‘Deeply flawed’: Truth bill on the brink in Senate showdown

Key senators are blockading a divisive government plan to crack down on lies in major public debates, threatening to vote down the bill and adding to a logjam of more than 20 bills stalled in the Senate.

The new warnings put the contentious plan on a path to defeat unless the government convinces at least three independent senators to set aside their concerns about giving a federal agency sweeping power to oversee content safeguards on social media.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland put the misinformation bill to parliament in September after a year of dispute over draft changes.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The setback comes as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese calls on the Senate to pass government bills including aged care changes, anti-scam measures, a school funding boost, new merger laws, the creation of an environment protection agency and housing reform.

The misinformation regime aims to give federal authorities the power to force tech giants to act on alerts about damaging falsehoods and stop them spreading before they cause serious harm, citing cases such as the misidentification of the Bondi Junction knife attacker earlier this year.

But independent senators including David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie, Tammy Tyrrell, Fatima Payman and Gerard Rennick are holding out against the plan, putting it on course for defeat even if Labor gains support from the Greens.

Senators said they were receiving hundreds of emails and calls from voters who opposed the draft law because they believed the Australian Communications and Media Authority should not have the power to check the controls on social media content.

Pocock declared his concerns on Friday afternoon ahead of a Senate committee hearing on Monday that will hear from experts about how the law might work.

“As it stands, I believe the government’s approach is deeply flawed and there would need to be wholesale changes to the bill in order for it to get my support,” he said.

Lambie said the government plan assumed it was easy to identify mis- and disinformation but experts said it was not.

“There are lots of problems with this bill and the government is rushing it. They only allowed seven working days to make submissions to the inquiry,” she said.

Independent senators including David Pocock, Jacqui Lambie, Fatima Payman, Tammy Tyrrell and Gerard Rennick are holding out against Labor’s plan to crack down on lies in major public debates.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

Rennick, who left the Liberal National Party in August and now sits as an independent, said Queensland voters were telling him they did not want a government agency to have power over claims made in public debate.

“The idea of having the government control over their version of the truth is extremely alarming,” he said.

Payman said she was aware of the concerns and would meet the Australian Christian Lobby next week to learn why religious groups opposed the draft law. She would decide her vote after more consultation.

Victorian senator David Van, who quit the Liberals to sit on the crossbench, said he was open to passing the bill because it was mainly about the power to direct platforms to take down harmful content.

“If I’m right and that’s the full extent of the powers, I’ve got no problem with that whatsoever,” he said.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland put the misinformation bill to parliament in September after a year of dispute over draft changes that drew objections from the Law Council of Australia and civil liberties groups about the threat to free speech.

The bill includes exemptions for the media and ensures that satire, parody and religious content will be protected.

To settle fears that ACMA would decide what was true or false, the government drafted the bill to leave those decisions to the social media platforms themselves, as long as they could show they had acted on complaints from the community.

Rowland insisted last month that the law posed no threat to free speech and was backed by security agencies that warned that false information was causing real damage in the community.

“Over 80 per cent of Australians are concerned about the rise of mis- and disinformation,” she said.

“The fact that it harms democracies, it harms economies, and the fact that action is needed in this area [means that] doing nothing is not an option.

“There are online harms that harm people socially. There are harms that harm economically, including in the area of scams. And there are also harms that go to our democracy.”

Coalition communications spokesman David Coleman has strongly opposed the bill on the grounds that those who wanted to silence opponents would claim a statement was misinformation and try to have it removed.

“A classic example is the Voice debate last year where the government, pretty much every day, said opinions they didn’t like were misinformation,” Coleman said last month.

“If this law had been in place, then I’m sure it would have been used and it would have had a chilling effect on that debate.”

The Law Council expressed serious concerns about the changes last year. The NSW Council for Civil Liberties said it supported new regulation to hold digital platforms accountable, but wanted amendments to improve public transparency. The Victorian Bar, the peak group of barristers in that state, said the bill should not be passed.

“While the Bar acknowledges the importance of responding to false and otherwise harmful information online, such responses ought to only make justifiable incursions into socially valuable freedom of expression,” the Victorian Bar said in a submission to the government.

“The present bill is not justifiable in this respect and will have a chilling effect. It is also likely to be ineffective and unworkable in responding to the harms to which it is purportedly directed.”

Labor has 25 senators and is hoping to gain support from the 11 Greens but needs 39 votes to pass a bill in the upper house, forcing it to find at least three independents.

The government has at least 20 bills it wants passed by the Senate as soon as possible but has only scheduled two more weeks of parliament for the year, starting from November 18.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on Friday the parliament would return in February, although MPs and senators privately observed that this would depend on whether Labor chose to go to an election early in the new year.

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