Trust governments to rule what’s true? Not a chance

That we would allow MPs to extend their control over public debate is an abomination.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. If we allow politicians and bureaucrats to decide what is reality and what is not up for debate, we may as well kiss democracy goodbye. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

In a world awash with lies, spin, fake news and AI-generated deep fakes, the craziest thing we could do is make government the arbiter of truth. If we allow politicians and bureaucrats to decide what is reality and what is not up for debate, we may as well kiss democracy goodbye.

Under a Labor-Greens government we might get a ruling that the truth was a renewables-plus-storage model was the cheapest form of reliable clean energy and to dispute this would be censored or outlawed. A Coalition government might enforce the fallacy that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was 20 or 30 pages long, just to make sure nobody raised Indigenous issues again.

“War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.” It seems the only thing George Orwell got wrong was the year.

Think of the falsehoods and Orwellian slogans politicians have foisted on us just in recent years: pandemic of the unvaccinated; green energy superpower; building the education revolution; flattening the curve; and powering Australia to bring down household power bills by $275 a year.

Previously in these pages I have revealed how the federal government, under the Morrison Coalition and Albanese Labor, used counter-terrorism arrangements to secretly censor social media commentary during the pandemic. Thanks to Freedom of Information applications by Liberal senator Alex Antic we learned that much of what the government censored was the truth.

Canberra intervened to have the digital media giants remove posts such as “Covid-19 vaccine does not prevent Covid-19 infection or Covid-19 transmission” and “Covid-19 was released or escaped from Wuhan laboratory in China and was funded by the US government”. It was clear these claims were factual at the time, and this has only been confirmed by all we have learned since.

This censorship, this anti-truth intervention against free speech, happened in a similar way to what is proposed under Labor’s new laws, by imposing obligations on the digital giants.

The concept that we would allow politicians at any time, let alone now, to extend their indirect control over public debate is an abomination. The Orwellian title of Labor’s proposed new laws should be enough to warn people off – Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill.

It makes you wonder why they did not just call it the Trust Governments to Control the Truth Bill. Maybe they thought no one would believe that.

So, what is this misinformation and disinformation that our benevolent masters wish to protect us from? Under the legislation misinformation is defined as “information that is reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive”, whereas disinformation is the same but with “grounds to suspect” the person disseminating it “intends that the content deceive” or it “involves inauthentic behaviour”.

In other words, misinformation is information someone says is deceptive and disinformation is information someone says is deliberately deceptive. While this Labor government is ignoring Orwell’s warnings, at least it is taking Mark Twain’s advice and writing what it knows.

Thank goodness the Coalition will oppose this outright. Yet it still may pass thanks to the unholy Labor, Greens and teals alliance that is built on a shared commitment to big government and moral superiority.

The irony is chilling – an informal political coalition that bases most of its arguments on twisted facts and outright lies is looking to entrench a system of bureaucratic censorship of public debate. It is gratifying that I got to write that observation while I still can.

Labor’s bill will empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority, which already oversees broadcast media, to enforce content regulation of the digital giants. Some will argue that if ACMA already regulates radio and television there cannot be a serious problem.

But this overlooks the insidious constraints ACMA sometimes enforces on broadcasters.

The pandemic, again, is a case in point.

To stay on the right side of ACMA, which took its cue from government authorities and bodies such as the World Health Organ­isation, broadcasters drastically self-censored on pandemic management criticisms. This was the only time in my four decades of media work where I regularly had legal interventions limiting what I could say – I don’t blame my employer or our lawyers, they were trying to ensure our station would not be punished and our content could still be posted on the digital platforms.

But the compromises and constrictions on debate were onerous. We were forced to pull back on much of our criticism of vaccination mandates, lockdowns and other restrictions, and even discussion of alternative treatments. At the very least, this suppressed healthy debate on public health management.

In some instances, it meant there was a gag on the truth.

The idea that similar controls should be applied to the digital giants permanently is chilling. They already distort free speech through their algorithms and political bias, as has been exposed in the US – we should be more concerned with combating that than imposing a new bureaucratic layer of censorship over the top.

It would seem a better idea legally to treat the platforms as publishers so that they are liable for any defamatory material or illegal information they host. If they do not know the identity of the people posting it, then the culpability should fall to them.

There is plenty of room for debate on how best to handle these issues; it is complex and the status quo could be improved.

But extending government-sanctioned censorship should be a red line.

Antic is one of the few strong and consistent voices on this topic. He has organised a petition against Labor’s misinformation laws with a heading borrowed from Orwell: “Stop the Ministry of Truth”.

“This is going to become a Ministry of Truth, it is going to become an absolute death knell for freedom of speech in this country,” Antic says, “and without freedom of speech there’s no freedom at all.”

The government circulated a guidance document about the bill and it cites “harm to the health of Australians” as one example of why misinformation should be tackled. Its example of harming health was misinformation causing “people to ingest or inject bleach products to treat a viral infection”. This was a transparent attempt to piggyback on nonsensical tropes and outright lies circulated after Donald Trump discussed Covid treatment research involving bleach during the pandemic. “Only this government,” says Antic, “could use misinformation in order to prosecute the case of misinformation.”

The public square is already heavily marshalled by political correctness. The sanctimony of the green left and the threat of the dreaded social media pile-on or social ostracisation clearly constrains public debate within unwritten bounds of orthodoxy.

This is the real threat: limiting ideas, constraining dissent and delivering a blancmange that suppresses not only liberty but also creativity and innovation in all endeavours. In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell was on to this risk and the price we would pay: “Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

A similar assessment came from Aldous Huxley in that other prescient novel about bedevilling our future with traps set for ourselves, Brave New World. Huxley explained what the authoritarians feared: “Unorthodoxy threatens more than the life of a mere individual; it strikes at society itself.”

Labor’s bill will seek to impose an orthodoxy on our public debate, an orthodoxy settled and agreed by the elites – politicians, bureaucrats and their delegated committees. What a frightening prospect, both in terms of freedoms lost and in having the life sucked out of our society.