Christians lose faith in Labor’s misinformation bill

Legal expert Patrick Parkinson has warned Labor’s proposed laws to combat online misinformation will send it down a ‘dangerous path’ of censorship.

University of Queensland Professor Patrick Parkinson has penned a submission for Freedom For Faith on the misinformation bill. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen/The Australian

Legal expert Patrick Parkinson says Labor’s proposed laws to combat online misinformation will send it down a “dangerous path” of censorship, cautioning that religious teachings and claims about gender identity could be captured by the bill.

The Christian legal scholar said there was a risk that “anything which upsets the powerbrokers of the day” would be captured by the bill and censored, calling for the legislation to be amended to grant faith institutions an exemption.

The bill will grant the Australian Communications and Media Authority the power to fine social media giants millions of dollars for misinformation and content it deems harmful, but will not capture content from governments, educational institutions or media outlets.

“I think the government is embarking on a very dangerous path from which it will be difficult to pull back,” Professor Parkinson said.

He wrote a submission to government on behalf of Christian think tank Freedom of Faith, in which he said claims by the transgender movement including that “puberty blockers are completely safe and reversible” could be labelled misinformation as they had been debunked by “medical experts of great distinction”.

Professor Parkinson said the bill, which leaves social media ­giants to monitor online content for misinformation and disinformation but threatens further action if self-regulation fails, would encourage platforms to be overly cautious in excluding content.

“It could stymie all sorts of speech; if you are warned that you will die if you fall over a cliff, the best way to avoid that is to stay 300m away from the cliff‘s edge,” he said.

“The social media companies will over-suppress and over-­censor to avoid any prospect of liability.”

In the submission – made on behalf of the Australian Baptist Ministries, Australian Christian Churches, Anglican Church Diocese of Sydney and the Seventh-day Adventist Church – Professor Parkinson said the bill’s “potential for conflicts of interest, abuse of power and censorship of ‘inconvenient truths’ is enormous”.

“The extraordinary power to censor religious teaching unfettered by any real public scrutiny leads us to conclude that the implications for freedom of religion in this country are too great to permit that courts should hold fiat over online religious teaching according to such an imprecise measure,” the submission said.