Well, as you’ve no doubt heard either on my channel or elsewhere, the E-safety Commissioner is at it again.

This time trying to take down or at the very least geoblock video showing the murder of Iryna Zarutska, who was of course brutally stabbed to death whilst on a train in the United States of America. Last time I spoke to free speech advocate and member of the Free Speech Union, Reuben Kirkham Dr. Reuben Kirkham he was involved in a tussle with the E-safety Commissioner. Well, I’m going to get an update from him about that tussle and bring you the story that he’s actually started yet another tussle because he is legally challenging these takedown orders from the E-safety Commissioner. I don’t know a whole lot about this story, but the man who does is Reuben from the Free Speech Union. Thank you so much for joining me on the Topher Project.

[From video] Thank you for having me along. [End video]

Now, what is going on? Sorry, just to come into this. What’s going on with the E-safety Commissioner now? She’s let’s get an update on that story before you ran a series or you made a portal basically where people could create a Freedom of Information request for themselves to find out whether the E-safety Commissioner had any information about them on file. Then the E-safety Commissioner made some comments about the Free Speech Union explicitly whilst she was in the United States, which you then applied to have classified as cyberbullying. You were trying to suggest that the E-safety Commissioner had cyberbullied yourself, I take it, or the Free Speech Union. That ended up going before the tribunal with quite an absurd outcome. There is a previous video. I’ll put the link to that in the description here. Is there any update on that story? Let’s talk about the first fight before we talk about the new one that you’ve just started.

[From video]

Well, not much. We won. The E-safety Commission has not appealed. Instead, she sent me her three-page statement of reasons which didn’t really mean much. And so I’ve gone back to the tribunal and unfortunately in the meantime, she’s been spreading more of her wild conspiracy theories. We’re a bit shocked to see Albanese reading some of them out. He believed we’re running some kind of artificial intelligence to shut down the E-safety Commissioner’s office. [End video]

Well, I’m sorry to interrupt my interview with Dr. Reuben Kirkham from the Free Speech Union of Australia. We will get back to that in just a second. But first, my name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and this is what I do. I bring you stories that the mainstream media by and large try to ignore things like someone suing the E-safety Commissioner and also I bring you perspective that helps you to make sense of the nonsense and understand what’s going on in the world around us. Now if you appreciate what I do, then you can help me to keep the Topher Project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net.

And also, if you like my videos then you’ll probably love my books which are all about law, civil disobedience, human rights and power government being a key theme. There’s my first book, Good People Break Bad Laws. This is all about the role of civil disobedience in a modern democratic society. Then there’s Good Christians Break Bad Laws, which is all about the theology of civil disobedience and why I believe it is that Christians should be among the very first people to say no and push back against a civil government that has overstepped its God-given boundaries. You’ll also find my DVD documentary, Battleground Melbourne. Now, this is available for free online. You can watch it at battlegroundmelbourne.com. You don’t have to pay me a cent. You don’t have to give me your email address. I had the privilege of telling this story, directing the documentary, but it’s not actually my story. The story was written by the people of Victoria, the people of Melbourne as they courageously pushed back against Premier Daniel Andrews when he went completely power mad during the COVID lockdown. So, you can watch it for free at battlegroundmelbourne.com. Or if you’d like a copy to put on your shelf or a DVD to give to somebody, you can get that from my website. The website is goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com. And you’ll also find all of my merch in t-shirt and hoodie form in a range of different designs. And everything you buy helps me to keep bringing you stories like this one. So, without further ado, let’s get back to my interview with Dr. Reuben Kirkham. And wow,

[From video]

It was very untrue. The reality was as simple as we made a web form using technology from the ’90s. But it does show how incompetent the E-safety Commissioner is if they’re spending hundreds of thousands of dollars dealing with something put together in 12 hours over a weekend. And all it does is ask a question which is as simple as: are you spying on me? And the answer should be no. But unfortunately, if you keep records that you should not be keeping on people, then you have to work to redact them. And in some cases, she’s been able to say, “Well, it’s so much work to redact those documents that we can’t give you anything. It’s just so unreasonable on the agency.” And there’s been people with like thousands and thousands of pages. Someone I think was on 9,000, another person was on 6,000. And yeah, it’s like why she got it? Why is she bothered collecting all this data? So, it’s nothing to do with the Freedom of Information Act to do with her obstinate incompetence and not knowing how to navigate a computer system as usual. [End video]

Yeah. So, Reuben, that’s a fight that’s ongoing. I will put the link to our original interview about that in the description of this video so people can follow that up if they would like to, but no resolution there. I’ll stay on top of that story as it changes. But the story this week is you’ve gone and picked yet another fight with the E-safety Commissioner. What is going on, Reuben? Tell us you are taking her back to the tribunal regarding or challenging these takedown orders for videos of the murder of Iryna Zarutska. Tell us about what the thinking is behind that, what the Free Speech Union’s stance is on this, and what you’re hoping to achieve by taking the E-safety Commissioner to the tribunal.

[From video]

So this time we’ve been able to file actually as the Free Speech Union because anyone can do it in this case as long as they’ve got an interest and our interest is protecting freedom of expression and in particular not allowing censorship of discussion of the news which is what’s happened in this case. So, we saw a video of the notice someone made a video recording of the whole bizarre 20-page notice that was sent to X about a week and a bit ago. So, we found out about it over the weekend and I’m like, “Here we go again. She’s done something else that she’s not supposed to be doing.” And so, it wasn’t very hard to write was on Sunday afternoon and some people checking it an application to the tribunal for those notices to be withdrawn. This time is actually a formal notice. So she’s threatening to fine X a non-godly amount of money every day those videos stay up or at least not geoblocked. So they are geoblocked for anyone without a VPN. So, if you don’t have a VPN, now might be time to get one.

But all she’s done is as usual cause a Streisand effect. But what we find disturbing is that she has only targeted certain accounts on a certain platform. There’s excerpts of this video that can be seen on a BBC News TikTok account. And they’ve done nothing about that. We haven’t seen any notices going to TikTok. We haven’t seen any notices going to YouTube. We haven’t seen any notices go directly to the platforms that are hosting this. Like, I know CNN, ABC, pretty much everyone hosting this horrible video of someone who was murdered in the United States. And the transport company released that video. So this was released in the public domain by the transport company. Various edited versions have shown up in different forms of news outlets. Some have shown it completely. Some have pretty much all of them put warnings on it. But the reality is she’s saying, “Oh, you can’t show that video at all.” I mean, if she would turn around and put a notice up saying, “Well, look, you know, take the gore out, put a warning on it,” we probably wouldn’t have a case. But that’s not what she’s done. What she’s done is said, “Oh, it’s got the video in it, the Classification Board has covered it, and therefore, we’re going to take that down.” Well, that’s not quite how it works.

She actually has to decide whether or not to exercise that power. Secondly, she actually has to exercise that power lawfully. So, we’ve gone to the tribunal and what happens is unless there’s some other jurisdictional tussle and this time we lose it I don’t think there will be, but she might try and claim we’re not interested enough in free speech to stall the proceedings and say, “Oh, we haven’t got what’s called standing.” But other than that, the tribunal has to reach what is called the correct and preferable decision. So the first step is the tribunal has to decide: has it got jurisdiction to do anything at all about that material, standing in the shoes of the E-safety Commissioner? So the tribunal basically becomes the E-safety Commissioner in their position and then if they decide they have got the power, then they go on to the next step which is to decide whether to take any action and if so, what action to take.

So there could be a range of outcomes in this case. One could be the tribunal says, “Well, this is in breach of the implied freedom of political communication. We’re doing nothing.” Another is the tribunal says, “Well, this actually isn’t protecting anyone. You’ve just caused another Streisand effect. We’re going to exercise our discretion to do nothing.” Or they might say, yes, some of this might be censored, but not the entire thing and not by targeting particular accounts. Or they might decide against it and say, “Nothing.” I mean, I think we know what the likely options are. I mean, look, if we thought the tribunal would say, “This is all right, perfectly fine,” we probably wouldn’t have bothered filing something.

But there are some significant holes in the E-safety Commissioner’s case and notice, and they still haven’t learned how to, shall we say, understand, interpret and apply the relevant law. After the last stabbing fiasco, you’d have thought, hang on, they wouldn’t be doing this again, but it seems they are. [End video]

Yeah, Reuben, I want to pick up on a comment that you made there where it was only certain platforms. I don’t know whether you want to weigh in on this or not, but it’s my personal opinion that Julie Inman Grant appears to have something of a personal vendetta, particularly against the American-owned big tech companies Alphabet, Meta, and especially X under Elon Musk. I couldn’t help but notice that X made the decision to send all 20 pages of that takedown notice to each of the accounts that had been affected by that notice. They didn’t need to do that. They could have simply notified them and said, “Hey, this is being taken down.” They didn’t have to provide the full text of that document. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, and I’d be interested to get your thoughts on this. Elon Musk seems to want the world to know about Julie Inman Grant and about what she’s doing in this particular case. Do you read it the same way?

[From video]

I don’t think this has gone to the level of Elon Musk. I mean, X has got a policy and a practice that if these notices come in, they will send them to the end user. And really, E-safety should be sending it directly to the end user themselves not necessarily in this particular case but normally they would, they should do this really. They should be putting the notice up on their website so everyone knows about it. Well, they have to be fair, they have publicized the notice indirectly because it’s now managed to go over the news media. But she has only targeted one platform and certain people. She’s not targeted Australians for some reason. Maybe because they think Australians will know how to appeal and they might come to us. But probably what they were not expecting was for us to appeal it because she hasn’t realized and the particular power she’s used, which is about Class 1 content so this is content that no one should be able to see in Australia. That’s what it’s been classified as. [End video]

That’s what she said. So yeah,

[From video]

Refused classification, which is a very rare classification. And apparently the Classification Board have seen the video and done this. I don’t know exactly what happened there, who put it in front of the Classification Board, and why the Classification Board decided to go and do whatever E-safety told them to. But the flaw is of course that you can only classify a film in its actual form. So it sort of makes a derivative work and it could just be, you know, they drop and change it. They take a bit out. They maybe present it in a different way. Maybe they take the sound off. Maybe they put a filter on part of it. Well, someone would have to go back and reclassify it. So then the question becomes, is it likely that it meets this standard? But who knows what they’re thinking in the E-safety Commissioner’s office?

Maybe someone just didn’t think. Maybe someone had Julie Inman Grant screaming at them and they thought, “Hang on, I know. Let’s just do something particularly stupid so it’ll get appealed and she’ll lose.” I mean, I don’t know how popular she is with her staff, but I do know there’s a massive staff turnover in her office because if there wasn’t, there wouldn’t be all these tenders going up on the government website for all these temporary staff all the time. So, who knows? We’re going to find out probably, but I’m looking forward to receiving what’s called the T-documents from the E-safety Commissioner, which is the bundle of documents they have to give us once we’ve appealed. We won’t necessarily be able to comment on them immediately because something called the Harman obligation, which limits the ability to comment on materials you’ve received in a proceeding.

So, it might be we know and we can only tell people in a few moments of time when there’s a hearing. But we will be able to put a response up. We’ll be able to give an indication without necessarily referring directly to the material what is going on. But what we can’t do is misuse it for other purposes. But we’ve got the material. We’d probably apply for an order saying, “Well, look, we’d like this to be in the public domain.” Yeah, but we will see. I don’t want to give too much away because I’m sure E-safety might even be watching this now to get some indication of what our legal strategy might be, even though it’s pretty obvious what we’re doing. But, you know, help them do their own homework for them, given how bad they are at it. [End video]

I suspect that a good number of my views probably come from federal officers and various other bureaucrats and government departments who are disgruntled about what I do and the guests I have and the stories that they bring. Well, Reuben, thanks to you and to the Free Speech Union. I’ve said for a long time that we need a lawfare-based pushback. And this isn’t a court case per se, but taking them to the tribunal is the necessary first step and I applaud you for having taken that step.

For anyone that wants to support the Free Speech Union and help you guys to carry this fight right onto the desk of Julie Inman Grant, how would they be able to get in touch and how could they support you?

[From video]

You can go to our website. We’ve got a contact form that lets you sign up to our mailing list. You can become a member. We have monthly membership options from $5 a month depending on your personal circumstances. The concessional ones most people, our membership is tax-deductible. Join us. Or even if you can’t afford to join us, just sign up for our mailing list and we occasionally send action alerts around. So you can, for example, write letters or you can email your representatives or you can make a submission to Parliament. There’s lots of ways of getting involved by becoming an FSU member. But writing to your MP or writing to your MP and saying, “Look, I’d like a meeting with you to discuss the E-safety Commissioner. I’m not happy.” Or sharing our material on X or Facebook take your pick. There’s lots of ways to help out. There’s lots of small things that people can do. Putting submissions into Parliament, that sends a message. Sending an email to your MP they might think, “Hang on, I’ve got all these constituents showing up about the E-safety Commissioner, maybe I need to rethink this if I want to get re-elected.” Even though we’re a good year, couple of years at least out from an election, they still think about this stuff. So, there are things you can do, lots of things you can do.

And some people have donated to a crowd funder that we’ve set up as well that we’ve advertised for our mailing list. So we’ve already I reckon we’re going to be covered. I think there’s a lot of people that are not, shall we say, happy about the E-safety Commissioner and [End video]

Oh definitely.

[From video]

Normally we can litigate them quite cheaply because the way she conducts herself we don’t generally need to bother bringing an army of lawyers and we let her do that. It’s not too hard to beat her in a legal argument because we’ve never really planned anything out. [End video]

But Reuben, we’re the ones paying for her army of lawyers as well. So we’re paying for her to lose, unfortunately.

[From video]

Well, you never know. She might give in. She might go, “Oh, oops. We shouldn’t have issued that notice.” You never know. She might think she may go, “Oh hang on, maybe I could have just rewritten this notice.” And said, “Oh, just, you know, put a warning on it and maybe cover up the blood and we’re happy.” She could do that. But I don’t think she’ll think to do that. But, you know, we’ve told her how she can do it in the notice of appeal. [End video]

I’m not going to be holding my breath on that one, Reuben. She’s not shown herself to be someone who how do I say this judicious in the fights that she picks. And quite frankly, I’m rather hoping that she’s set herself up for a showdown with the US tech giants due to the age verification, which is a whole other story for another video. Reuben from the Free Speech Union of Australia, thank you so much for joining me on the Topher Project and I wish you all the best in this fight in the tribunal.

[From video] Thanks for having us. [End video]

That was Dr. Reuben Kirkham from the Free Speech Union. I’ll put links in the description of this video so that you can find the Free Speech Union and you can find my previous interview with him where he told us about the Freedom of Information requests and all of the nonsense that came out of that. It’s frankly quite a funny interview. If you appreciate my work, the work that I do here at the Topher Project, then please consider buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And also remember to go to goodpeoplebreakbadlaws.com where you’ll find my books, my DVDs, my merch, my masterclass, and more. And everything you buy will be helping me to keep the Topher Project going.

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