Alex Antic (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How often do you hear a woke politician or media pundit using the words 'misinformation' or 'disinformation'? It usually refers to an issue which one disagrees with rather than something which is untrue. We're told that misinformation lurks in the confines of the free-speech digital world, ready to pounce on unsuspecting citizens, and can only be cured by fact checks and censorship. The strange thing is that, from where I sit, the main purveyors of actual misinformation and disinformation aren't on conservative podcasts or tweeting on X. They're experts freelancing around their fields of expertise. These experts spend years mastering one niche topic and then mistakenly feel like this gives them the equal authority to freelance into other topics with opinions which coincidentally marry up with their political views. The media is awash with these experts speaking out on matters that are often totally unrelated to their personal field of study, all the while using their academic titles of expert status as justification for presenting those opinions as facts.

If you want a way to push your climate agenda, find yourself a sympathetic marine biologist to give you a meteorological opinion. If you want to lock people in their homes and force them to inject themselves with a novel therapy, get yourself an epidemiologist to tell you what they think about infectious disease. These people are very capable of drawing false conclusions and very vulnerable to the natural human tendency of bias.

Many experts claim impartiality but allow their work to be influenced by their political views or the priorities of those who fund their research. Many experts make research decisions based on concerns about their own social reputation or their desire to support the legacy of their own earlier work. Many experts freelance outside the scope of their expertise. That's proper misinformation.

An unhealthy reliance on expert views is attractive to those who don't think the people can be trusted to make their own decisions. That's one reason why during COVID politicians allowed the 'best' expert medical advice to set the rules by which we were allowed to live. Now we know that most of those views turned out to be genuine misinformation, and I'm sorry to tell you your masks didn't work and they still don't work today. In March of 2020, when governments in this country began rolling out COVID lockdowns, they did so at the behest of legal advice. That saw us locked down for weeks and months, subjected to ridiculous procedures and forced into treatments we didn't want, all in the name of science—or was it politics?

Having studied a particular topic in depth doesn't make someone infallible. Modelling software is not a crystal ball. Any time you hear one of these people say, 'The science is settled,' alarm bells should ring, because the science is never ever settled; that's what makes it science. The scientific method demands that every question be open to investigation at any time. To trace the history of human knowledge and scientific knowledge in particular is to trace an endless process of orthodoxies being proven false and replaced. People dislike being spoken down to like this, but they dislike being lied to even more.

The use of so-called expert evidence has become a powerful way for politics to dress up opinion as fact and to crush dissent, but not all of it is valid. So where is the real source of genuinely dangerous misinformation? Is it people grappling with ideas on a podcast and social media, or is it your socialist GP giving immunology advice to the entire country on national TV? I tell you what: I know which one I'm more concerned by.