One of the world’s best journalists, American Michael Shellenberger, has dramatically weighed into the Australian government’s over-the-top efforts to censor the Australian public.

In his newsletter he writes that Australia’s Censorship Bill Is Aimed At Americans. And that it has pissed off the Americans.

“Australia shouldn’t matter. It’s 27 million people on the other side of the world,” he wrote.

“But on Monday its government introduced a bill that would let one minister order X and other American platforms to remove anything she ‘is satisfied may cause serious harm’, with fines up to A$109.2 million.”

The minister, Anika Wells, said, “There is a global reckoning coming for big tech. And it started in Australia.”

The bill came ten days after Labor lost a seat it held by 11.5% to One Nation, the party running against mass migration, and nine months after an Islamic State attack killed 15 people at Bondi Beach. The government’s answer to angry voters is to silence them.

But a clip of Wells trying and failing to justify the enormous power she’s demanding went viral.

Shellenberger posted it on X and Instagram. “Look closely at this woman,” he wrote, and a half-million people did.

Within a day of Shellenberger bringing attention to events Down Under the White House warned of “fines and other forms of extortion.”

By Wednesday, Australia’s lamentable Communications Minister Anika Wells was claiming the bill was about “parents and kids.” Her own text says “any other material or conduct.”

As Shellenberger writes, contradictions like that kill bills.

In November 2024, Shellenberger flew to Australia to brief MPs in Canberra and speak in Sydney against a previous iteration of this bill, supposedly aimed at misinformation and disinformation, in reality a disgraceful attempt to censor everyday Australians.

Two days after Shellenberger spoke, the Australian government withdrew their legislation.

Now he is threatening to return to Australia.

“Why do they blunder like this?” he asks. “Because, like Principal Skinner, they’ve decided it’s the voters who are wrong.”

That’s why we do two things: defend free speech, and report the establishment’s collapse. They’re the same story. Censorship is what a losing establishment does when reality gets through.

Shellenberger has written about the imbroglio on his well read Substack page: Australia’s Prime Minister Threatens Relationship With Trump Over New Demands For Sweeping Censorship To Counter Critics Of Mass Migration.

He writes that legislation that would let the Australian government impose sweeping censorship on American social media platforms, including X, owned by Trump ally Elon Musk, and perhaps even on Americans, for practically any reason whatsoever, with the transparent intention of silencing rising public opposition to mass migration.

One section lets the government censor “any other material or conduct” that the Communications Minister “is satisfied may cause serious harm.”

Australia, always regarded as the world’s most restrictive democracy, is now a democracy in name only.