Australia’s Most Radical Censorship Bill Ever Proposed in the West: Labor’s Assault on Free Speech

High profile free speech advocate Michael Shellenberger has returned to Australia after a two year absence.

Asking why in the world anyone would want a government to be able to silence practically any citizen online, his message has been blunt. “Two years ago, the people of Australia rose up to defeat sweeping censorship legislation. It was a momentous victory for free speech everywhere and a terrible defeat for the Albanese government. Today, the Albanese government has proposed an even more extreme radical censorship regime. Arguably, the most radical censorship bill ever proposed in the West. I’ve returned to raise the alarm.”

As a guest of the thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs, he has just spoken at CPAC Australia, the country’s annual tribal gathering of conservatives, a two-day talkfest that draws the right’s activists, donors, MPs and true believers to one room. Shellenberger had already warned, as we reported in September, that Australia’s extreme censorship push was straining ties with Washington.

Australia’s Most Radical Censorship Bill Ever Proposed in the West: Labor’s Assault on Free Speech

This year’s edition of CPAC, held in Brisbane over 10–11 October, carried extra weight. One Nation has been outpolling the Coalition, and the conference became a stage for the fractured right to test whether it could present a united front against the Labor incumbents.

Pauline Hanson was the clear star. She received a standing ovation as she took the stage and an even louder one when she finished. In her speech she attacked the establishment “uniparty” of Labor and the Liberals and called Opposition Leader Angus Taylor a “smarmy management consultant”.

She drew the warmest response of any of the main speakers. She has previously described Labor’s Digital Duty of Care proposal as “Orwellian machinery” that would be used for government censorship.

Most Australians have never heard of Shellenberger, author of the best-sellers Apocalypse Never and San Fransicko. His trajectory changed when Elon Musk opened Twitter’s internal files in late 2022. Shellenberger, working with journalists including Matt Taibbi, helped publish the Twitter Files.

Those documents exposed how U.S. government agencies, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and others pressured the platform to suppress content on COVID, elections, the Hunter Biden laptop and more. The revelations documented what Shellenberger has called the “Censorship Industrial Complex”: a network of officials, contractors and NGOs coordinating viewpoint-based suppression.

Shellenberger’s work on the Twitter files had direct implications for Australia, because Twitter, the precursor to X, was a major influencer of public opinion in Australia.

The Albanese government has been running variations of the same playbook for years. In 2024 it introduced the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill. The proposal would have empowered the Australian Communications and Media Authority to force platforms to combat “misinformation” and “disinformation,” with fines reaching five per cent of global revenue. Critics across the spectrum, civil liberties groups, the Human Rights Commission, churches, the Coalition and even the Greens, warned it would chill legitimate speech.

Elon Musk called the approach fascistic. The bill passed the House then collapsed in the Senate in November 2024 after the government admitted there was “no pathway” to passage. Shellenberger publicly celebrated the defeat as a free speech victory.

Undeterred, Labor has returned with the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026. Released as an exposure draft in September, it imposes a broad duty on online services to ensure a “safe online environment,” backed by civil penalties of roughly $109 million. The definition of harm is elastic and includes material that “encourages or promotes hostile attitudes.”

Under the proposals the Communications Minister would have powers to expand the list of harms by legislative instrument. Most sinister, the draft grants the eSafety Commissioner, currently Julie Inman Grant, authority to operate under false “sock puppet” identities to observe, record and interact with users online, with little reporting requirement to Parliament.

Shellenberger has described the scheme as allowing one or two people to censor the internet while waging informational warfare against the public. Inman Grant, a former Twitter and Microsoft executive with close ties to the World Economic Forum, has already drawn repeated criticism for overreach under the existing Online Safety Act, including demands for global takedowns that courts have later found exceeded her powers.

It is being sold as protection for children and “safety by design.” The substance is a regime that treats political speech as a risk to be managed and equips an unelected commissioner with tools of deception and deletion.

Free speech is not a luxury to be traded for bureaucratic comfort. It is the mechanism by which free people correct error, expose power and govern themselves.

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