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Liberal Democrat John Ruddick’s maiden speech to the New South Wales Parliament on 28 June was censored by YouTube. The video of his speech was removed by YouTube just 7 hours after it was uploaded.   

YouTube claims that the video violated its “medical misinformation policy,” and implied that removing the video was necessary to ensure that YouTube remains a “safe place for all.”  

So, what did Mr. Ruddick actually say that might have disturbed the information gatekeepers?  You can watch his speech below and decide for yourself.

Read more: YouTube Censors Australian Politician’s Maiden Speech to Parliament, Brownstone Institute, 8 July 2023

During his maiden speech Mr Ruddick said that he had been tempted to leave the Liberal Party and defect to the Liberal Democrats in the past but mid-2021 was the final straw. “State and federal Liberal governments did four things that made me throw in the towel,” he said.  He listed them as:

• the authoritarian covid police state, all over a bad flu;
• vaccine extremism;
• government debt; and,
• “despite most Liberal parliamentarians privately acknowledging a ‘Net Zero carbon economy’ is a reckless folly, they capitulated anyway because the polls said to. Real leaders don’t follow polls – they change them.”

“The Liberal Democrats,” he said, “are a libertarian party. We libertarians are plotting to take over the world, so we can leave you all alone. Libertarianism can be summed up in two words: power corrupts.”

“The worst atrocities of history were not the result of drought, flood, pestilence or plague but of big government throwing its weight around like an elephant stomping on ants. Scepticism of government doesn’t make you a conspiracy theorist – it makes you a history buff.

“[One of the reasons], libertarians don’t like big government because mankind is, from time to time, subject to irrational, harmful mass delusions – especially when melded with big government. Covid is merely the last case study.

“Is the global warming orthodoxy yet another mass delusion turbo-charged by big government? … Why was global warming rebadged climate change? Is it because the warming didn’t arrive? … When it is pointed out that perhaps the science is not as settled as we are told, some get upset. But surely it would be a good thing if we weren’t facing a global warming apocalypse, wouldn’t it? It seems like some want to press ahead regardless of reality because it is in their commercial or political interests to do so.

“The political forces across the Western world who spent the 20th century advocating the big government utopia of socialism, disappointingly did not learn from the collapse of socialism in the early 1990s and overnight morphed into: ‘Let’s now have a big powerful government to save us from global warming’. It’s forgotten that the nations with the most degraded natural environments are the once-socialist utopias.

“My preference would have been for environmentalism to have branched out into advocating for animal welfare and the protection of endangered species and native forests but there’s no money to be made in those noble causes.”

The video of Mr. Ruddick’s maiden speech has been reposted on YouTube HERE but we have uploaded a copy of it below should it be removed by YouTube for a second time. You can read the transcript of Mr. Ruddick’s speech published by The Spectator Australia HERE.