STATEMENTS BY SENATORS

Senator BABET (Victoria—United Australia Party Whip) (13:48): The progressive left has discovered one of the most powerful weapons in politics: not a gun but a dictionary. Control language and you begin to control thought. If people lose the words to describe an idea, eventually they also lose the ability to defend it.

This is how the boundaries of acceptable thought are quietly redrawn. Disagreement becomes hate. Abortion becomes health care.

State assisted suicide becomes death with dignity. Gay marriage becomes marriage equality. Illegal immigrants become undocumented migrants.

Censorship becomes content moderation. Government spending becomes investment. Notice what happens: the argument is half won before it even begins.

Who opposes health care? Who denies dignity? Who is against equality?

The language itself frames a moral answer. Once those loaded terms are accepted, anyone who challenges the policy can be made to sound cruel, ignorant or extreme before they've even opened their mouth. Orwell understood this.

Political control of language can become control over imagination. The most effective censorship is not banning a thought; it's about making that thought difficult to express. If every objection is called 'hate', every inconvenient fact 'misinformation' and every traditional belief 'harmful', eventually people will just censor themselves.

The dictionary becomes a fence and, once that fence is built, the prison doesn't need bars. This is why I defend free speech so strongly. Free speech protects free thought and, without the freedom to think, speak and argue openly, we are not truly free.

We must resist the policing of language and defend the right of all of us to call things the way that we see them, even if others are offended. That is the essence of freedom.