Friday, September 30, 2011

Why can't I be free to speak?

I am the son of journalist parents who came to Australia the year before I was born.

For a long time, I have felt like an outsider here, not least because my family moved around so very often.

You know how it is when you feel you don’t fit in. You look for other identities, other groups, like climate change deniers, to give you a sense of belonging, and perhaps some status.

So for a while I considered myself a Journalist, and even worked for a newspaper.

Later I realised how affected that was, and how I was borrowing a group identity rather than asserting my own. Andrew Clot’s.

So I chose to refer to myself as a defender of  free speech, as one of the many on the Right who claim that any criticism or inconvenient fact checking of our claims is an attack on our freedom of speech.

Yet even now I fret about how my free speech is being silenced here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here.

So that’s the background to the calamity that hit me yesterday.

That’s why I believe we can choose and even renounce facts, because I have done that myself.