Barnaby Joyce (New England, National Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Where do we start? As they say, opinions are like noses; everybody's got one. Your opinion and your facts are personal, but they're yours, and what we see with the misinformation bill—the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024—is someone's opinion and someone's facts can be determined to be the facts for everybody. That's an incredibly dangerous thing. Quite frankly, I find it peculiar that the government would bring this forward so close to an election. It's so toxic out there. It really has stirred people up. We all know that the traffic we get into our office via emails and on our Facebook sites, and people really don't like this piece of legislation.

So I'd leave good enough alone and just walk away from it. I hate to give tactics to the Australian Labor Party, but if I were in their tactics group, I'd say, 'Look, we don't need this one. Cut this off. While you're at it, take intermittent power out, too, because that is awfully unpopular.'

With this misinformation bill, at the start, you hear stuff where there's some sense of credibility, where you say, 'Well, if you're stirring up young girls on body image and it's bringing about real afflictions'—and that does happen—'then I suppose it's a good thing,' but then, when you look at the bill, you see that it doesn't deal with that issue. So you say, 'What does it deal with?' and it's, 'Well, your position on climate change; your position on intermittent power; your position on nuclear'—and these are part of the political debate.

We have got to give some credibility to the common sense that is held by the vast majority of people, to determine what they believe in and what they don't and what they take on board. Are you going to have misinformation legislation for people at public functions or for people going to the local pub on a Friday night? Are you going to say, 'I heard what you said, but I'm now going to have you arrested because I believe that you are espousing misinformation'? No. You give credit to the people around you. You say, 'Look, I heard what he said, or what she said. It's a load of rubbish, and I'm just parking it, but I don't want to create a commotion so I'll just let the clown carry on with what they're saying and completely ignore it.' But what we're doing here is saying: 'You're not capable of discerning what is the truth. You're incapable of checking the veracity of an item, of crosschecking it, of corroborating it, of playing it over in your mind in those sweet hours before you fall asleep as to whether you believe that is the truth or not.'

There are a lot of things in the presidential election that is happening right as we speak—and I know that, right now, this speech will be probably the most unwatched thing in Australia, because everybody is glued to that. Mind you, I do know that I have my virtues and I might be pulling a bit of an audience away from the presidential election! But I doubt it. There are a lot of things that have been said in that presidential election which even I hear, from thousands and thousands of kilometres away, and say, 'That's not right.' But do I feel offended by it? Does it rock my core? Am I inclined to throw things at the television set? No. God has given me the grace—and blessed I am by it—that I can listen to something and say, 'That's not right.' And that's all it needs. That's where you need to stop.

What we're doing here is: we are codifying one person's or one side's opinion as having supremacy to other people's opinions. You could say, 'Well, you're couching your opinion as fact.' Well, maybe that's how you see it and that's another opinion of yours, as to how that argument is framed. But it is not your right to determine, in a liberal democracy, what can be heard and what cannot be heard.

Of course, you cannot scream, 'Fire!' in a cinema; we all know that. But we've already got that covered in Australia. What we're doing here is further outreach—this further sense of censorship. That is how we are seeing it in the replies that are coming to so many of our offices and, no doubt, to the offices of government members of parliament. You are creating censorship.

I used to be cynical; I used to call them conspiracy theorists, but now I'm starting to get a sense that maybe there was something to George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. Maybe they were kind of smart. Maybe we see, in the Ministry of Truth, how this happens. These people were clever enough to pick the tenor of where things go. And this, to be precise, is what they were talking about.

Leave this to the individual. Leave that right to be wrong, that right to be misinformed, to the individual, because it balances up with that even greater right: to state your mind, without fear or favour. We all know how, in a malevolent way, with a sense of malfeasance, one could grasp this piece of legislation and say, 'I know the truth, and the only truth that I'm going to let you hear—

See this speech in context