Almost a year ago, on September 25, 2017, we warned in this article that the Queensland government was paying a communist to police our speech with regard to the same-sex marriage postal vote. As reported a few days ago, charges are now being planned against people for comments they posted online during the debate in the lead up to the postal vote. Thus this encore provides important background on the communist, namely Matilda Alexander, behind this speech suppression.
Who is the government paying to police your speech?
On Saturday XYZ published an article by Adam Piggott reporting that the Queensland Government was gifting $7000 of taxpayer funds to LGBTI Legal Service President Matilda Alexander in order to train volunteers to monitor social media for “hate speech” and properly report such wrong think to authorities for prosecution.
It’s a good article by Adam and if you haven’t read it yet, please do so.
In the SBS report Adam linked to Ms Alexander was quoted saying:
“There seems to be a misconception that freedom of speech allows you to say whatever you want… We wanted to make sure firstly, that people know that kind of speech is unlawful and secondly, to have the tool available to be able to make a complaint… you need to screen grab it and send it into us and we will take the appropriate actions to make sure the law is enforced.”
Judging from the tone of the piece, the SBS reporter Riley Morgan seemed quite happy about this outsourcing of thought policing to the private sector.
Felicity Caldwell of the Brisbane Fairfax stable seemed equally happy at the idea of people with incorrect thoughts having to walk on eggshells, quoting Ms Alexander again as stating:
“I think having a postal vote makes people feel like their homophobia is legitimised and they have a right to say whatever they want to say about LGBTI people – that’s not the case under the law.”
After all, we can’t have people saying whatever they want, who know what silly ideas they might have? Thank God the valiant Matilda is there with her selfless band of volunteers to help set us right.
And thank God that earlier this year her “volunteer” organisation was gifted another $406,000 of taxpayer money by the QLD government, all well-deserved I’m sure.
But something bothered me about the way Matilda outlined her wondrous plans for an internet scoured clean of opinions she disagreed with. Something about her phrasing felt eerily familiar.
Who is Matilda Alexander?
Well her bio back to 2001 shows her bouncing around various taxpayer-funded groups of a legal bent. She is the current treasurer and former principal solicitor for the publicly funded Prisoners Legal Service, has lectured on Gender and the law at Griffith University, and prepared cases for complainants regarding the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.
But what was she doing before 2001?
Well here it gets interesting.
Over the ANZAC Day long weekend in 1999 Matilda Alexander, Griffith University women’s officer, was a featured speaker at the Brisbane “Socialism for the new millennium” conference. The event was run by the Democratic Socialist Party, then the largest, best organised and most violent extreme left-wing group in Australia, who shortly afterwards would transform themselves into the Trotskyite umbrella organisation Socialist Alliance.
Apparently it was quite a weekend. A dinner titled “Forty years of the Cuban Revolution” was held on Saturday evening. I’m sorry I missed it.
In August 1999 Green Left Weekly reported that Matilda was associated with the “New Broad Left” student group, an attempt by the then two biggest Trotskyite groups [DSP and the International Socialist Organisation] to organise extreme-left groups on university campuses in an effort to wrest control of the NUS away from the traditionally dominant Young ALP.
Matilda wasn’t just a member, she was the Queensland co-convener for NBL, and seemed quite enthusiastic about using the group to fight mushy mainstream Labor party types, stating:
“You are either with the system or against it, and on an ideological level NOLS [Young ALP] are part of the system, so I don’t think they should be included. It is more important to be pro-feminist, anti-capitalist and fight for queer rights and environmentalism. If you are in NOLS, you can’t be a revolutionary and be any of these things in a meaningful sense.”
A year later in August 2000, not long before taking up her legal career, Matilda helped lead a rally against John Howard’s policies on IVF for lesbians alongside the members of Queers Against Corporate Exploitation who described themselves as:
“A group committed to combating homophobia through the use of militant forms of direct action and linking our struggle to the struggles of other oppressed peoples such as women, indigenous people and the working class.”
QuACE boasted about organising an illegal occupation of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Offices in the Brisbane CBD, blockading Australian Stock Exchanges on May Day 2001, and organising activists to attend the orgy of thuggery and vandalism that was the 2000 Melbourne S11 riots.
Pretty mainstream stuff, clearly.
The IVF protest also tells us more about the Prisoners Legal Service that curiously picked Matilda up straight out of University.
At that protest, in her capacity as Brisbane co-ordinator for the Prisoners Legal Service, was one Karen Fletcher who just happens to have been a member of the Democratic Socialist Party [later the Socialist Alliance] for over twenty years, standing as their candidate in elections for the New South Wales Legislative Assembly (1995); the House of Representatives (1996); and the Queensland Senate (in both 1990 and 2001). She was still writing for Green Left Weekly as late as 2014.
It looks a lot like Karen and Matilda got along so well that they ended up working together the very next year. Imagine that.
So to sum up, the Queensland government just gave a $7000 dollar taxpayer-funded top up to a group they only months ago gave over $400,000 dollars to, on the understanding that the smaller grant be used to monitor speech the government dislikes and prepare legal cases against dissidents.
The woman gifted with this mandate for internet thought-policing, and put in charge of all this taxpayer money, is a Marxist activist with a long history of associating with the most violent political extremists in this country. A woman who in her own words believes that Feminism, anti-capitalism, queer rights and environmentalism need to be enforced via a violent revolution, and also that:
“There seems to be a misconception that freedom of speech allows you to say whatever you want”.
I don’t know what’s more terrifying, that this happened or that at least two full-time journalists were so biased or incompetent that they didn’t even bother to check.