Plibersek makes my skin
Of course Plibersek, Christine Nixon and even Stephen Mayne (who bizarrely endorsed the Government's creepily totalitarian line on the meeja) wheeled out the usual febrile anti-Murdoch cant. And O'Neill just sliced it to ribbons. They were clearly upset, and started supporting each other for comfort.
You often see this with lefties. Being the primitive, cowardly collectivists they are, they feel deeply threatened by just one person with his own mind. They then resort to nasty smears and insinuations that are always emotive.
A case in point was when Plibersek complained that O'Neill was verballing her, an act of verballing in itself. The transcript is not yet up and I don't have time to watch it all again, but there's a bit near the end where she says something along the lines of "you're saying it's okay to hack into phones", when he'd actually just made an explicit point of deploring the practice.
Not surprisingly lefties were all asquitter on Twitter. Too thick, slow and malicious to actually refute what he said with anything like a counter-argument, they just got nasty as they always do, often about his appearance. This little gem was retweeted by Leslie Cannold, one of our leading "intellectuals".
Of course there were several Nazi-themed smears. Mike Stuchbery lamely compared him to Oswald Mosely. Nothing O'Neill said was remotely fascist. On the contrary, he consistently endorsed more democracy, openness and freedom. The fact that his reasonable arguments made leftie tweeps squeal like stuck pigs and fire off such delusional analogies reveals the scary extent of their own sinister groupthink.
At 29.50 min O'Neill said, "No one would defend what happened at News of the World. I have heard no one defend that. It was outrageous, some of the journalistic, or so called journalistic practices, that they undertook."
ReplyDeleteAt 33.27 min (in response to Plibersek) O'Neill said "Shall I tell you something about this law, there’s something about this law that they have broken in Britain. It is the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, which gives the Government the right to hack our phones, read our mail, to intervene in our email correspondence, and to read our emails, but it denies these rights to journalists."
On this point I believe O'Neill deserves some criticism. On the one hand, he's saying that the phone hacking by News of the World was terrible and indefensible. On the other hand, he implies that the media should have the same investigatory rights as the government.
A thoughtful libertarian view would be that the power of the Government to do these things should be limited in order to protect individual liberty and political freedom, rather than saying the press should have the right to these powers as well. Is his view "fascist" or "Nazi"? Not at all! But the watering down of laws that help to protect people's privacy leads to less individual freedom, not more.