Despite living in the world’s freest colonies, they knew that taxation without representation offended their rights and dignity as British subjects.

In their immortal words, they declared that they held “certain truths” to be “self-evident”, that “all men are created equal”, that “they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” and that among these are “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.

RENOUNCE

An immigrant, Elon Musk understands the sanctity of those words. He believes that he must never renounce the inalienable right of freedom of speech, as expressed constitutionally in the First Amendment.

That is why he stopped X from continuing as part of the propaganda arm of the now far-Left Democratic Party.

But Julie Inman Grant, Malcolm Turnbull’s American e-safety commissioner (or, as Elon Musk says, e-commissar) told the media the First Amendment, a constitutional guarantee about free speech drawn from the Declaration of Independence, has no application in Australia.

Nevertheless, Churchill said that after the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights, the Declaration is the “third great title deed” for liberties across the English-speaking world. Although the precise form of the First Amendment does not apply, its essence is foundational to, and implied in, our constitutional system.

Recognising this, parliament expressly limited the application of the e-safety legislation, the Online Safety Act, 2021, section 233, from infringing our constitutionally implied freedom of political communication.

Ms Grant has already been in the world’s headlines. This began with her take-down order, on pain of an enormous fine, of a Canadian post on X which criticised a World Health Organisation appointment of a colourful Australian female-to-male trans-activist.

The affair attracted international ridicule.

Now Ms Grant has ordered X to take down the video of the stabbing of an Assyrian bishop in Sydney, despite the bishop’s own belief that it is important it stay available online.

Elon Musk has refused a broader take-down, and rightly so.

Despite his assuming a national pastoral role, the Prime Minister comes from Labor’s far-Left faction, a fact crucial to our understanding not only of everything he does but also, how he does it.

EXTREME

Far-Left tactics include substituting abuse for debate, hiding details, and pursuing an extreme agenda, all the while affecting affability and reasonableness.

Much of the mainstream media fails to penetrate this façade, to Labor’s advantage in the polls.

Indeed, after the overwhelming rejection of his almost all-consuming campaign to ram through without detail the Voice, the mainstream revived what was already the longest honeymoon ever awarded an Australian government.

So, unsurprisingly, Mr Albanese opened the take-down campaign by dismissing Elon Musk as a “narcissistic billionaire”.

This tactic of abuse was notably preceded by his denunciation of referendum No voters as “Chicken Littles” and, more recently, the Productivity Commission’s foundation chairman Gary Banks as a “flat earther”.

In John Howard’s words, the latter was both “gratuitous and dishonest”.

Meanwhile, the PM’s initial justification for the ban on the video of the church stabbing is “misinformation”.

Misinformation? The unedited transmission of a live church service can hardly be described as misinformation.

Then it’s argued the video will be used to recruit terrorists.

They already have it, and far worse.

The terrorists themselves filmed the horrific subhuman outrages they committed against the Jewish people on October 7, the worst since the Holocaust, and which started the present war.

Nor will the church video encourage other terrorists to offend. They were doing this long before videos were generally available.

No e-commissar stopped Australians from seeing the terrible events of 9/11 nor the little nine-year-old girl in the Vietnam War covered with burning napalm screaming in agony.

It was crucial that we saw these distressing images because we needed to be informed, to form opinions and to exercise our rights as citizens in this democracy.

It was crucial to exercise our constitutionally protected right of political communication. Just as with the attack on the bishop, there was no justification to pull any of these down.

Similarly, we are entitled to see and hear, for good reason, the Opera House outrage on October 9, as well as what The Australian newspaper called “a raft of hate-speech sermons by Islamic leaders across south-west Sydney”.

This is even more important now that both the Albanese and Minns governments have taken the unprecedented decision not to act against these outrages and to open a disgraceful page in Australian history, their toleration of antisemitism.