just for the US but I think for all of the English-speaking countries, which, to some extent, look to US law and interpretation as a benchmark. So yes, we have to wait a sec.
John Storey:
Yeah, that’s depressing news, Adam. My impressions were that it was a little more hopeful than that. I hope you are wrong in a way. It leads to an interesting question. We’ve had Professor James Allen on this programme, and Jim is a conservative legal scholar, but very sceptical of Bills of Rights. He believes that a Bill of Rights just empowers judges. And he has a pretty dim view of judges, if I can put words into his mouth.
But the perception… And I guess, but the United States does have a Bill of Rights, and it does seem that, as you see, people perhaps take rights more seriously over there. I know this is pretty high-end stuff, but do you think having a Bill of Rights in the United States and the very first amendment that was put into that Bill of Rights is a protection of free speech, the First Amendment. Do you think Americans look at freedoms, and particularly free speech, differently, or as you say, do ultimately judges just defer to governments most of the time anyway?
Adam Creighton:
Yeah, certainly. Look, I think the Bill of Rights in the US makes a huge difference and has made a huge difference to society in general. And I think it has made Americans more respectful of individual rights, kind of the 18th century rights, free speech, private property, all that sort of stuff than in Australia or other countries. And I probably had the same view as Jim Allen, who’s a great man and a friend of mine. Until COVID, I probably had the same view as he does, but since COVID happened, you’ve seen in the US that clearly the Bill of Rights, it wasn’t totally effective, but it was a crutch that people could use to stop governments doing crazy things. And sometimes it succeeded, sometimes it didn’t, but it was better to have it than not have one at all. And I think where Jim is certainly right is legislative bills of rights are just complete nonsense. And of course, the-
Adam Creighton:
… bills of rights are just complete nonsense. And of course, the great irony is that Victoria’s the only state that has one, right? In Australia, I think the only state with a legislative bill of rights is Victoria. So that’s kind of comical really, isn’t it? It just shows that they’re meaningless.
Canada also has the Bill of Rights, but I’m pretty sure it’s legislative, although don’t quote me on that, but judges have just interpreted away. But I think if the Bill of Rights is in the Constitution, so it’s higher than Parliament, if you like, higher than Congress, then I think it does have a positive impact if it’s written well.
John Storey:
Yeah, no, that’s interesting. It is a debate I’ve shifted from side to side over the years. Definitely, COVID put my faith in bills of rights into question. But yeah, I think you’re right. It definitely seems to have been influential in keeping America freer than most places, so yeah.
Adam Creighton:
I think too, just to stop you, I think COVID was a wake-up call in so many ways, but I think one of the ways, in Australia at least, was I think the realisation. The realisation that most people should have had is that actually, governments can do an extraordinary array of very authoritarian things without passing any new laws. They can just do them, and the reason that is you’ve had these obscure bits of legislation pass after the last 30 or 40 years, normally called biosecurity or something like that.
I think in the case of Australia, I think a lot of the stuff the federal government did, stopping flights, keeping everyone inside was the Biosecurity Act, I’m pretty sure. So it didn’t even have anything to do with viruses really. But there’ll be some clause, some little section that says, whenever the public health officer declares an emergency, which is a bureaucratic decision, then basically no one has any rights. No one knew that these clauses were in these bills, but they were.
So I think the realisation should have been that our governments, our state governments in Australia and the federal government are extremely powerful when they want to be. And they don’t need more powers for God’s sake. They’ve got enough, plenty already.
John Storey:
Yeah. I’ve heard sort of a related argument, very, very topical in the United States with all these court cases against former President Donald Trump. There are so many laws and so many of these laws have criminal aspects buried in them that you’re not even aware of.
Adam Creighton:
Totally.
John Storey:
It’s just if you want to, almost any activity could slot within some breach of some rule somehow. Now, most of the time-
Adam Creighton:
Definitely. I couldn’t agree more.
John Storey:
Most of that time, our law enforcement agencies-
Adam Creighton:
It’s tyrannical.
John Storey:
Yeah, most of the time, our law enforcement agencies apply the law sensibly. It’s only when someone’s physically harmed or if it’s a fraud case, it’s when lives have been destroyed or whatever. But misallocating something on an accounting book or saying something in the wrong way probably breaches some regulation somewhere.
Adam Creighton:
[inaudible 00:23:12].
John Storey:
If the organs of the state are willing to weaponize that, they can. We saw that during COVID where they already had all the powers they need right there.
Adam Creighton:
Yes. Totally.
John Storey:
And in this case, if you give the brief to well-funded district attorneys, “Bring down this guy,” well, they’ll find a way. And I guess that comes back to Jim Allen’s point, that the law is one thing, but it’s ultimately the culture of the institutions that are our real protection.
Adam Creighton:
Really good point you make. I think this is something the IPA has been very strong on over the years, I understand, the proliferation of laws and regulations, just out of control. And very rarely are old ones deleted, there’s just this cumulative mountain. And normally, the laws have nice titles so everyone feels good about themselves, but of course, that’s not how they work in practise. And they do, every new law basically equips the judiciary or the legal system with more power because there’s a greater chance people will contravene it.
And I maintain that, and the Trump examples a very good one, these are obscure applications of law. In the case of the bookkeeping case in New York now, never been applied this way before, ever. It’s completely novel. It’s kind of complicated, they’re kind of using a misdemeanour offence, but they’re turning it into a criminal charge by saying that he was fiddling with the books to hide some affair from the American people.
It’s all very crazy. And I don’t think, if he wasn’t Donald Trump, there’s no way it would be brought. It’s a waste of resources. Just from an economic point of view, as an economist, I look at the district attorney’s office and they’re spending hours and dozens of people on this one case. They could be doing other things, far more important things.
But I think one of the biggest problems with Western societies now is that we have so many laws. Most people have no idea what half the laws are, so it’s easy to break them accidentally. And it’s easy to be prosecuted if someone in government doesn’t like it. And I think it’s a real problem. I don’t know how to reverse it. It’s a very difficult question.
John Storey:
I want to shift gears before I let you go, Adam. A lot of these laws, these censorship laws, e-safety, misinformation, what’s been going on in the United States is very much targeted at social media. And there are plenty of problems with social media and the internet, but it tends to be blamed for election interference or COVID misinformation or causing polarisation in the community. But there’s also an aspect that the mainstream media, of which you are working, that the mainstream media is, to an extent, responsible for some of these things.
It seems to me, more as an outside observer of the media, not an insider, that, certainly in the United States, the corporate mainstream media have very much, either you’ve got your left wing and you’ve got Fox News, and they beat quite ideological drums. And one of the controversial things about our misinformation laws is that the media would be excluded.
The flip side to that, jumping back into the corner of your profession, is that social media has radically changed the business model of mainstream media. People don’t buy the daily paper every day. It’s about gaining the attention of eyeballs, clicks and eyeballs, and that does tend to require more extreme content, more extreme, over-the-top views, and I guess pandering to your audience rather than just informing them.
What are your views on the future of the media? And is it sort of complicit in some of this polarisation? Or is it still a profession that we should look to for balanced information?
Adam Creighton:
Well, certainly, mainstream media, which yes, I’ve worked in 12 years at the Australian, had a wonderful time, very much enjoy it. The media didn’t cover itself in glory in COVID, I must say, during the COVID pandemic. I think I can say that unequivocally. And I think probably most journalists now would agree with me, most mainstream journalists, I say. I kind of went out on a limb very critically of lockdowns and mandates and so forth at the Australian, and thankfully they published me. And that was fantastic, a great privilege. But most journalists wouldn’t have agreed with me at the time, or if they did, they wouldn’t have said anything because there was this kind of atmosphere of fear. You remember it, I’m sure.
Look, I think for me, I was disappointed that mainstream media wasn’t more critical of government. Because outside of that pandemic or panic scenario, I would say just a fake panic, but outside of that, of normal situation, they lost all of their cynicism about government and about incentives, about the pharmaceutical sector, about regulators. We know, for instance, that the industry funds the regulators, so clearly, there’s a conflict of interest there. But you couldn’t even say that as an argument. You couldn’t say during COVID, “Well, hang on. Isn’t it in the pharma’s incentives to get everyone to take this vaccine, for instance?” That was kind of beyond the pale.
Look, your point about the changing incentive structure of media is very true, and I think it’s probably for the worst. And I think most people in the media, if they put their hand on their heart, they’d want it to go back to the old days when you’re mainly funded by advertising. I’m talking mainly about newspapers here, because that’s obviously my background.
Newspapers used to make a lot of money from advertising, and the cover price of the paper was very cheap. It was often free online because frankly, didn’t really care very much about reader revenue. It didn’t matter. You had a lot of advertising money. And of course, that’s dramatically fallen, as we know, not just in Australia, but around the world, all newspapers. And of course, that’s meant papers have had to shift for revenue to their readers, and so they charge more, they have a good online website.
But that doesn’t [inaudible 00:29:53], as you say, that you kind of get a bit captured sometimes by your audience, or at least that’s a risk that editors have to think about. And you do get this polarisation because the political spectrum in any-
Adam Creighton:
And you do get this polarisation because the political spectrum in any civil society goes from left to right, or whatever you want to call it. And the people at those ends of the distribution, they want to consume media that’s broadly accords with their view. And so you get companies that are satisfying kind of all spots on of the market, so to speak. So that’s a great thing. If you’re like me and you consume both ends, then you get both sides, and you get a lot more arguments. But sadly, I’d say most people don’t consume both ends. They consume one end only, and I think that’s not good for your ability to navigate society and to understand why people behave the way they do.
John Storey:
Yeah. In a perfect world, if you had this sort of market failure, if you like, where the traditional role of journalists as the informers of society have become a bit more cheerleaders for their side, that’s where a role for a publicly funded broadcaster who strictly sticks to the middle could actually find a rejuvenated space. But of course, our publicly funded broadcaster has just drifted more and more to the left regardless. So that’s been a complete failure. No one goes to the ABC for independent views.
Adam Creighton:
No, you can’t. You mentioned earlier about the importance of culture, and culture’s kind of upstream from everything, if you like. Basically everything else flows from that. And yeah, in theory you can say yes, we had a public broadcast, very well funded just to stick to the facts. And I agree with you, there’s a great economic argument for that now. Yeah, you could increase the funding of the ABC basically. I wouldn’t be against that, but there’s a big but, how do you change the culture of it? And I don’t think you can because inevitably public institutions get captured by left wing people. That’s just natural. It’s not bad or good, it’s gravity. That’s what happens because people… It’s like gravity because people who think that the state has a benevolent role to play, they’re inevitably attracted to those jobs. And so it’s just a case in Australia, and Washington here. It’s extremely left wing city here, extremely. Remember, in the 2020 election, the Democrats was 93%, right? So it makes Canberra look like kind of hot bed of libertarianism.
John Storey:
I think the year 2020, when we look back on the history of the media, was there’s a bad one. We got the COVID-19 outbreak, the George Floyd event, where I think the media just completely became narrative managers rather than reporters. And then of course,-
Adam Creighton:
It’s totally true.
John Storey:
… at the end of the year, we had one of the most contentious elections we’ve ever had. And I just think it just… I think a lot of people just lost complete faith that what they’re hearing on TV or reading in the paper is in any way truthful. And that has inadvertently created… There’s a lot of these sort of independent online journalists, Andrew Lowenthal, who we’ve had on this programme.
Adam Creighton:
Yes. He’s a great guy.
John Storey:
And the sort team he worked with were the Twitter files who… They’re subject to these same things as well. They’ve got an audience they want to cater to, but they feel… It seems like they’re a lot more free to just break an amazing story and get some eyeballs and go, “Wow, look what those guys are doing.”
Adam Creighton:
Yeah. No, look, I’ve recently subscribed myself to Michael Shellenberger’s outfit, Public Square. Is it public? I think. And then Matt Taibbi’s called Racket. Very good, really good. They’re a bit obsessed with the free speech stuff, but I like that, so I like rooting for that. But they do… It’s well-written, it’s well-researched journalism, and I think… Well, I guess in corporate media, there’s always… And this has always been the case, this is not a great revelation, but big media companies, they have proprietors, they have owners, and it’s perfectly reasonable the owners have views about things, and that’s their perfect right. And so the journalists then tend to be concerned about what the owner thinks, so that’s kind of like a naturally limiting force, a perfectly understandable one. But these kind of independent outfits, well, distributions cost them zero because the internet, so they can actually potentially get quite a large audience globally, and it’s just them writing for themselves. But the funny thing about that too, they also get captured by their audience, those journalists-
John Storey:
Absolutely.
Adam Creighton:
… because of these subs. So I have a lot of friends who have successful Substacks, and privately, they say to me, “God, I’d like to write this, but there’s no way I can, because the readers might unsubscribe.”
John Storey:
Yeah.
Adam Creighton:
And I don’t have a Substack, but that would be a very real consideration. Say you had three, 4,000 people who are willing to pay $5 a month or something to read you. You don’t want to upset those people.
John Storey:
And that’s why I think people, particularly have gone through this process of COVID and the polarisation of politics, if they’ve been able to stick to some core principles, like people who are free speech crusaders regardless of who’s speaking, I think that’s an important test of whether someone is someone who should be listened to.
Adam Creighton:
Well, I think we can infer that that’s a very small minority of people who are actually genuinely supportive of free speech. I think both sides of politics to talk about the importance of free speech when it’s a speech they want others to hear. But when they don’t like it… We’ve seen that in COVID, we’ve seen it in the Russia-Ukraine war, now, the Israel situation. That’s kind of caused all sorts of political realignments, but you often see that the people try to stamp out speaks they don’t like on right and left. I reckon there’d be no more than 10% of people who are genuinely in favour of free speech, which is a sad fact, but I tend to have a fairly cynical outlook. So that’s why it’s hard to preserve. That’s why I think that we’re entering a dangerous time now in the West.
We’ve got governments with the most technological power they’ve ever had, and you’ve also got this somewhat pathetic, in my view, view of most people in Australia that, yeah, the government has a role to keep us safe. And sadly, I think a majority of people think that, and so they haven’t been as angry with this e-safety thing as I thought they might be. So I don’t know. I just hope we’re kind of not like the boiling frog in Australia and all these laws keep getting passed. And then there’s a new COVID, and suddenly people think the government has basically completely totalitarian powers over the internet, which I think almost is what this new law is going to bestow.
John Storey:
Yeah. I think there’s always been that sort of, it’s probably a psychological divide between people who cherish security or those that cherish freedom. And I just think I naively thought that I was in the vast majority who would rather have freedom than security, and it’s been a bit of an education.
Adam Creighton:
Yeah. Look, honestly, same for me. 2020 was life-changing really for me, because I thought that I was naturally a common sense person and that the majority of people agree with me. That was not the case, sadly. I realised that for a good year and a half at least, I was in quite a small minority of people. So that was a wake-up to me. And I think it’s the importance in a democracy of having actual real rights that don’t change according to the political panic at the time, but that’s very hard to engineer.
John Storey:
And one of the aspects that I wish I could tell the other side, for want of a better word, I guess the political left, is you may not always control these institutions and they could be turned against you.
Adam Creighton:
Exactly. Exactly.
John Storey:
But speaking of who will control institutions, the most important question I want to finish with is, who is going to win the 2024 presidential election in the United States?
Adam Creighton:
Well, look, if I was forced to bet, and I’m not a betting man, but I would say Trump at this stage. One interesting fact for you is that he’s been leading for about a year in the national polls and the political betting markets. But when Biden gave his State of the Union in March, which was widely considered to be well-delivered, well, for him, it’s a very low bar, but he did have a big increase in support, noticeable in polls, and also the political betting markets, which I tend to prefer to look at because it’s people actually putting down money to express a view.
But in the last two weeks of this court case, which I’m sure Democrats assumed would humiliate the former president by having all these dirty laundry out in public, Trump’s increased steadily throughout the trial, and also political betting markets, he’s back in front. He’s the favourite to win again by a small amount, but he’s still the favourite again. So look, if I had to bet, it’s going to be Trump. Biden’s increasingly feeble, and I’m shocked that he’s agreed to these two debates with Trump. I don’t know why he did that because that’s going to be embarrassing, I think. He’s really getting old. It’s very obvious. He’s not the man he was four years ago. So I would say Trump, and that’s my preference too. I’m not a huge Trump fan, but if I had to choose between those two, I would pick Trump, but remains to be seen what happens.
John Storey:
Adam, thank you so much for your time and sharing your thoughts from that side of the Pacific on some free speech issues and political issues. It’s been fantastic and hope we can chat another time.
Adam Creighton:
It’s been fun, John. Thanks so much for having me.
