Australia’s e-safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant says she’s ready to leave the role, claiming that threats to her family and online trolls have made her walk away.

It’s quite an admission from the woman who was given extraordinary powers by the Morrison government, who expanded her office and powers in 2021. If she can’t handle the online trolls herself, then she’s probably not the right person to be the internet cop. But actually, I’d say that she is clear proof that there should not be an internet cop at all. And her departure from the role at the end of her contract next year is our opportunity to secure the abolition of the e-Safety office altogether because, by that point in time, the e-safety office is going to be a dumpster fire of unwinnable court cases, and hopefully, the government will want nothing more than to stick the whole thing in the bin.

I’m going to go through a few of the key failings of the e-Safety office as a whole, plus a few of Julie Inman Grant’s greatest fails personally, to illustrate just how useless the e-Safety office is as a concept, but also how Julie Inman Grant is perhaps Australia’s most obvious post turtle. Do you know what a post turtle is? Well, it’s a turtle balanced on top of a post. You don’t know how it got there, but you know for sure that it didn’t get there by itself. It seems that Julie Inman Grant is ready to pop off and be a nuisance somewhere else, which is great news for all Australians. But we must not allow another turtle to be placed on top of that same post. We need to destroy the post, which means, in this case, we need to destroy the e-Safety office altogether.

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Julie Inman Grant, as the e-safety commissioner, has done nothing but lose court cases she should never have gotten mixed up in in the first place,

and she’s put the government into no-win situations, such as with the impending under-16 social media ban, which I’ve covered extensively, but we’ll recap briefly here. The only people who will win out of this under-16’s social media ban are the lawyers. And if you wanted to create a massive legal dumpster fire that will drag on for years and cost untold tens of millions of dollars for absolutely no useful outcome if that’s what you wanted to do then you would do exactly what Julie Inman Grant did. You write vague regulations that are open to interpretation with the intention of suing anyone who then interprets those regulations in a way that you don’t like.

YouTube have already announced their intention to sue the e-safety commissioner, although it appears that they may be waiting for the ban to come into effect in December before they actually file that lawsuit. And as I covered a few weeks ago, TikTok, Meta, and Snapchat flat out refused to show up to a parliamentary hearing to answer questions from MPs. They were, of course, loaded questions, and this whole hearing was nothing more than a publicity stunt for the MPs who support this censorship-by-stealth regime with age verification as the cover. But the platforms have made it clear they’re not going to roll over and play dead. Then there’s X, who has already sued the e-Safety office and won. Famously, in the case of Billboard Chris and his posts about Teddy Cook, the e-Safety commissioner Julie Inman Grant wasted taxpayers’ money losing a case about a post that was written by a Canadian on an American tech platform about an Australian who had been appointed to a UN position advising on transgender policy. Apparently, this was the hill that the e-Safety office was willing to die on on our dime, of course and die it did. Well, at least its credibility.

And let’s not forget that public figures have discovered via freedom of information requests that the e-Safety office sometimes has literally tens of thousands of records on file about them so many records that in some cases they simply refuse to provide the records because it would take them too long to comply with the Freedom of Information request. So, if you have so much information that you can’t possibly be expected to go through it all, why do you have it? Officially, it’s because the e-safety office uses a thing called Meltwater to monitor online activity and record every mention of themselves or of Julie Inman Grant personally. Senator Malcolm Roberts tried to get to the bottom of this in Senate estimates. I’ll let you see for yourself the official explanation for why the e-Safety office had, in the case of Katherine Deves, 16,000 records.

[From video]

Katherine Deves made an FOI Freedom of Information request to the e-Safety commissioner for documents referencing her, and you rejected the request because you hold 16,000 documents on one single person. Is that correct? “I think that is a misunderstanding,” she said. “I will have Mr. Fleming, our general counsel, announce that further. I think the hit she was talking about was a Meltwater report on social media mentions, and this was of Ms. Deves tweeting either at the e-safety office handle or at myself at Tweeting Jules. These were not actual records or conversations that we had of Ms. Deves. These were, again, picked up through Meltwater social media monitoring mentions, but you can clarify.”

“Yes, Senator Richard,” Mr. Fleming responded. “I’m general counsel. I’m not aware of the precise circumstances in this case, but we often do see that occurrence that the commissioner mentioned where people do mention themselves or mention us in their posts, and our social media listening picks that up, and so that’s how those records get created.” So what is Meltwater media monitoring? How does it get to 16,000? “So, as you know, Senator, departments and agencies have media monitoring, and whenever a particular term is mentioned that’s e-safety commissioner or whatever the term is and it could well just be our email, our Twitter handle, our X handle, that gets picked up, and that’s what gets reported. And when we do the searches, that’s what gets discovered through the search process. It helps us pick up the sentiment analysis, so obviously she was either engaging and tweeting a lot at us, or we were in the same sort of set of viral tweets.” So there are 16,000 mentions, not documents. “No, not documents.” [End video]

Okay, so that does help us to understand a little bit better why there are literally tens of thousands of hits for people like me and many others who are critical of the e-Safety office. But I want to put aside how Orwellian it is for a taxpayer-funded entity responsible for online censorship to be keeping tabs on its online critics in the first place. I’m going to put that aside and point out something that’s very easy to miss in this particular exchange and as far as I know, it actually has been missed up to this point. They refuse FOI requests because of the number of hits. Now, these aren’t documents, so okay, whatever. But as a result of there being so many of these hits, they give themselves an excuse to not provide whatever documents they do have.

They’re saying, “Oh, it’s too hard because we have all this stuff that isn’t really relevant, so we’re going to do nothing at all.”

But by doing that, they’re avoiding ever having to show anything that might actually be relevant. They never have to admit to whatever documents they do have on someone because instead, they get to say, “Oh, it’s just too hard. We have thousands of hits that aren’t documents, and we can’t be expected to waste our time on this.” You see how that works? The e-safety office operates with a terrible lack of transparency all around, and this appears to me to be yet another technique that they can use to avoid having to offer what little transparency an FOI request might have provided. A more honest response would be to give whatever they do have excluding the Meltwater reports put that to one side. That would be at least a little bit more transparent. But clearly, that’s not what they want to do.

Now, I also interviewed Dr. Reuben Kirkham from the Free Speech Union of Australia a little while ago. It’s an interview well worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. It’s about how Julie Inman Grant directly attacked the Free Speech Union because they created a tool that made it easier for people to lodge Freedom of Information requests. And so the Free Speech Union, having now been attacked by the e-Safety commissioner herself, lodged a complaint for online bullying against the e-Safety commissioner to the e-safety commission. It’s a hilarious interview, and it ends with Julie Inman Grant being humiliated yet again as she loses in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. Now, that’s Topher Project Episode 141. If you want to get the full story, you won’t regret it. It’s a great interview to look up.

But even more than all of that, Julie Inman Grant as the taxpayer-funded e-safety commissioner has completely failed to be politically impartial. Her office was responsible for requesting the censoring of elected members of parliament during the COVID troubles most notably Craig Kelly, but many others as well. And she was named eight times in the U.S. House Judiciary Committee report into GARM, which it describes as an advertising cartel. Julie Inman Grant is partisan. She participated in cartel behavior trying to censor the global internet, including American citizens, which is something that President Trump has no time for and is guaranteed to start a very big fight. More on that in a minute.

And she’s been called out specifically by the U.S. government for working with GARM to target her former employer, Twitter (now X),

which does explain something of the crusade she appears to be on. Exhibit Seven of this House Judiciary Committee report shows Julie Inman Grant’s emails with one of the GARM that’s the advertising cartel’s executives. They were published in this report, showing how she used her position as a powerful taxpayer-funded Australian government official to contribute to this censoring of Australians and the cartel manipulation of advertisers to financially punish companies who allowed opinions to be expressed that she felt shouldn’t be expressed.

And now the best part is we also know that she is thin-skinned because she says she won’t seek a contract extension when her time comes to an end next year because she’s had enough of what she alleges to be online bullying. The danger here is that we all get so excited about the departure of the e-Karen personally that we don’t take full advantage of this moment this opportunity to put an end to the e-Safety office entirely. This is an opportunity that we must not miss. The pressure on Julie Inman Grant has been immense. She narrowly avoided being subject to a Senate inquiry, and she then wrote a five-page letter to the opposition practically begging them to ease up the pressure on her.

But whilst I agree that Julie Inman Grant has been an absolutely terrible e-Safety commissioner and I will be glad to see her go, that doesn’t change the fact that there is no such thing as a good e-Safety commissioner. The entire e-Safety office needs to be abolished because the temptation is clearly too great for them. They want to cross over into outright censorship and partisan games online. The age verification plan is now just six weeks away from being implemented, and it is going to start an absolute dumpster fire with lawsuits between the Australian e-Safety office and most, if not all, of the major social media platforms. And I promise you that the U.S. government will get involved in exactly the same way as they did when the U.K. government tried to stop encryption online.

It now appears to me that Julie Inman Grant plans to simply walk away from her post just as that dumpster fire is really getting going, leaving it to someone else to clean up her mess.

That’s what creates the opportunity because it’s up to us and the handful of decent politicians that we have in Canberra to make that dumpster fire so big that the government wants nothing more than to simply abolish the e-safety office altogether and put that fire in the bin.

My name is Topher Field. This is the Topher Project, and I help busy people like you to keep up with the world as it changes around you. And you can help to grow that dumpster fire and put the government under pressure by sharing this video with everyone you know. I am 100% viewer supported, so please help me to keep the Topher Project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and also checking out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com.

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