“Prime Minister Pauline Hanson” is no longer a punchline but a real prospect in contemporary Australia. So why are Labor and the Greens handing a potential One Nation/Coalition government an advanced censorship and surveillance apparatus?

One Nation says they are pro-free speech, but do you think that will hold if they take power? Just like Trump, after years of insults and humiliations, they’ll be out for revenge. And Progressives are giving them the toolkit to do it – the Digital Duty of Care.

Free speech used to be a Left-wing cause; today the Right monopolises it, making political hay in the process. Abandoning free speech turned out to be a big error in a post-October 7 world; now an increasing amount of censorship is directed at pro-Palestine activism.

The security and intelligence apparatus are among the bill’s main beneficiaries, which makes the eSafety Commissioner an enforcement body under the Privacy Act with increased powers to share information she collects with other departments. With the Five Eyes alliance, that also means potentially sharing data with the U.S. and other key allies. The bill allows her to create an unlimited number of fake identities (sock puppets) that can join groups, monitor, and record information. It’s warrantless mass surveillance under the guise of “care”.

Right now, progressives should be thinking about that very real prospect of how these powers might be used when they are out of power, and behave accordingly. Instead, Labor and the Greens are creating tools that mean the Right and the security establishment can surveil and crack down on digital dissent at a moment’s notice. And if you think this bill will be enough to keep them out of power, think again – across the world, right-populist parties only grow when they feel they are being censored. This will boost Hansonism, not stop it.

An array of government- and foundation-funded NGOs are fronting from the government’s bill, giving it a virtuous glow – how could “care” or “choice” be bad? But the bill isn’t about choosing your feeds; it’s about a vague definition of “harm” that a One Nation/Coalition government can change at any time to target its political enemies. Posts promoting gender affirming or LGBT advocacy harm teenagers, they will say. Climate change activism harms our coal industry and children’s mental health, and pro-Palestine activism harms the Jewish community.

The next time there is an attack on a parliamentarian by an alleged leftist, they’ll go all in; it will be the event they crave, and then you’ll wonder why you didn’t stop it when you had the chance.

If you think they are cynical enough to do it, don’t leave them the tools to make it a reality.