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

The Albanese government's proposed censorship law, the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023, is a two-card trick on the Australian people. First, the government label criticism of their policies and edicts as 'misinformation'. Then, they enact laws threatening to issue massive fines if what they call misinformation isn't 'disappeared' from the internet. We've already seen the first phase of these authoritarian tactics being rolled out by government ministers, who've used the catchphrase 'misinformation and disinformation' over and over again in response to legitimate criticism and questions of their policies and priorities from Australians. Now, they're seeking to ram through the second part of their plan—changing the law to censor Australians. To do that, they plan to team up with the Greens. Two political parties, who think that men can be women and have implemented numerous laws around the country to punish women who say otherwise, want to give themselves the power to decide what is true and what is false.

The Labor government's censorship bill was rightly slammed in submissions by thousands of Australians and experts because of the inevitable chilling effect that it would have on freedom of speech. The reason this bill is so dangerous is very simple. A government which seeks to control what its citizens can say and where they can say it is deliberately undermining the freedom of speech on which our democracy depends. It is the domain of dictators and despots to censor the internet and to control what their citizens can see. That's what the Chinese Communist Party does, and it's what the Putin dictatorship does. The barbaric Islamic Republic of Iran regime constantly cuts off internet and communications as a tool to suppress dissent and opposition—to silence and control Iranians and leave them with few ways to organise political opposition and communicate with the rest of the world. We certainly hope that the Australian population is never at the mercy of such a merciless regime as the Islamic Republic, but we have no guarantee. The fact that we have seen so many people in recent weeks marching down the streets of our major cities chanting propaganda, which has been pushed by the likes of the Islamic Republic regime, is a stark reminder of that. When you start undermining the very principles which protect democracy, you are making it easier for that type of regime to emerge.

Freedom of speech is one of those core foundations that true democracy cannot survive without. Freedom to say only what the government and the big tech companies allow you to say is not freedom of speech. Controlling what people can say and where they can say it is precisely what Labor's proposed censorship laws intend to do. That's not a side effect or an unintended consequence of these laws. It is a core premise of the bill in question. The quiet announcement by the Albanese government last weekend that it intends to make a few tweaks and push ahead with its bill will do nothing to make Australians more comfortable with government censorship, and nor should it. We have seen clear examples from all over the world where governments see social media as a useful tool to censor their critics. We've even had some of these social media companies admit that they did it and then admit that they got it wrong.

Many people are realising that the ability of these companies to control the flow of information is incredibly dangerous to our democracy. That danger only becomes greater when those in authority seek to capture and direct that censorship power themselves, and, no matter how they try and spin it, that is exactly what the Albanese government are proposing: unelected government bureaucrats, appointed by the government of the day, able to hold the threat of millions of dollars in fines over the heads of social media companies if they don't disappear what the government claim is misinformation. The Albanese government do not have the right to accuse their own citizens of spreading misinformation, let alone to censor us. The real danger to our democracy doesn't come from citizens; it comes from governments, including our own, seeking to remove avenues for them to be challenged and held to account.