Column – Stifling free speech won’t guarantee good speech

Andrew Bolt Monday, March 05, 2012 at 07:41am

THE Gillard Governments media inquiry threatens not only our freedom to speak, but to hear and decide for ourselves. But why?

Its report last week, by retired judge Ray Finkelstein, proposes a super media-cop, funded by government, to police all thats said and written in the media.

It would even have the power to disappear you - or, rather, your words - by requiring offending artilces to removed from the Internet, never to be read again.

But what suddenly happened that free speech is thought a threat, needing even more oppressive controls?

Finkelstein offers five striking instances of wrongful harm caused by unreliable or inaccurate reporting, breach of privacy, and the failure to properly take into account the defenceless.

Its list is astonishingly thin.

A minister of the Crown has his homosexuality exposed. He is forced to resign.

(The NSW minister was found visiting a bath house, is not defenceless and was not forced to resign, but chose to.)

A chief commissioner of police is the victim of false accusations about his job performance fed to the news media by a ministerial adviser ... He is forced to resign.

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Column - Stifling free speech won’t guarantee good speech