The most effective form of censorship doesn’t necessarily involve the government banning what you say. It involves making everyone else afraid to let you say it.
That’s the danger in the Albanese Government’s Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care) Bill 2026, which passed the House of Representatives on Wednesday and now goes to the Senate.
The bill would force online platforms to take reasonable steps to protect users from a list of harmful material and conduct. Fall short and the penalty can reach $109.2 million.
Canberra says it’s about protecting Australians, kids especially, and at the core of it that’s fair enough. Keeping children away from pornography, exploitation and abuse is a proper job for government. But a real problem doesn’t make every proposed fix a good one.
This bill has a catch. It also reaches material that promotes hostility towards women or gender equality. Who decides what counts as hostility? If you reject contemporary gender ideology, is that hostility to gender equality? What about a pastor posting Christian teaching on the different roles of men and women? Would a platform’s compliance team see that as a risk?
Those questions aren’t far-fetched. Genuinely harmful material and opinions the powerful find distasteful have never been easy to tell apart, and this bill hands the sorting to someone else.
Now look at it from the platform’s side. Miss an obligation, and you face a nine-figure penalty. Pull down something perfectly lawful and nothing comparable happens under this duty. So which way does a cautious business lean? Delete the post. Lock the account. Nobody has broken the law; it’s just cheaper.
That’s censorship with no ban in sight. Ministers get to say they’ve never outlawed an opinion. Platforms get to say they’re only following the law. Meanwhile ordinary Australians find that their place in public debate depends on the judgment of moderators and regulators they never chose.
For Christians, this goes beyond free speech in the abstract. Christ’s authority doesn’t stop at the church door. It covers public morality, government and the family, and believers are called to speak truthfully even when the culture finds it uncomfortable. A law that makes that riskier every year isn’t just regulating technology. It’s leaning on religious and moral dissent.
Government has a real duty to punish wrongdoing. It doesn’t get to decide which lawful convictions are allowed an airing.
Silence shouldn’t be the safe option whenever people disagree. Under the Digital Duty of Care, it could be.