The vibe shift continues apace.

First came Facebook, then there was Australia Day.

On Monday last week I talked about 'the vibe shift' of the West. The next day from America came Facebook's announcement it was abandoning the censorship of 'fact-checking'. Then, today, here in Australia, the Institute of Public Affairs released the results of its annual survey on what Australians think of Australia Day. It's (nearly all) good news.

A poll of 1,002 Australians by research firm Dynata found:

• 69% of Australians agree Australia Day should be celebrated on 26 January (up from 63% last year); 14% disagree (down from 3% last year). 52% of 18-24 year-olds agree (up from 42% last year); 23% disagree (down from 30% last year).

• 86% of Australians agree with the statement 'I am proud to be an Australian' (down from 87% last year); 4% disagree (the sameas last year). 90% of 18-24 year-olds agree (up from 89% last year); 3% disagree (up from 2% last year).

• 68% of Australians agree with the statement 'Australia has a history to be proud of' (down from 69% last year); 13% disagree (down from 15% last year). 59% of 18-24 year-olds agree (up from 49% last year); 22% disagree (down from 22% last year).

Daniel Wild, the IPA's Deputy Executive Director, wrote about the findings in The Daily Telegraph today. This is some of what he wrote:

Every year in January Australians are subjected to the usual hand-wringing about our national day. The activist class and inner-city elites hold that Australia, our culture, and history are not worth remembering, much less celebrating. To them, January 26 is a day of mourning, invasion, dispossession, and violence.

But this year is a little different. The vibe and energy around Australia Day have shifted. Mainstream Australians – the silent majority – have had a gutful of being put upon by the out-of-touch activists, and are now clearly making their voices heard.

It started last year, when Woolworths announced it would not be stocking Australia Day-themed merchandise on its shelves. The backlash was immediate and fierce, with calls for a boycott of the supermarket giant ultimately leading to the premature departure of then-chief executive Brad Banducci.

We celebrate Australia Day on 26 January because that is the day modern Australia commenced. The First Fleet arrived not just with prisoners from Great Britain, but also with a rich intellectual and moral cargo of the ideals developed in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and forged through the Enlightenment.

None of this is to minimise, much less deny, the real hardship and violence which many Indigenous Australians experienced at the hands of some colonists. Rather, it is to say that now, more than at any time since World War II, we must as a nation unite around our shared values, which speak to all Australians regardless of race, ethnicity, religion, or gender.

We are the people who went further than any other in establishing the rule of law and equality before the law.

We are the people who invented the secret ballot in 1853, which meant that everyday Australians could vote without being intimidated by wealthy landowners or union officials.

We are the people who, by a ­margin of 90-10, said Yes to ­removing divisive references to race in Australia's Constitution in 1967, in a watershed moment for racial equality. And we are the people who, in 2023, voted to keep it that way, with 60 per cent of Australians opposing the reinsertion of racial separatism into our Constitution.

These are the reasons why we celebrate Australia Day on 26 January. Long may that continue.

A commitment to freedom of speech should be a core Australian value. It’s noteworthy that in response to Mark Zuckerberg's announcement that 'fact-checkers' would no longer censor what people said to each other on Facebook, the ALP attacked the decision while the Coalition said nothing.

Megan McArdle in The Washington Post (yes - The Washington Post), asked a fundamental question.

If you want to know who wields power in a society, there's a simple and effective test: Who supports censorship?

If you see someone advocating for more suppression of dangerous speech - be it heresy, hate speech or 'misinformation' - you can be sure they expect their side to have exclusive use of the ban-hammer. The natural corollary is that when censorship regimes collapse, you know a power shift happened. That's how you should understand the kerfuffle over changes in Meta's moderation policies.

McArdle continued:

…it's so revealing that a fairly minor change to moderation policies felt so apocalyptic to progressives... The fact that merely letting people talk to each other feels like a dangerous concession to the right tells you just how much power progressives had amassed.

(To progressives, everything they disagree with is 'apocalyptic'. Predicting the apocalypse in some form or another, has long been a tactic, and an effective tactic, of the left. Eventually though it wears thin. Greta Thunberg is now reduced to parroting anti-Semitic slogans and shouting 'f--k Germany' and 'f--k Israel' as she did at an anti-Israel rally in Germany last month. Last year Forbes magazine asked whether Thunberg's 'controversial' views on Israel could adversely impact her ability to campaign on climate change policy. Ya think? To imagine that Thunberg was not that long ago feted by leaders around the world. In 2019 The Sydney Morning Herald chided the PM at the time for not attending a session of the United Nations at which she spoke. The newspaper's editorial of 26 September 2019 was titled, 'Scott Morrison should have gone to hear Greta Thunberg'.)

Freedom of speech was once a cause of the left. Until the left captured the commanding heights of culture. As if to prove McArdle's point, Sean Kelly a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd wrote in today's The Age that Facebook's decision is a victory for conservatives. If Facebook's fact-checking was even-handed, then ending it wouldn't be ‘the giant leap to the right’ Kelly describes it as.

In my column in The Australian Financial Review I talked about Zuckerberg's decision.

What’s been happening to the culture in much of the West over the past 12 months has been given many different names: 'the vibe shift', 'the cultural tipping point', and 'a weather change'. It’s been described in basic terms as the backlash against 'woke'. A more sophisticated analysis calls it the 'the turning against managerial authoritarianism' and 'the reassertion of democratic populism'.

'Fact-checking was never about checking facts. It was about governments, implicitly or explicitly, and academics and journalists controlling public discussion for political purposes. In 2020, the BBC fact-checked and declared false the claim that the source of the COVID-19 virus was a laboratory in Wuhan.

The Institute of Public Affairs analysed fact-checking during the Voice referendum. RMIT FactLab was employed by Facebook during the campaign and checked 41 articles on the Voice. Despite all the claims for the Voice made by almost every institution of social and economic power in Australia, the only arguments RMIT FactLab assessed were those supporting the No case. Facebook eventually suspended RMIT FactLab as one of its fact-checking partners.

Under the Albanese government’s now-abandoned 'misinformation' laws, fact-checkers played a key role in advising on what was to be censored.

According to [Communications Minister] Rowland’s spokesperson, 'Misinformation can be harmful to people’s health, wellbeing, and to social cohesion.' Maintaining 'social cohesion' is just the latest in a long line of excuses for censorship that governments through the ages have used to justify censorship. Politicians have the temerity to tell the public that to stop the fraying of social cohesion, people should stop talking about the fraying of social cohesion.

(The claim that government censorship is necessary to maintain 'social cohesion' is something we will hear more and more about in the years ahead. It's the excuse Julie Inman Grant, the eSafety Commissioner, used last year when she attempted to censor the video of the attack on Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel and censor comments on it. Appeals to 'social cohesion' justify censorship not necessarily because the material being censored is inaccurate or wrong but because dissemination of the material - even if true - would disturb 'social cohesion'. 'Social cohesion' is such a vague term that in order to maintain it the government could censor any news and any comment about the news.

It’s not only government censorship that ‘the maintenance of social cohesion' allows for. A few weeks ago, in response to the reignited controversy about 'grooming gangs' in the UK, the historian and podcaster Tom Holland wrote on X, 'My position remains: 1. The authorities have a responsibility to preserve good race relations. 2. This is a noble goal. 3. In the context of the grooming gangs, this goal resulted in fatefully wrong decisions being taken. 4. 10 years on, the tragedy of this is even more evident.' Holland's interpretation of what happened was not shared by the majority of the three and a half thousand people who commented on his post. In The Critic, Ben Sixsmith replied to Holland. You can read it here.)

This was how I concluded my AFR piece:

Once upon a time, the West’s political leaders liked social media.

In 2011 during the so-called Arab Spring, Barack Obama welcomed that 'cell phones and social networks allow young people to connect and organise like never before' against authoritarian regimes. The president quoted an engineer in Benghazi who said, “Our words are free now. It’s a feeling you can’t explain”, and a young man in Damascus, 'After the first yelling, the first shout, you feel dignity'.

As we’ve been discovering recently, many leaders in the 'liberal' West are enthusiastic about freedom of speech everywhere other than in their own country.

Those leaders are not so keen on social media when the free words and yelling of uncensored speech are directed at them.

Thank you for your support.

kind regards John