Peta Credlin:
Thank you. Let’s go now to my Panel, National Affairs editor at the Daily Telegraph, of course, a host of News24, James Morrow, and Deputy Executive Director at the IPA, Dan Wild. Dan, I’ll come to you first, if I can, and get your comments on this digital duty of care, because I know you’ve just been as vociferous as I have been in criticism this week. What do you make of the decision, also from the coalition quite quickly to say it will not be supported?
Daniel Wild:
Well, you’ve given this a very thorough treatment over the last couple of days, Peta, and your analysis of it. And I’ll just add a couple of observations. Firstly, it all comes down to section 25C in the legislation, which confers upon the communications minister basically carte blanche powers to decide what is a serious harm. Anyone can look up the legislation and read the paragraph that is there.
Now, yes, the legislation specifies a whole bunch of other harms, but there’s a catch-all term that basically says anything we haven’t got in the legislation, the communications minister can decide. As you pointed out, that is the thing that she got hung up on in an interview a little bit earlier, where she had to basically say, “Yeah, it’s up to me to decide what is a serious harm.” Now, the other point that I want to make is the government has formed in this area, right.
So this is the third crack that they are having at internet censorship. The first one was a couple of years ago with the misinformation and disinformation laws, which was designed basically to set up a digital ministry of truth to decide what is true and what is not true. Now you remember that those laws were so toxic, they didn’t even make it to the Senate floor because they were going to be rejected. Then they had another crack in the wake of Bondi with the hate speech laws.
So they had the hate group laws, which did go ahead. But you remember the original legislation had sweeping hate speech laws that would’ve had a UK-style police state ushered in Australia, where people would’ve gotten arrested for things they’ve said on the internet. Now they kiboshed those as well because they were so unpopular. So this is the third time they’re having a go at it, right?
So the first time was about we need a police misinformation to save democracy. The second one was we need to protect social cohesion, so we’re going to have hate laws. Now the third one is we’ve got to save the kids, so we’re going to have internet censorship. So this is a government that’s hell-bent on censoring what you can do and say online. I do think that these laws will be defeated, but it’s going to take a lot of pushback to do it.
Peta Credlin:
Well, we know, James Morrow, why they don’t want us to be able to put the truth to air because the revelations that are brought to air tonight from a bit of digging around this afternoon. I mean, forget the idea that he was an honorary member of a golf club and pretended in the Parliament that he couldn’t even remember being offered the membership.
Of course, we know he was known as the patron locally, the most famous patron says the mayor. We know he was there on his feet in 2019, promising them a bag of money if Labour was elected. Of course, they weren’t at that time. But the revelations now that he’s owned not one but two properties in close proximity to all this green space. You live in Sydney. If there was no golf course there, no green space, no upgraded clubhouse, that would probably have an impact on his property values.
James Morrow:
But even if it didn’t, and I do think it would, and I do think that’s a clear conflict of interest there, there’s all this other stuff that’s just so bizarre to me. This is entirely in going to this man’s character. And I have to say, listening to your editorial and reading everything that there’s been out there on this today here, Peta, I mean, honorary membership at Royal Sydney, the multimillion-dollar property portfolio. My God, Peta, being a landlord, for a guy who wants to fight Torries, he must have a hard time looking in the mirror.
He’d want to punch it, given all of these sorts of things. But this is so emblematic of the Albanese way of doing things. Deflect, minimise, say it’s the other guy’s fault. And if this misinformation stuff goes through and the algorithm stuff goes through, the digital duty of care. Who knows? They might even say, “Hey, I think that that meme the Liberal Party put out there,” that reel that you showed before, “Maybe that’s hurting social cohesion because people aren’t trusting the government.”
Peta Credlin:
You’re not wrong. Let’s go to the brouhaha with Andrew Hastie in One Nation after he was called a traitor in a cartoon. Now he’s done a lot of media in the last couple of days, Andrew Hastie. He’s labelled Hanson as weak and glass-jawed.
Speculation, of course, that more today that there’s other things to come out about Warren Pickering. Dan, I’m going to be first on the broader issue about Hastie being called a traitor and Pauline Hanson digging in. Should she apologise? Should this clip go down? Because I certainly supported the ABC taking down the offensive skit involving Gina Rinehart. What’s your view?
Daniel Wild:
I don’t know that the clip needs to go down, but I mean, certainly Andrew Hastie is more than entitled to defend himself, and he’s more than entitled to see it as an attack on him and as an attack on his service to our country, which there’s the whole Ben Roberts-Smith thing.
I don’t have any special information about that, but certainly I think that Andrew Hastie is well within his rights to make the connection that he has made. Now, Senator Hanson, as you know, has said, “Well, it was a cartoon. I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about the hate group laws,” and so forth. Maybe that’s what it is. Maybe it isn’t. I don’t really know.
What I think Australians see here, though, or the risks that they see, is more squabbling of politicians when they want people to be focused on the issues that they’re feeling in their homes. So I think this will go on. Obviously, as you know, Canning is probably under the pump from One Nation following that by-election. So we’ll probably see a lot more of this, I suspect.
Peta Credlin:
James, I’ll go to you now on 9/11 because you said to me that you had only just arrived in Australia when the terror attack occurred, the Islamic terror attack. We’re not the Canadian media here. We’ll call it as it is. But you’re a longtime New Yorker, a long, long history in the area. Give me your reflections of this terrible, terrible day.
James Morrow:
Yeah. It’s really interesting, and I’ve been thinking a lot about obviously for… to talk about it here, and I’ll be talking about it tomorrow night on the US Report for sure. And it’s really interesting to me because there’s so many different sort of emotions around. It was a terrible thing, obviously.
But what’s so tough, I think, is that the 25 years since we haven’t had really a resolution. We had the campaign in Afghanistan, we had the Global War on Terror, we had Iraq, but this Islamist terrorist monster still exists. It has not been defeated.
And in some ways, the way in the West people now who forget it, or people who want to minimise it and they talk about things like, “Well, yeah, but the US does a lot of bad things. They try and put things in perspective.” I think it’s hard to kind of deal with the way people have sort of started to minimise and forget it. And I think that what we talk about tomorrow is going to be very important.
Peta Credlin:
I’ll leave it there. Thank you to you both.
This transcript with Daniel Wild talking on Credlin – News24 from 10 September 2026 has been edited for clarity.
