Henry Pike (Bowman, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a late hour and there certainly aren't a lot of government members here to listen to our contributions on the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. It's disappointing that we haven't got more government members willing to defend their own bill. It's certainly an important bill. It's an issue that I've probably had more correspondence on than any other that has been before this parliament. It's something that the government should have given a lot more thought to before they introduced this for a second time. It's something that certainly a lot of voters across this country are very concerned about. Certainly, a lot of my constituents and certainly the feedback I've heard from members across the aisle is that this has certainly been a hot issue and one that is worthy of a good, lengthy debate from both sides.

The conventional wisdom once held that the world was flat, that smoking was healthy and that slavery was part of the natural order. People with opposing views were denounced as heretics, radicals and charlatans. Heretical views are often silenced by authority, only to later become accepted facts. History shows us you should never trust government to be the sole arbiter of truth, but I have complete faith in the Australian people to sort fact from fiction. I think that's the significant ideological difference that I would have with the previous speaker, the member for Warringah. I have faith that the Australian people are best placed to sort fact from fiction.

We live in an era of infinite information. It's all available at our fingertips: the good, the bad, the inaccurate, the absurd, the AI generated funny images, the ones that we can't quite tell are real or not. Our freedom to access and analyse this knowledge improves accountability, drives innovation and advances the betterment of society. But I bristle at the thought of a big government information directorate or big tech predigesting this information and spoonfeeding it to the public. There's no algorithm, no regulation and no team of cyber bureaucrats that can sort fact from fiction as effectively as the inquiring and sceptical mind of the average Australian. But this Labor government has a different view on the role of the state and big corporates in controlling information.

This bill seeks to create special powers to tackle online misinformation. The bill will place new censorship burdens on digital platforms and empower the government to obtain information in relation to any breaches. Fines for non-compliance could be as high as five per cent of a digital platform's global turnover. But the problems begin when you look at what would constitute misinformation under this bill. For example, the definition includes any views that might harm public confidence in Australia's banking system or financial markets. My mind goes those who were blowing the whistle about issues to do with those very sectors of our economy in the lead-up to the banking royal commission. It also includes anything that might vilify someone based on their gender identity, and I think about the public outcry over certain participants in the Olympics earlier this year. These are debates that we should be having in this country and I don't think we should be shying away from them.

It also applies to anything that calls into question the efficiency or the efficacy of public health measures. Deputy Speaker Buchholz, you would appreciate that there were certainly a lot of questions to be asked during the recent pandemic, particularly when I think to the Queensland government, which tried to impose a mask mandate for people driving alone within their vehicle. The public should be critical of that. There should be open debate on that and calling into question matters like that should be part of a healthy society. Certainly, I don't think there should be any role for government in terms of trying to curtail criticism; they should be open to the debate.

It doesn't require a lot of imagination to see how easily this broad and subjective definition could be politicised and used to silence dissent. If you recall Orwell's 1984, this feels like a modern twist on 'newspeak'—the language crafted with a limited vocabulary to crush critical thought. I trust Australians to assess the value of information rather than leaving it to faceless bureaucrats or Silicon Valley algorithms. This bill feels like a dangerous step towards Big Brother style control with significant risks of ideological overreach, and, of course, the coalition will not be supporting it.

I take the point made strongly by the member for Casey earlier about the seven days of consultation on this latest version of the bill—seven days for one of the most important pieces of legislation, with huge ramifications, not just for those working within this building but across Australia's society more broadly. The government, obviously, didn't like the massive response that they had to the first round of consultation on this and wanted to limit the days. But I think seven days is wholly inadequate when you consider the size of this bill, the size of the explanatory memorandum and the scale of public interest.

This misinformation bill is one of the most dangerous bills that has come before our parliament in recent memory. Claiming to protect Australians online, it goes way too far and is a shocking attack on free speech. Government should never be the sole arbiter of truth yet, under this legislation, that is what the government is hoping to achieve. There is a list of topics under which misinformation can be considered serious harm under the bill. It includes public health and preventative health measures, imminent harm to the economy or financial markets, referendums and elections. I note some of the commentary that the previous speaker made around misinformation when it comes to elections and I think about the recent Queensland election that we have just been through. I think of an example by the Labor member for Redlands with a huge billboard which outlined that the incoming David Crisafulli government would sell a new satellite hospital that has been built within my electorate—a total fabrication, totally made up, no sense of truth in it at all but still something that is put forward. We were able to use that and counteract that message. This bill, I don't think, provides anything that would have been able to deal with that but it goes to show that, for the moral high ground that some try to take on the other side of the chamber, there is certainly a lot of misinformation that I saw in the course of that campaign.

I have a number of serious concerns with the bill, particularly the unequal treatment of content. One of the previous speakers outlined that academics, scientists, artists, and anything done with parody or satire in mind, are exempt from the bill, or exempt from the definitions of 'misinformation'. But the same exemption doesn't apply for everyday Australians. The same exemption rules apply to anything that is distributed for an artistic or scientific purpose, or things that are said for the purpose of parody or satire, but I wonder about those everyday Australians—many Australians—who are using social media to get involved politically, offer their opinion—honestly held opinion—and what this bill will mean for those individuals getting active within our democracy in that context. Also, the unequal treatment of content in relation to professional news content: if something appears in professional news content—by the definition, effectively mainstream media—it cannot be seen as misinformation. But if that same view or a contrary view was put outside of professional news content, it could be, under this bill, seen as misinformation. This applies to journalists. While their content would not be misinformation if it were within their professional news content, it could be if it were expressed on their personal Facebook page or on Twitter, for instance. I think that's a concerning lack of consistency within the bill.

I'm also concerned that the minister may exempt certain digital platforms. We can certainly foresee a situation where some digital platform may be more favourable to one side of politics or the other, and the fact that the minister, under this bill, may exclude any platform from the operation of the bill opens it up to abuse. This would open up an opportunity for a minister to say, 'One platform, which is favourable to my side of politics, can be excluded, while other ones will be put right through the wringer of this bill.'

It is certainly concerning that the minister, under this bill, would have the ability to personally order misinformation investigations and misinformation hearings. Some good examples were given by previous speakers, so I won't dwell on that. But, when I consider the powers that that would invest in the minister to be able to target dissenting views in relation to any number of policies, I think the ability to personally order that is open to massive abuse and is certainly something we don't want to see in Australia.

The bill would also impose huge fines on digital platforms if the government decides that they have not done enough to prevent or respond to misinformation. This is really my primary concern with this bill. The digital platforms are going to err on the side of pulling off anything that they think might even come close to infringing on these provisions. As is totally understandable from their perspective, they are going to err strongly on the side of limiting the free speech of Australians, and that worries me significantly. We're talking about a scale where individuals can't be making individual calls about whether this or that is misinformation and what's accurate and what isn't; they're going to be relying on algorithms to make those decisions for them, and, to stay on the safe side, they're going to have to err as much as possible on the side of caution.

The communications minister is reportedly warning that there would be devastating consequences should this legislation not be passed by the end of the year. I find this totally alarmist and desperate language. The government has had more than two years to do this already, and I think that—

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