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Our eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, is the Australian government’s online censor-in-chief… and it’s long past time she was let go.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has been found out. Again. On Tuesday, Julie Inman Grant, or the “eKaren” as she’s become known to many conservatives, was rebuked for issuing an unlawful censorship order. Last week, she was named and shamed by the U.S. Congress for colluding with the international censorship cartel.

Julie Inman Grant, armed with the taxpayer-funded title of eSafety Commissioner and a near-unrestricted mandate, has repeatedly trampled on freedom of speech, not just in Australia but around the world. She’s weaponised the Online Safety Act to silence criticism of radical gender ideology, suppress inconvenient truths, and strong-arm global tech platforms into doing her ideological bidding. And now, there are official rulings and Congressional findings to prove it.

eSafety Commissioner’s Unlawful Censorship against Billboard Chris

As mentioned, on Tuesday (1 July 2025), the Administrative Review Tribunal struck down one of the most brazen censorship orders ever issued under Australian law. The eSafety Commissioner, Julie Inman Grant, had ordered Elon Musk’s X platform to erase a social media post by Canadian activist Chris “Billboard Chris” Elston, a post that simply shared a Daily Mail exposé on a controversial trans appointee to the World Health Organization, along with Elston’s pointed remark: “This is who Australia’s eSafety Commissioner says must be protected from criticism.”

The tribunal was having none of it. Deputy President Damien O’Donovan ruled that there was no evidence Elston intended to cause “serious harm,” as the Online Safety Act requires for a takedown. The post, he concluded, didn’t meet the legal test for “cyber-abuse.” The decision didn’t merely overturn a bureaucratic overreach—it declared the Commissioner’s takedown order unlawful.

Think about that. An unelected official, installed by government, issued an illegal directive to censor a foreign citizen on a foreign-owned platform. If that doesn’t terrify you, it should.

This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s the culmination of a years-long pattern of overreach, secrecy, and partisan activism by Inman Grant, who, let’s remember, worked as Twitter’s Director of Public Policy for Australia and Southeast Asia from 2014 to 2016, where she helped establish and lead the company’s so-called “safety” program in the region.

This was during the same era, now exposed in the Twitter Files, released by Elon Musk, revealing how deeply government pressure influenced content moderation and censorship decisions. Inman Grant was part of it all before transitioning to become the government’s own enforcer of speech suppression.

The Office of the eSafety Commissioner, foolishly created by the former Morrison Liberal National Government through its Online Safety Act 2021, holds the power to demand the removal of any online content within 24 hours. If a company refuses, they face fines of up to A$7 million per day. Yes, seven million dollars daily. And yes, that applies to companies anywhere in the world. One legal commentator rightly called it “the financial equivalent of a loaded gun held to the head of every digital publisher.”

The Office of the eSafety Commissioner started as a tool to combat child exploitation and bullying, but has become a political weapon, one aimed squarely at speech that doesn’t conform to progressive orthodoxy. Inman Grant has unilaterally expanded her reach from cyber-bullying into the realms of gender politics, “misinformation,” encrypted messaging, and now even parental control over children’s online access.

Take the Baumgarten case from earlier this year. The Commissioner’s office didn’t issue a formal notice that would be reviewable. Instead, it sent what critics call a “shadow notice”: a quiet “complaint alert” that pressured X to remove content while skirting the legal checks and balances. The Tribunal blasted the manoeuvre, calling it an evasion of “transparency and accountability.” The Free Speech Union now alleges that 99 percent of her takedown orders are issued through this backdoor method, deliberately and flagrantly skirting the law.

Censorship of Bishop Mari Emmanuel Stabbing

Then there’s the infamous church stabbing incident: on the evening of 15 April 2024, Assyrian Orthodox Bishop Mari Emmanuel was delivering his sermon from Christ the Good Shepherd Church in Wakeley, live-streamed to hundreds of viewers, when, in an act of terrorism, a 16‑year‑old Muslim attacked him at the pulpit with a flick‑knife, slashing the bishop and several others.

The livestream captured the horrifying scene up to the moment the assailant was overpowered. After the brutal, livestreamed attack on Bishop Emmanuel, Inman Grant demanded that every clip be deleted globally, not just in Australia. When X partially complied by geo-blocking the video locally but left it up elsewhere, she dragged them to court.

The Federal Court tossed out her injunction, and she quietly dropped the case in June 2024.

Justice Geoffrey Kennett, who oversaw the injunction case, gave a ruling as emphatic as it was scathing. He found that Inman Grant’s office had sought an order with “worldwide effect, unlimited in time,” and that the regulatory demands placed on X were not just overbroad but fundamentally unreasonable.

He noted that “a requirement to block access by all users worldwide to material posted by a user in the United States, and which does not contravene the laws of that country, is not a reasonable or proportionate measure” under Australian law. The judge warned that granting such an injunction would set a dangerous precedent that could see every country demanding global censorship powers. Inman Grant’s overreach, he concluded, did not justify the sweeping international suppression she sought.

2023 Digital Surveillance Attempt

She’s even tried to invade your phone. In 2023, under Julie Inman Grant’s leadership, the eSafety Commissioner’s office drafted and circulated industry standards that would have required platforms like Apple, Signal, and Proton to detect illegal content “where technically feasible.” It was a direct initiative from her office, part of her aggressive campaign to expand surveillance powers under the guise of online safety.

Privacy experts immediately warned that the wording would compel platforms to deploy client-side scanning on every device, effectively scanning your private communications before they’re even encrypted. In other words, mass surveillance. A year-long outcry from civil liberties groups, encryption advocates, and tech companies forced a rewrite. But even the revised standards still oblige companies to develop “workarounds” to encryption, vague language that continues to threaten user privacy. That’s not protection. That’s government peeking through your digital blinds.

Under 16 Social Media Ban

Now the eSafety Commissioner is coming for your kids. Under a law she now champions and enforces, every Australian under 16 must be kicked off social media by December 2025. The bill offers no clear way to verify age, so platforms will likely demand government ID from everyone or roll out facial recognition tools. While YouTube received an exemption from this “ban”, Inman Grant recently intervened to tell the federal Communications Minister that the exemption should be revoked.

As far as we can tell, she has not yet suggested anything to the Minister about requiring age verification for pornographic websites that proliferate the internet and that can be accessed by under-18s with just a click of a button. This leads to criticism that her reasoning for the YouTube “ban” is not just about child safety but, rather, something else.

Indeed, the public argument she gave for also including YouTube in the “ban” is that she believes the autoplay function that YouTube has leads minors down what she calls “rabbit holes they’re powerless to fight against.” It just so happens that “going down a rabbit hole” is the term many now deploy perjoratively against looking too deeply into online videos, podcasts, websites, and information from those who go against the mainstream narrative and are attacked as “conspiracy theorists” or “anti-vaxxers” and the like.

So the question rightly arises: Does the eSafety Commissioner think children need to be protected from spiels and interviews by folks such as Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson and Russell Brand? Does she have an ideological bent against conservatives?

Colluding with Foreign Governments and Corporate Cartels to Censor American Speech

Well, just last week, Inman Grant was named and shamed for her partisanship in a blistering U.S. Congressional report titled Exporting Censorship. Released by the House Judiciary Committee, the report reveals emails where she describes the 2022 Republican mid-term congressional win in the U.S.A. as “soul-destroying” and praises the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), a partisan group that pressures advertisers to defund conservative platforms.

Why is an Australian Government employee – @eSafetyOffice – cooperating with an NGO that wants to see Trump “sidelined”?

Today the eSafety Commissioner lost another court case. There can be no trust that she is properly enforcing the law in an unbiased fashion. pic.twitter.com/YQCGlxi7FO

— Senator Matt Canavan (@mattjcan) July 1, 2025

“We would be grateful if GARM can keep us updated…,” she wrote in an email to GARM boss Robert Rakowitz, “and share any information, so we can take [it] into account our engagement and regulatory decisions.” Think on that: an Australian government bureaucrat seeking advice from an avowedly left-wing (and foreign) advocacy group to help her make official decisions impacting Australians.

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has just been named in a US congressional report for colluding with foreign governments and corporate cartels to censor American speech.

This is a diplomatic scandal—and a threat to free expression worldwide.

A thread 👇 pic.twitter.com/uKj5eJCtIc

— Kurt Mahlburg (@k_mahlburg) July 1, 2025

The report accuses her of colluding with a left-wing advertising cartel to censor U.S. speech from Australia. It warns that the Trump administration might restrict visas for foreign officials who meddle in American politics. When asked recently at the National Press Club whether she fears being banned from re-entering the United States, she smirked and said she’d “defer to (her) DFAT colleagues.” She effectively sidestepped the question, choosing not to deny possible U.S. travel restrictions for her actions that sought to censor folks in the Land of the Free. That speaks volumes.

The ability of government agencies to censor individuals at will is dangerous. This nonsense really grew legs during the COVID-19 pandemic era, in which “official health advice” was sacrosanct and anything that questioned or strayed from it was deemed a new form of blasphemy. Bureaucrats in charge of hunting down such blasphemy, like modern-day Grand Inquisitors, grew empowered and frequently tried to overstep the mark, sometimes with success and sometimes not.

When I served as an Australian Federal Member of Parliament, I organised a phone-in protest after the Therapeutic Goods Administration banned doctors from prescribing ivermectin off-label for COVID. Bureaucrats in the Department of Health tried to get my posts promoting the phone-in protest taken down. They failed… but only because I was careful not to whisper a word against official health advice in those posts, but merely encouraged people to phone in to the Therapeutic Goods Administration and protest the decision. Even ordinarily censorious Big Tech outfits realised that to ping me on that would be a step too far.

But what happens when they don’t think it’s a step too far? What happens when they just acquiesce to them? When your words, your links, your facts, your protests vanish because a government agency in Canberra decides you’re “harmful”? The reality is that the Office of the eSafety Commissioner is that government agency and it’s already making such decisions that Big Tech are complying with. Even when such decisions are unlawful.

eSafety Commissioner’s History of Unlawful Activity

Let me spell it out: Julie Inman Grant has issued not one, but multiple unlawful takedown orders as ruled by the judiciary in Australia. How many others have gone unchallenged? How many posts have disappeared forever because platforms, fearing financial ruin, complied without a fight?

The pattern is clear: Stretch the law. Bend the definitions. Work in secret. Coordinate with international activists. Then deny, deflect, and do it again.

Well, not anymore.

This isn’t about left or right. It’s about whether the government gets to police your thoughts. About whether unelected bureaucrats get to decide which science, which morality, which reality is acceptable.

So here’s what you can do. Today. Right now.

If you’re an Australian, pick up the phone. Call your local Member of Parliament. Call your Senator. Tell them three things:

• Julie Inman Grant must be fired.
• The Office of the eSafety Commissioner must be shut down.
• The Online Safety Act must be rewritten to prevent any future bureaucrat from threatening $7 million/day fines for protected speech.

Do not wait. Do not “see how things go.” We already know how they go when freedom is left undefended. Yesterday, the Administrative Review Tribunal stood up for free speech. Now it’s your turn.

Let’s put the Office of the eSafety Commissioner back where it belongs—in the dustbin of history.

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Republished with thanks to Nation First.