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Another week means another government taskforce – now an ‘anti-hate’ one – in the socialist State of Victoria.

Honestly, Victoria must be running some sort of frequent-flyer scheme for bureaucratic overreach.

The State Labor Government can’t fix the housing crisis, or the energy crisis, or the youth crime epidemic.

So they’ll declare that your opinions and thoughts are a crisis and fix those instead.

We had a classic case of it recently when Premier Jacinta Allan announced the Orwellian Anti-Hate Taskforce. It’s a name so noble it practically demands a standing ovation.

But peel back the branding and you’ll discover it has less to do with stopping synagogue arsonists and more to do with criminalising dissent.

The Labor Government is planning to create a national database of hate speech online.

The police all around Australia already have the tools they need to deal with threats of violence.

When "hate" is the criteria, the slippery slope is real.

Free speech is under attack in… pic.twitter.com/BkltyK1HRA

— Senator Alex Antic (@SenatorAntic) July 14, 2025

Increasing Restrictions on Freedoms

This isn’t about fighting hate, it’s about fighting people who disagree with the government.

Premier Jacinta Allan, never one to let a civil liberty go unregulated, assures us it’s about “the bigger picture.”

And by “bigger picture,” she means tighter control, control of your speech, control of your thoughts.

If she has her way, you and I won’t be able to post something on Facebook that goes against the government-approved narrative without a visit from the algorithmic inquisition.

The government allows mayhem on the streets, pretending they are powerless to stop it, as cover for legislating more and more laws to crack down on everybody’s civil liberties.

We already have laws against harassment, threats and vandalism.

What exactly does a new taskforce offer that existing legislation does not?

I’ll tell you, but it should be obvious: The anti-hate taskforce offers Premier Jacinta Allan and her cronies a fresh opportunity to monitor, label, and suppress ideas that stray from the state-approved narrative.

Because nothing says “we’re the good guys” like potentially giving bureaucrats the power to decide what counts as “hate.”

Bureaucrats Decide What is ‘Hate’

Today it’s anti-Semitism in the spotlight, but tomorrow? They will be cracking down on views that promote the rights of biological females over males pretending to be females or views that don’t support mass immigration, climate scepticism, and perhaps the suggestion that the ABC isn’t the gold standard of journalism.

Hate you see is a moving target, and the government holds the rifle.

How long before quoting the Bible or saying “there are two genders” lands you in prison? How long before “I disagree” is reclassified as “emotional terrorism”? Think I’m exaggerating?

Just look across the pond to the UK, where more than 12,000 people a year are arrested for posts on social media.

A country that once gave the world the Magna Carta now gives us police knocking on doors because someone made a post on Facebook or X (Twitter) that a woke fool found offensive.

Here’s the irony, some Jewish organisations are enthusiastically applauding the creation of this taskforce and demanding more laws to protect Jews. But give it time and the same mechanisms created to protect them will inevitably be used against them.

It’s already happening in Britain, where a 71-year-old man was arrested for criticising radical Islam. Hate laws are like boomerangs – they always return.

Death of Democracy

Free speech isn’t a threat to democracy. Free speech is democracy.

And suppressing speech doesn’t make a society kinder, it just makes it more dishonest, until eventually it explodes.

Jacinta Allan’s reactionary taskforce isn’t about stopping hate, it’s about enforcing compliance, it’s about converting disagreement into “vilification” and criticism into “extremism.”

Victoria doesn’t need another taskforce. It needs a government with more spine, fewer slogans, and a working definition of freedom that doesn’t come with a 28-page exception clause.

We need fewer politicians pretending to be moral saviours while outsourcing common sense to unelected panels of professionally offended bureaucrats.

Because if we don’t stop this creep now, this slow suffocating drift into censorship, one day soon your opinion will be a crime. And your silence? Mandatory.

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Republished with thanks to Let’s Talk About It. Image: Screenshot of YouTube/Sky News Australia.