It has Come Down to This: An Organisation for Civil Liberties Rejects Freedom of Speech as an Important Civil Liberty! By James Reed

       Alison Bevege at her "Letters from Australia," reports on the extraordinary decision at the Annual General Meeting of the NSW Council for Civil Liberties. She details what happened when she moved a motion affirming the ideal of free speech, which then got soundly voted down!

"I requested the following motion:

"That the NSW Council for Civil Liberties recognises freedom of speech as one of the most important civil liberties we have, and that it's under attack right now - the worst attack we've seen in a generation - and that the NSW Council for Civil Liberties will do its best to try to support freedom of speech."

Censorship laws now before the Parliament directly threaten everything you can hear, see, share or say on the internet, especially independent media such as Letters From Australia on Substack.

You would not think this motion was controversial at a Council for Civil Liberties - but you would be wrong.

Eyes widened, heads wobbled, the elderly awoke: it was on like Donkey Kong.

A group of Council members, led in opposition by Treasurer Stephen Blanks and his former intern Josh Pallas (a former Council President), voted it down, 18 to 12.

It's ironic that Stephen Blanks was the most vocal opponent to free speech, speaking the longest against it, because his executive bio on the Council's website says it is his special interest, having once defended a publisher bullied by a NSW Government agency.

The agency was writing to major booksellers, telling them not to sell the publisher's book, his bio says.

Here is a Bill that seeks to censor the entire internet - the largest book fair the world has ever seen - through social media platforms (akin to his booksellers), and now he loves it.

Stephen Blanks said he is favour of censoring the internet as long as that power is shared by ACMA with the courts, based on a European model. Individuals could claim to be harmed by "misinformation" (being wrong) and apply to the courts for even more censorship than is now on the table. He calls this "democratisation" of the censorship.

Note that "democratisation" here means "sharing power with other institutions" not "giving power to the public as expressed by vote". It would mean rich people, institutions and political gangs would game the court system to erase your dissent.

Here he is on October 17 telling the Senate Committee how important it is to censor "misinformation" (being wrong) on a European model.

His protégé Josh Pallas is a University of Wollongong law graduate studying a PhD in "preventive detention and supervision laws" at the University of Sydney. He was put in the Council by the University of Wollongong Law School as an intern under Stephen Blanks, his bio says.

Josh Pallas opposed free speech, on the grounds that the Council are "unashamedly not free speech absolutists" and have had a "carefully considered approach since 1963" which is "nuanced".

Translated for normal people, that means: "we're the experts, shut up."

A spirited defence was mounted by long-time council member Billy Field who said free speech is the only protection against despots and tyrants, and that the very purpose of the council's existance is to stand up for these important rights.

Journalist David Southwell spoke powerfully, reminding the room that governments lie regularly and that to submit to any arbiter of truth is to abandon free speech and its defence.

What follows is an unofficial transcript of the entire episode. At bottom are links to the Council's new submission on the censorship bill so you can read for yourself how they support expanding this new 2024 assault on free speech, and how they reference a weak and bogus academic study riddled with errors.

As this censorship bill legally formalises what the government was already doing during covid, I have also uploaded a copy of vaccine-injured support group Coverse's submission at bottom so you can read precisely how it will devastate medical science and punch down on those already injured by the mandated gene-vaccines.

The NSW Council for Civil Liberties by majority vote at the AGM, has officially discarded support for free speech.

Read on for how a simple support for free speech was obfuscated, dismantled, and defeated by Australia's peak "civil rights" body."

Ms Bevege has a lengthy transcript of what then went down at the meeting which can be read at her site. The main point here is the utter lack of philosophical understanding of the nature of civil liberties by them, since no civil liberty can be defended without the prior right of free speech. I think what is happening is that the system, the Censorship Industrial Complex, has made free speech a taboo, so it becomes politically incorrect, and not possible to defend in woke society when one must not criticise the system.

https://lettersfromaustralia.substack.com/p/nsw-council-for-civil-liberties-votes