Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I would like, in continuation, to go through some of the so-called facts that we found out were not going to be facts. We were told a fact at the start of the year that there was going to be an El Nino. It was going to be very dry, and that was from very reputable organisations like the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO. They all went out and said that. A lot of people—and this is for real—sold their cattle. They designed everything for and got ready for a drought. Boy, didn't they get themselves into trouble? It wasn't a drought. It actually started raining, and we had one of the wettest seasons on record.

If you'd gone out at that time and said, 'No, it's not going to be El Nino; it's going to be La Nina,' you would've been up against the most abundant and proficient information backed by peer reviews, and this bill would've allowed them to say, 'No, that's unreasonable.' You would've had that censored and blocked. You're allowed to be wrong in life. It's one of the great things about living in a liberal democracy. You're allowed to be stupid. You're allowed to be crazy. You're allowed because of freedom. We believe in another person's capacity to say, 'I've heard the respective member, the respective sage and the respective reporter, and I completely disagree.'

Today, we see—this is a fact, but some might disagree—Mr Trump is going to be President Trump again. I think we can all understand that. There are a lot of people there who said, when they were interviewed for vox pop, they weren't going to vote for him, but they did. This just goes to show you that so often people want that space. They want that space to go against the views; they might determine that aggravates others. We saw that in the Voice, where so many people who were asked, 'Are you supporting the Voice?' said: 'Oh, yes. I'm supporting it.' But they weren't. People want that liberty to be free. They don't want to be corralled, and they don't want that form of—especially the government. They are inherently sceptical about the government starting to have further rights in their lives. There are so many people—I've said this before and been mocked about it—who want the government out of their face. They want to not see the government in their private lives. They don't want the government to have a say over their opinions. They don't want the government to determine what they can read and what they can assess as right.

No-one is suggesting, for one second, things that are of a criminal nature such as child pornography or people who entice young girls, especially, on body image or eating disorders—we all know about that. Of course, the capacity of the platforms—to find key words, to have the analytics and to write the code, especially with AI—is there now. They should do it. That would be an entirely different debate from what we are having here right now. But this is not about that.

It talks about having religious beliefs, but they have got to be reasonable. Well, who is determining whether my beliefs are reasonable? I am far from a perfect person—if you put that up for a vote it would be won overwhelmingly!

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