Kate Thwaites (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

My apologies, Deputy Speaker. The Prime Minister has not publicly condemned those comments—not surprisingly, as we have seen the Prime Minister repeatedly fail to act and pull into line government members who are spreading misinformation. All year we've seen social media accounts from the government side wrongly spruik hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. This kind of misinformation is outright dangerous. Perpetuating these lies and blurring the line between fact and fiction only continues to undermine and erode our democracy. Climate change deniers, far-Right hate groups, Islamophobia and COVID conspiracies all spread in social media bubbles on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. I have read with great interest and alarm in recent days reporting by Business Insider explaining how Sky News now has one of the biggest social media reaches of any Australian media organisation to spread their own unique brand of information and opinions.

Meanwhile, the news sources we used to get our information from and which helped us to create shared stories about what was actually going on in our communities are declining almost to the point of extinction. Our national broadcaster, which we know has been a trusted source that people have looked to for reliable information during this pandemic, has had its budget repeatedly slashed by this government. Tonight the government have been using the Senate to try to pre-emptively undermine the ABC's independence because they are not prepared to face scrutiny. Public interest journalism is on the endangered list in this country, and the government has no real plans to change the situation. We know from data collected by the ACCC that 106 local and regional newspaper titles closed across Australia between 2008 and 2018. That's a net 15 per cent decrease in the number of these publications. Earlier this year we nearly lost the independent news wire, AAP. The number of journalists employed in print and online businesses fell by 20 per cent between 2014 and 2017.

We are experiencing a crisis of information in this country. It requires the government to think differently about how it supports public interest journalism. It requires some creativity and some new thinking about: how do we have information flourish that is trustworthy? How do we support journalism that tells us what's going on in our community without peddling misinformation? How do we call out lies and mistruths? And what role do all of us, as leaders in this place, have to do that? If we continue to drift along, our democracy is at risk. Our sense of what makes us a strong and cohesive community is at risk. (Time expired)

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