Smoke and mirrors: truth goes MIA in a world full of spin and deception
In the age of information, people are becoming isolated in digital silos where beliefs are seldom stress-tested.
Truth is as golden as Lasseter’s Reef, but in our public debate it has become almost as hard to find. The battle against lies in politics is nothing new (Winston Churchill said “a lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on”) but we are losing it faster and more often.
How do we settle momentous issues of economics, science and engineering without coalescing around agreed facts? We need to confront reality rather than pretend it away, yet in the information age people are becoming isolated in digital silos where facts are seldom stress-tested.
The times do not value truth. To observe that someone with a penis is not a woman is to invite scorn and censure; we are expected to go along with the chosen pronouns of individuals rather than prioritise the rights of biological women and girls.
We see university students, no less, align their activism in support of Palestinians in Hamas-controlled Gaza with their support for LGBTIQA+ rights. Queers for Palestine is not an ironic tagline or a bizarre suicide pact but an earnest group of pro-Palestinian protesters – what next, Yazidi women for Islamic State?
Palestinian protesters also have displayed placards linking their cause to climate action. It defies belief that such absurdity can exist, let alone be taken seriously.
Even after our federal election Labor Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is persisting with a $600bn price tag for the Coalition’s nuclear power plan. This is a fabricated figure, a wildly exaggerated number five times higher than credible estimates, and it comes from a Labor-aligned renewable energy lobby group – it is a lie.
Yet those who have called this out most stridently from the right-of-centre happen to be the same people who promulgated the falsehood that the Uluru Statement from the Heart was 18 or 26 pages long. If you want to demand honesty in political debate you need to stand on solid ground yourself.
We were lied to ad nauseam during the Covid-19 pandemic. This was a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, Victorian premier Daniel Andrews declared, insisting there was a social duty to get the jab as he locked his state down and even imposed curfews without medical advice.
Our own government secretly censored social media to take down factual posts about the inability of vaccines to prevent virus transmission or the ineffectiveness of lockdowns. We were told lies about the origins of the virus, the threat it posed to the healthy and the young, the relative risks from vaccines, the effectiveness of masks.
People were arrested for daring to dissent. Yet so thin is our society’s commitment to honesty and transparency that the politicians have been able to avoid a full royal commission into the pandemic response. After colluding to spread fear rather than facts, most of the media is happy to leave it all unexamined. No apologies have been forthcoming.
The climate and energy debate is broadly disdainful of reality. Think about how often we are told renewable energy is the cheapest form of electricity and then examine what its rollout has done to our power costs.
Bowen offers the oxymoron that “reliable renewables are securing the grid” – a complete inversion of reality. He insults the intelligence of voters but is seldom interrogated on the facts.
Proponents are free to advocate for renewables all they like – there are rational arguments to be made – but pretending away the central weakness of intermittence is delusional. If renewables are reliable and cheap, then war is peace and ignorance is strength – when bills go up or power is in short supply, reality catches up with spin.
On global warming we are constantly fed forecasts and opinions as fact, even when they fly in the face of the empirical record. During Cyclone Alfred in March, Anthony Albanese said “the science tells us that there would be more extreme weather events” and “anyone who looks at the science knows that that is what is occurring”.
In fact, the science shows tropical cyclones in Australia have become less common; even the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water’s Earth Systems and Climate Change Hub notes the “overall number of tropical cyclones recorded in the Australian region has decreased significantly in recent decades”.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts cyclone frequency will continue to decline with a possible increase in intensity.
After most bushfires and floods we hear activists, politicians and media refer to new records as they misuse the word “unprecedented”. A quick check of the record often exposes their claims – our worst bushfires and floods in most locations occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries.
On January 24, 2019, the Bureau of Meteorology proclaimed a record maximum of 46.6C for Adelaide, claiming it was the hottest maximum ever recorded in an Australian capital city. Yet almost exactly 80 years earlier, on January 12, 1939, the maximum recorded in Adelaide was 47.6C, a full degree hotter.
When questioned, the BOM advised it had revised down or “homogenised” the earlier records, as it has done with much of the historical temperature data. So the record it proclaimed only occurred because it had lowered, ex post facto, the earlier record.
The bureau will defend its scientific processes; fair enough. But if it were really interested in facts and transparency, it would at least include footnotes and be upfront about its revisions.
Then there is the constant and nonsensical deceit (and conceit) that emissions reductions in Australia can change the climate. The science is clear, we can make no discernible difference.
On Middle Eastern affairs we are constantly told that Hamas terrorists in Gaza are fighting against Israeli “occupation”. Yet Israel withdrew completely from Gaza, including forcibly removing Israeli farmers and settlers, two decades ago.
The term genocide is used to describe Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza when the latter’s population has been growing faster than Israel’s and their energy, health and food supplies have been facilitated by Israel all along. We have never seen a war previously where so much care has been taken to warn civilians about attacks and provide pathways and ceasefires for safe passage.
Figures provided by Hamas-controlled agencies about the number of Gazans killed are shared by the world’s media without accounting for the fact that about half of the dead are terrorists and many others have died of natural causes.
In the first weeks of the war global media reported that Israel had bombed a hospital and killed 500 people when no such thing happened – a missile fired by a Hamas-aligned group landed off-target and killed up to 200 people.
Unsurprisingly for Islamist terror groups, the wild claims from Hamas and its affiliates are often the polar opposite of the reality. Yet they are amplified and endorsed by much of the media and political debate before verification.
On social media there is an unholy confluence of hidden agendas, misinformation, artificial intelligence and malevolent actors that feeds directly into the minds of our population, especially the young. And the algorithms ensure that whatever falsehoods intrigue us will be repeated and reaffirmed on constant loop.
As traditional media becomes more polarised, the silo effect is accentuated and we see far too few examples of people with differing views debating issues directly, so that we might at least come to an agreed set of facts on which to base our disagreements.
The one shining light of the federal election campaign was that we had four debates of differing formats fostering a contest of ideas and information – the trouble is most people probably consumed it through social media tidbits and hot takes.
These are immensely challenging times. Increasingly we are picking our way through a hall of mirrors.
There must be a constituency for truth because it will always win out in the long run. What we are missing are platforms that dare to confront all issues from all sides with the aim of arriving at basic truths, even if we disagree about how to address them.
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