You Could Be Forgiven for Thinking Elon Musk Was the Attacker and Twitter Was the Knife

Albo's bid to memory hole the Sydney attacks is the desperate act of a PM who doesn't know what to say or do

If you weren’t paying attention, you could be forgiven for thinking Elon Musk had gone around stabbing people in Sydney.

Our political class have decided, in the wake of the Bondi stabbings and the attack on a church bishop, that the real danger to the public is Twitter.

Everyone from the Prime Minister to the Opposition leader has spent the weekend denouncing Elon Musk for the crime of …

Wait.

What’s the crime?

Apparently it’s a heinous crime now to allow real people to post real videos of what really happened in real life.

Turns out our politicians don’t like real life.

They would much prefer us to live in a world carefully curated by an E-Safety Karen who decides what we may and may not see.

Senior Government Minister Tanya Plibersek posted a video of herself on Twitter today saying …

“It just beggars belief really, doesn’t it?

“That this guy, this egotistical billionaire thinks that it’s more important for him to be able to show whatever he wants on X, or Twitter, or whatever you want to call it today …

“It’s more important for him to have his way than to respect the victims of the crimes that are being shown on social media and to protect our Australian community from the harmful impact of showing this terrible stuff.”

So Twitter can show videos of Tanya Plibersek saying we shouldn’t be allowed to see things that happened, but Twitter can’t show videos of what happened.

You have to love Plibersek. It takes a special lack of self awareness not to see the irony in using the egotistical billionaire’s platform to complain about the egotistical billionaire.

If Elon Musk was half as egotistical as Plibersek, he would censor her videos as she demands to censor his.

The Liberal Party is no better.

Opposition Communications Spokesman David Coleman said of the church stabbing footage …

“This material is really disturbing. Not only are adults seeing it, but kids are seeing it.”

Whoa! Adults are seeing what happened during mass at Christ the Good Shepherd Church?

Who will protect the adults?

Lucky the government has an E-Safety nanny, as David Coleman was quick to point out …

“That is why the online safety act is so important. The commissioner can say ‘that’s not acceptable, we wouldn’t allow that kind of violent imagery to be seen on TV, and that needs to come down’.

Clearly David Coleman doesn’t watch much TV.

This attack on Elon Musk and the right of Australians to see what has happened in their own backyard smacks of politicians desperate to change the subject.

Keeping Australians “safe” from videos of Australians getting stabbed is evidently a lot easier than keeping Australians safe from being stabbed.

But it’s no substitute, contrary to what our useless politicians would like you to think.

Australian politicians have no practical solution to Sydney’s recent stabbings, so they’ve just decided to ban people from seeing the stabbings.

KFC?

What other inconvenient events should be memory holed by our political overlords?

Should we ban footage of the 9/11 attack in case it sparks awkward conversations?

Should we erase vision of the Bali bombings in case adults see it and say things?

Would Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton like to come around and vet my DVD collection?

Seriously. This is ridiculous.

The Sydney stabbings were terrible and horrific and tragic and sad.

But it’s not the government’s job to protect us from seeing bad things that happen to our neighbours.

And it is certainly not the job of the government to hide events from us because they either don’t like or are afraid of the conversations that might arise.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told journalists …

“The pain of many people has been exacerbated by what occurred on social media. The broadcasting of violent images that have no place.”

Er, it’s the attack on shoppers that has no place. It’s the attack on a clergyman that has no place.

And do we really honour the dead and injured by preventing anyone from seeing what happened so that the crimes are quickly sanitised and the discussion is swiftly muted?

The PM went on to lament the fact that footage of the attacks had the potential to “inflame what was a very difficult situation”.

That’s a PM who does not trust the Australian public.

It’s also a PM who clearly has no idea how to address the horrific events in an honest and forthright way.

Anthony Albanese doesn’t know what to say or do in the wake of the attacks. And so he has decided we should all move on as quickly as possible to other, more plantable things.

Making Elon Musk the villain and Twitter the knife is his way of doing that.