Much has been made of Julie Inman Grant’s totalitarian tendencies to crackdown on Australians’ free speech under the guise of ‘misinformation and disinformation’. These tendencies were on full display when, earlier this month, Inman Grant gave a speech at Government House in Sydney lamenting the fact that after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, ‘unhinged conspiracy theorists’ were able to ‘spin mistruths’ more quickly than the government was able to report the ‘facts’.
In echoes of Jacinda Ardern’s infamous pronouncement that her government was the sole arbiter of truth, the largely unaccountable eSafety Commissioner is doing her utmost to position her employer, the federal government, as the only source of truth and thus the only ‘safe’ source of facts. In her world, all other sources that might offer a different narrative are to be regarded as ‘false’, and thus by implication, ‘dangerous’.
But little attention has been given to the fact that, in my opinion, Julie Inman Grant is actively advancing one of the most dangerous misinformation and disinformation projects Australia has ever seen via the eSafety Commission. Inman Grant has launched a program brimming with anti-scientific ideology, concocted in academia, which is convincing young people around the world that sex and gender are not features of reality, but social constructs invented by human beings in order to wield power over each other.
That the eSafety Commission is a peddler of radical gender ideology is beyond doubt. In 2022, the eSafety Commission announced the opening of the online ‘LGBTIQ+ learning lounge’ on the grounds that ‘LGBTIQ+ people are more than twice as likely to experience online hate speech than other Australians, with 30 per cent targeted compared to 14 per cent of the general population’.
When Inman Grant accused Billboard Chris of having deliberately misgendered an individual on social media, the radical gender theorist credentials of the eSafety Commission were revealed to the world. Not only does the eSafety Commissioner appear to believe that the use of pronouns other than those compatible with, and conforming to, one’s biological sex are beneficial, the eSafety Commissioner is suggesting that misgendering is a harmful tool of political oppression directed at transgender people.
In the eSafety Commissioner’s module Being out, transgender or gender diverse online, aimed specifically at young Australians, we are told that the ‘LGBTIQ+ community and First Nations people are twice as likely to experience online hate than other Australians’.
We have heard the eSafety Commissioner cry wolf on claims of abuse towards political causes she supports before. Recent research by the Institute of Public Affairs’ John Storey showed that the narrative the eSafety Commissioner attempted to establish during last year’s divisive Voice to Parliament debate, that there was a wave of racist cyber abuse set to occur during the referendum, was not supported by her own office’s data.
Regardless, this module is entirely compatible with radical gender ideology, which proposes that white, European men invented the ‘gender binary’, or division between man and woman, in order to oppress racial and sexual minorities. Her adherence to synthetic sexual identities such as ‘non-binary’ is another sign of her attachment to radical gender ideology.
In another module entitled Power and Gender in Relationships, the eSafety Commissioner propounds the notion of ‘toxic masculinity’ as the module exhorts young people to ask the following questions: ‘What gives a person status in society? How do gender stereotypes influence power dynamics in society and the way someone is treated online?’ This pernicious idea posits that men and women are shaped by society – or, rather, patriarchy – which writes instructions on the human tabula rasa about the right way to be female or male. Those rules are designed for the benefit of the powerful, namely white males, and are completely separate from biology.
The eSafety Commissioner is part of an ideological and political movement which is deliberately and actively going out of its way to disinform and misinform young Australians about the very nature of their own biological reality.
As demonstrated via attempts to censor material worldwide on Twitter/X following the stabbing of Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Sydney, the eSafety Commissioner has become a law unto herself. Inman Grant wields immense power, with no meaningful democratic oversight, and has shown a desire to use that power to silence online debate and opinion with which she disagrees.
Let’s not beat around the bush. Australians do not need to be protected by the eSafety Commissioner; they need to be protected from her.
Dr Bella d’Abrera is the Director of the Foundations of Western Civilisation Program at the Institute of Public Affairs.