Author: Michael Barnett

Allegedly this comment got Pauline Pantsdown banned from the Facebook page of The Australian newspaper:

“Oh, Archbishop Davies. The recent events you write about were two people tweeting at corporations and organisations about the perceived discrepancy between their stated company values and the membership of their boards. This is hardly a headlong strike at the heart of democracy, you’d need a greater scale for that. How great? You’d need to go to the architect of the activists’ tactics in the marriage equality debate. – your friend and colleague, Archbishop Anthony Fisher of the Catholic Church, who bizarrely seems to be holding the same position as you. The letters that he got his Business Affairs Manager to send to Telstra and other corporations in 2016, recommending that they back down on their supportive stance for marriage equality, carried considerably more weight and threat to the status of those companies than two guys tweeting about board members. Had Telstra not stood their moral ground, the consequences of the possible withdrawal of Catholic Church accounts – from any corporation or company – would have been a more powerful slap than us individual LGBTI activists could ever hope to muster from our twitter accounts. It’s a little bizarre that you decry our small-scale appropriation of Anthony Fisher’s tactics. Climb down from that cross – you’re the ones who purchased the nails.”

So much for Freedom of Speech.