Regulating speech at law is much like regulating breath. At what point is an intake of air deemed inappropriate to the body and worthy of rationing? When will exhalation be allowed? The very idea that speech requires ordering and control is the first step to preventing its exercise. Death, in this case to freedom of thought and political expression, is bound to follow.
Unfortunately, the rationing of speech and its exercise is a favourite of governments the world over, even in liberal democratic countries. As it’s the only genuine way one can address the gross inequality between the power of the citizenry and the governing authorities exercising such a right is bound to strike terror in the hearts of those who shun accountability and criticism. Importantly, it also points to the possibility of losing control, be it over official narratives or myths deemed palatable to those in power.
Much of this was evident in the recently ditched Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 proposed by Australia’s Albanese government. It was a bill that had already made its debut in a previous iteration but had been revised and redressed for parliamentary consumption. The revision, and redressing, failed to impress.
In Australian Senate hearings on the bill, the edifice began to crumble. Nationals Senator Ross Cadell, in a question to the Communications Department, wondered why there wasn’t a single witness not a member of the government agency who “says this bill should pass as it is.” On November 22, the Greens demanded that the government pull the draft, arguing that it exempted such media titans as Rupert Murdoch while shifting the responsibility “to tech companies and billionaires like Elon Musk to determine what is true or false under ambiguous definitions.”
Facing certain defeat, the Albanese government revealed its position a few days later. “Based on public statements and engagements with senators, it is clear that there is no pathway to legislate this proposal through the Senate,” conceded Communications Minister Michelle Rowland.
On its demise, former deputy prime minister and Nationals MP Barnaby Joyce was characteristically colourful: “This shabby, decrepit, blanket over democracy is not even going to make it to the Vinnies bin, […] it’s going straight to the tip where it will be burnt.”
Why, then, was this bill so problematic? For one, it proposed adding schedule 9 to the Broadcasting Services Act 1992(Cth), imposing core obligations on digital platforms to make their own risk assessments regarding misinformation and disinformation on their platforms, and publishing their findings on the matter; publish their policy or policy approach regarding how misinformation and disinformation is managed; and publish what an oddly named “a media literacy plan” that would outline the measures that the platform will take to enable users to identify misinformation and disinformation.
In first placing the onus on digital tech giants to effectively police content supposedly deemed by Australian government regulators to fall foul of the “mis-disinformation” bar, the warning shot to information exchange was being made with a clamour. But just to add another layer of stifling, rough and ready regulation, the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) would have been empowered to do a number of things. Its powers would have included obtaining documents and information regarding such misinformation and disinformation from the platforms, make rules regarding their recording and retaining of records on the same, even if disallowable by Parliament; approve and register misinformation codes, even if disallowable by Parliament; and determine misinformation standards in cases where the misinformation codes supposedly did not protect the Australian community.
When it comes to the relevant meanings, misinformation, for instance, is described in subclause 13(1) as content containing information “reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive.” Expansively, and chillingly, this intended to include opinions, claims, commentary and invective. Indeed, the Explanatory Memorandum is damning in noting, with approval, such a provision, warning that “experience from around the world suggests that misinformation and disinformation of this nature can influence public opinion and sway voter behaviour to such an extent that the outcome of an electoral process can no longer be said to represent the free will of the electorate.”
Disinformation, subclause 13(2), shifts the focus to intention, namely, the “grounds to suspect that the person disseminating, or causing the dissemination of, the content intends to deceive another person.”
The concept of serious harm in the bill was critical. Not only would it cover such instances as information on public health, but also “harm to the operation or integrity of a Commonwealth, State, Territory or local government electoral or referendum process.” Doing so would effectively vest ACMA with powers to comb through information shared during an electoral or referendum process, even if it was a mere opinion, true or false. Political speech becomes the object.
The Bill was also not intended to cover the dissemination of “professional news” – which more than suggests a threat to independent media outlets not officially approved as appropriate outlets for journalism.
In the US, we can at least rely on constitutional protections that saw the sinking of the absurd Disinformation Government Board, established in 2022 to guide the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in targeting the deliberate dissemination of false information. The advisory body, while lacking, according to the DHS, “operational authority or capability”, was advertised as a council of wise creatures, working “in a way that protects Americans’ freedom of speech, civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy.”
The Board was swiftly, to cite a word common in press coverage at the time, “paused” after a mere three weeks on suspicions that it would be unworkable and unconstitutional. “Legally, it is rarely permissible for the US government to be the arbiter of truth,” wrote Jill Goldenziel for Forbes in May 2022. “The name suggested that it would do just that – despite DHS officials’ protests that it was designed to protect free speech.”
Despite these failings, the Board’s former chair, Nina Jankowicz, has been busy promoting its ideas abroad, notably on the issue of electoral interference. Jankowicz, who markets herself as a disinformation expert, did her best in a visit to Australia to warn about malicious agents attempting to meddle in the Australian electoral system. On Radio National’s Saturday Extra, she was unequivocal that the triumph of the “No” vote in the 2023 referendum held to decide whether an Indigenous voice should be constitutionally enshrined, had been driven by some 9,000 digital accounts based in China. Never mind that the voters convincingly rejected the proposition. Despite admitting that one should still look “at the data” to verify her case, breezy speculation abounded. An Indigenous voice to parliament could have threatened Chinese mining rights.
Joyce is only partly correct in assuming that this hideous bill perished in a fiery tip reserved for bad legislation. Its remains will be revived and reincarnated in due course, along with the justifications of danger, instability and chaos that arise when citizens traverse the World Wide Web unsupervised. And it is impossible to imagine a Coalition government, certainly one run by the paranoid Peter Dutton, resisting the temptations of restricting thought, content and communications expressed online.
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Any proposed policy or misguided regulation that inhibits or places a ban on free speech is dangerously undemocratic and goes against EVERYTHING that 99.99% of Australians believe in! When politicians – on both sides of the political fence – attempt to silence us or grotesquely inhibit our freedom of speech, that type of autocratic, undemocratic power can, very quickly, deteriorate into fascism! Australians won’t stand for it! You would expect this type of megalomaniacal proposal to be pushed through by the power-obsessed autocrats, misogynistic predators and racist right-wing extremists in the LNP; the fact that it was proposed by a Labor PM, Albanese, goes against EVERYTHING that the eminent, compassionate late Labor leader, Gough Whitlam, believes in! Clearly, Albanese has proven to be a bitter disappointment and is shaping up to be a right-wing wolf in “left-wing clothing” – there doesn’t seem to be much difference between Albanese and that unspeakably corrupt, racist and dangerously undemocratic political psychopath, Peter Dutton! Whilst it is agreed that Labor is (or was) a fairer, more compassionate and egalitarian political party, sadly, it seems evident that the two major parties have lost the plot. BOTH major parties seem to be seeking megalomaniacal power without consequence and seeking to shut down any form of public debate and/or justifiable criticism against their increasing level of born-to-rule arrogance, self-serving corruption, inherent misogyny and increasing lack of compassion for working- and middle-class Australians! What happened to the compassionate, left-wing Labor Party of yesteryear? No wonder other political parties like the Greens and the Teals are becoming more and more popular.
Lest we forget: the death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013, demented, an incontinent wreck who no longer recognised her family let alone the enormous damage she had done to Britain and by extension the western hemisphere by virtue of her championing of the socially destructive policies of neoliberalism with its upward flow of capital at the cost of the broader communities.
Her death was widely celebrated in Britain with the playing of the song, Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead, such was the hatred the population of that country felt towards this satanic harridan.
And here we are, more than forty years on, social inequality at historical levels in America, Australia, Britain, all as a consequence of Thatcher’s (and Reagan’s) embrace of destructive economic policies.
A koala stamp for Binoy’s allusion.
The MAD Bill is aimed at destroying freedom of speech as Katie clearly explains above.
Freedom and truth are magnetic. And if there’s one thing globalist and petty dictators with their well-honed narratives of deceit tend to hate, it is free thinkers and truth coming together. The movies ‘They Live’ and ‘The Jones Plantation’ spring to mind.
It’s easy to see the goal of the MAD Bill, just look to Russia or China: REAL freedoms gone.
3 parties were to be exempt from the MAD Bill – politicians, MSM outlets and universities. For the last 4 years the public was told by politicians and media that Pfizer’s vaccine (gene-therapy) was ‘safe and effective’ to treat Covid-19. Yet if one searches for –
‘5.3.6 CUMULATIVE ANALYSIS OF POST-AUTHORIZATION ADVERSE EVENT REPORTS OF PF-07302048 (BNT162B2) RECEIVED THROUGH 28-FEB-2021’
(phmpt.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/reissue_5.3.6-postmarketing-experience.pdf)
and goes to –
‘APPENDIX 1. LIST OF ADVERSE EVENTS OF SPECIAL INTEREST’ (page 30-38)
there’s a list of over 1000 potentially serious side effects.
Someone is spreading MISINFO, either Pfizer lied to the FDA telling them their product was dangerous and they made up that list, which the FDA stupidly approved anyway; or our politicians and media are lying that the product is ‘safe and effective’ even after reading that report, which reminds me, how are the remedial reading group sessions going at the TGA HQ?
But I assume the Pfizer report is true, so how can it be otherwise that Pfizer and the FDA have a cosy relationship, a co-ordinated dance of deception to bring a product to market without advising the public of the dangers shown in the report? Did they really believe no-one and no Court would ever expose that document to the public? Obviously.
I doubt the MAD Bill is ‘dead’, more like loitering in the corridors of Canberra, waiting for a massive MSM distraction so a leftist Fabian, dressed in sheep’s clothing, can pass it into legislation under some kind of contrived ‘emergency’ or maybe some LNP equivalent do the same thing.
It must be a hard job these days being a journo covering the number of lies coming out of Canberra, but then again, birds of a feather.
katie, absolutism is not worth defending.
We are reaching a cross road where “free speech ” is used as a shield to say and do anything to gain power. See Trump and now Dutton on nuclear energy and antisematism crap.
We need decisive action to bring liars to heel. Spreaders of misinformation need to be shown the whats for.
We can start with the media. Murdoch was allowed too much leverage to stoke fear and misinformation over a long long period. Lets face it, his mantra is far superior to any education system we have devised. Everything from realestate to championing the libs whilst having a monoploy on the media outlets. This is NOT FREE SPEECH. this is malfeasance at its core. He isnt interested in free speech, unless it makes money. You dipstick libertarians want to play by Marquise de Queensberry rules, all the while these AHoles are pulling your pants down and ramming you from behind.
Its not hard to pick the obvious ones, and thats a very good place to start. Why are we so caught up in the technicalities of the complex ones? So the perfect has to destroy the good because …..the babies think its too hard.
You want an example of easy? Murdochs 4 page spead telling us of the wonders of gas. It should have been easy as, your a newspaper with news reporters, you influence people. stop the shit or your licence is removed. You have 4 days to balance it out with 4 front pages of reasons why its a shit idea. You dont create the facts, your job is to report and not influence, no matter how much they pay you. Pick the obvious ones, and they are there every second day.
Free speech my backside. Its a euphemism for shaft me at at will and collect $200 on the way.
Another one, no politician shall be allowed to sue anyone . We pay them to do a job, if they are no good, we should be able to call them out. The legal system should know when they are being gamed. The finest minds and they cant see what ten guys at the local can. If the legal system deals with facts only, why are politicians immune……because the ones making the rules are same ones who abuse free speech.
Since when is demonising refugees been deemed acceptable? Since when is legit discussions about the israeli government been deemed antisematism? Its long been acceptable to demonise dole bludgers….we let that mantra bleed into our brains because nobody had the guts to call it out as a big fat lie. In fact the media revelled in it.
we live in a post fact world, accept that we need to reign it in or go down the slope that humanity has experienced time and again.
Katie, “What happened to the compassionate, left-wing Labor Party of yesteryear? ”
we the voters decided to go with spin at every election time. The facts were just inconvenient.
We intimidated them into acceptance to get elected. Shorten had a good plan but we went with Morrison.
Who did that to us? Keep voting in aholes and soon, only aholes get elected.
Now, facts are no longer important, its the culture war you got to win to get elected.
Expect nothing but lies from Dutton for next years election!!!
Remember Howard’s core and non core promises?
Howard said that everybody should had known what promises he was gong to keep!!!