Claire Chandler (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

If you were to ask Australians who they least trust to decide what is true or false, government and big tech would be at the top of the list. There is very little more chilling to the concept of democracy and free speech than a government which pronounces that it and its powerful friends will decide what is true and what is false. It is a tactic of authoritarian governments to censor the media and the internet to prevent and suppress challenges to their authority. Of course, these authoritarian regimes rarely tell their citizens that they're censoring the internet to silence political opposition. They say that they are removing misinformation which causes public harm. Australians do not want to live in a country where a government overseer breathing down the neck of private companies can force public statements by its citizens to simply disappear, or where elected officials or social media executives sitting in another country can declare something as undesirable and that it is false, even if it happens to be true, and to have it removed from the public square by the high inquisitors in big tech.

Labor is using its own misinformation against Australians by claiming that it won't actually be the government responsible for the censorship it's demanding, even as it threatens businesses with huge fines and criminal penalties if those companies don't comply with Labor's wishes. Does anyone really believe that social media companies won't censor more and more content that they think the government won't like as a result of Labor's proposed censorship laws? Do you really trust that if this law passes you won't have government officials and staffers picking up the phone to their contacts in social media companies and suggesting it might be in their interests to take down content challenging the government, lest the regulator suddenly decide that they are not doing enough to tackle misinformation?

Australians are not stupid. Everyone knows the internet is full of false information. But a fellow citizen being wrong or disagreeing with the government is not a threat to our democracy. The real threat to our democracy is the government and its powerful friends controlling the flow of information. As if social media companies haven't already been enthusiastic enough at censoring opinions which challenges the politically favoured narrative, now we have the Labor government demanding that they do more of it. What's worse is that Labor's proposed censorship laws make clear that they have no intention of holding themselves to the same standards that they will impose on the rest of us because Labor's laws brazenly exempt any information from their own government from being considered misinformation. Under this proposal, if the Labor government says up is down and down is up, that cannot be considered misinformation. It could even be argued that content from foreign universities or bodies like Confucius institutes will be protected from being represented as misinformation.

This Orwellian censorship bill is aimed squarely at the government's own citizens and limiting what you can say and where you can say it. The Labor Party has given the game away by repeatedly labelling genuine and valid criticism of its own policies as misinformation. Indeed, for years those on the political left have successfully used cries of hate speech to censor criticism of their ideology. They have enacted laws making it difficult to make even the most commonsense mainstream comments like, 'Males should not be in women's sport,' or 'Male sex offences shouldn't be placed in women's prisons,' without being subject to legal threats. Labelling anything they don't like as misinformation is simply the new hate speech. It gives governments, bureaucrats and those with power the ability to simply label the opinions of average Australians as unspeakable and silence them. And when they can't bully you into self-censoring, they will just bully the social media platforms into censoring you. Whether you're from the Left, the Right or anywhere in between, we should all recognise in a democracy that censorship of political debate and discussion does not protect the public. The only people it protects are those in power who don't want to be challenged.