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Melbourne filmmaker Nathan Livingstone makes his daily bread producing online videos for his vlog, which are posted mostly on X @TheMilkBarTV. Like many Australians, he scorns the notion that we are so mentally feeble Big Sister Julian Inman Grant must vet any and all online content we might come across.
No fan of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and a critic of Inman Grant’s censorship policies, Nathan was astonished to find one of Big Sister’s acolytes had been checking out his family.
Below, Nathan’s open letter to the eSafety Commissioner demanding an explanation. As of today, no worthwhile response has been forthcoming. — rf
__________________________
MY NAME is Nathan Livingstone (above) and I create videos for a living, primarily posting on the X/Twitter account @TheMilkBarTV.
Recently, I’ve made several posts on X being critical of Julie Inman Grant and the Esafety Office, for what I see as an overreach in online censorship in Australia. Most notably, I interviewed Chris Elston aka @BillboardChris about one of his recent X posts that was censored in Australia by the eSafety Commissioner.
See also: What Julie Inman Grant has in store for you
I posted this video on X on March 18, 2024, and again on April 20, 2024, this video has over 160k impressions.
On 19 April 2024, my wife, received a notification on LinkedIn that someone with the title of ‘Business Strategist’ at the eSafety Commissioner had searched for her profile (screenshot below).
My wife has not interacted with the eSafety Commissioner in any way, in person or online. She has not made any public comments or criticism about Julie Inman Grant or the eSafety Office. Furthermore, her last name is different to mine on LinkedIn and has no affiliation with my content or @TheMilkBarTV.
My wife has made an effort to keep her social media accounts private, for the personal safety of herself and our 1 year old child. Her LinkedIn profile is deliberately hard to find.
The only plausible reason anyone at the eSafety office would have to be looking into her social media is her connection to me and my criticism of their recent behaviour.
This is a targeted and blatant attempt of surveillance and has been extremely disturbing and distressing to both my wife and I. At least one employee of the eSafety office has made a concerted effort to find my wife’s social media profile.
We demand to know why someone in the eSafety Commission was looking into my family online. Which other members of my family or people connected to me have they been trying to find and monitor? Is this normal and acceptable behaviour for the eSafety Commissioner, to be supervising content creators and their family online?
On their website, esafety.gov.au, eSafety states that they are the “world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online” with the goal of creating “a more positive online experience for all Australians”.
My wife feels considerably more unsafe and vulnerable following this targeted and intrusive behaviour by eSafety.
As an Australian citizen, I believe I have the right to know why I am being monitored by my own government, especially when the only possible reason the eSafety Commissioner would be looking into me (and my family) is because of my public criticisms of the office itself.
I expect full transparency and accountability on this matter.
Sincerely,
Nathan Livingstone
Thank you Nathan. May I respectfully suggest that you send a copy of your letter to Senator Jacqui Lambie. She needs to understand just what the consequences of her populist condemnation of Elon Musk are.
Fascism is alive and thriving downunder
Fascism is the gathering and binding together of like elements to make a much stronger whole. This is different. It’s the beginning of the end of free speech against the ruling neo-communist regime, whose aim is to breed resentment in women, the poor, the mentally ill and minorities of any status against primarily White men in order to weaken White nations. It’s the exact opposite of fascism. It’s unlikely that this Kristina Keneally lookalike fully understands what her role is. I suspect she is a frustrated church lady, just brimming with moral righteousness but she could be a knowing member of the Fabian Society.
I’m guessing from Latin: fascis?
Dear Mr Isaac, please remove your rose-tinted glasses and study the definition of fascism again.
The binding together refers to making close links between government and private sector agencies, only to ensure greater centralized control by government. It is totalitarianism by another name an not much different to communism either classical or neo.
Dear Mr dad, There are many definitions of this oft-abused term.. Italian Fascism did involve links between the state and corporations, and I’m fairly sure it did not allow unfettered free speech. I understand it as a compromise with socialism, protective of social distinctions, traditional family, culture and religion in the face of the pan-European atheistic, international communist onslaught. It’s not a system I’d choose to live under but it seems preferable to communism and to whatever this globalist system we’re heading into is. You could at least send your children to school knowing they would not be encouraged to become trannies or communists.
You’re right. Benito Mussolini, who probably knew, said that “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power”.
Where, when and according to whom? In any case corporations were not just commercial bodies under Italian fascism but various associations akin to guilds.
“On their website, esafety.gov.au, eSafety states that they are the “world’s first government agency dedicated to keeping people safer online” with the goal of creating “a more positive online experience for all Australians”.
Given that eSafety is a government bureaucracy created as a result of an out of control government hell bent on having more and more control over us, it is hard not to be skeptical of their claim that they are ‘dedicated’ to keeping us nice and safe whilst giving us a more positive online experience. For eSafety read thought police dedicated to keeping us safer online for our own protection.
Ah, the government ‘keeping us save’. When that happens, you know you are in trouble.
Dear Nathan, May I suggest you complain to the Cwlth Ombudsman about failure to reply on this serious matter?
The problem with censorship is not only that it can corrupt the censors through exposure to heretical material – as John Milton observed (‘Areopagitica’ 1644) – but also that the censors themselves are so abundantly liable to error to begin with. Throughout Covid, the official government view on everything – masking, injections, medical treatment, lockdowns – was repeatedly wrong. The authorities, zealous but deluded, used various strategies, including censorship by proxy, to obscure the truth. Why would we want them to have more power?
It is only because official censorship was not entirely successful that real experts, such as the English nurse educator John Campbell (on YouTube) and the Australian immunologist Robert Clancy (Quadrant), were able to disseminate useful information to the public. What government bureaucrats want now is the additional powers needed to silence the Campbells and the Clancys. Having dealt with the opposition by ridiculing and censoring them, the government has a clear billboard on which to display its own fabricated narrative du jour.
Sadly, it seems that there are no limits to the credulity of a gullible public. The government invariably argues that this very susceptibility to error makes censorship a moral imperative: the public need to be protected from their own folly. But we know from bitter experience that the authorities themselves are equally subject to limitations of intellect, knowledge, and moral standards. Furthermore, the pressure of political loyalties distorts government policy and personal prejudice corrupts the judgement of officials, making them more prone to error than a dispassionate observer. The answer is not more censorship, but more accountability on the part of government ministers and public servants, and more open debate in the public square.
Apologies – this is a comment on the article about the eSafety Commissioner’s Plans. I’ve posted a copy there, but cannot remove this one – SD
This single instance of unlawful surveillance by the laughingly named ‘e-safety’ Commissioner is no doubt the tip of a vast iceberg and shows just how Orwellian life under Albanese’s leftist ALP | Greens | Teal coalition government has really become for ordinary Australians. Viva Elon Musk who, unlike the rest of us, has the resources to take on the ‘Thought Police’ at the ‘e-safety’ Commissioner. Hopefully, individual heads will roll, including that of our Chief Censor, as a result. Shades of Gough Whitlam’s ‘Department of Information’ disbanded by the Libs after the 1975 dismissal of our worst ever Prime Minister and the ideologues that constituted his whacky ‘government’. If this is a sign of the ‘e-safety’ Commissioner and her work, it may be high time to disband this department too. No right thinking Australian wants their tax dollar to be used to censor them or surveil their families.
From The Australian:
.
Meta’s new artificial intelligence tool has ranked Gough Whitlam as Australia’s best prime minister, with Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull also making the top five — in a list that ignores the nation’s two longest and conservative leaders Robert Menzies and John Howard.
How long are we going to put up with these abuses of power?
Nathan,
You will really have to start worrying when ‘Big Sister’ starts targeting your one-year-old child.
I note that Gateway Pundit says that Sleazy wants all criticisms of him removed from the internet. Ther is so much that would require the appointment of another huge bureaucracy.
Time to look around at the real world that you are in Nathan. Your expectation of “full transparency and accountability” is naïve, to say the least. The currency of politics, at both parliamentary and public “service” level, is the lie. It was Winston Churchill who said, “A Member of Parliament is one who is asked to stand, who wants to sit and is expected to lie”.
Graham Richardson was kind enough to spell it out for us in his book; “Whatever It Takes”, and what that means is that the primary, and perhaps only, real object of all politicians is to cling to power, and to achieve that the politician will do whatever it takes.
Is it any wonder that a government run by such inadequate people as Albanese, Wong, Chalmers, Bowen etc. would not only set up a bureaucracy to monitor and control the speech of citizens, but would find a Frau Goebbels type to be its boss.
In these dark days, the words of George Orwell come to mind; “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”.
Frau Goebbel’s had six small children. Apart from them she probably left telling people what to think up to her husband.
First we had to trust the science, now we have to trust our ‘betters’