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

We hear the term 'Orwellian' a lot these days, perhaps so often that it has lost its meaning. But Labor's Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 is truly, truly deserving of the term. The bill seeks to penalise those who promote so-called misinformation and disinformation online. Obviously, how one defines misinformation is critical. The bill essentially creates the possibility that anything the establishment considers harmful, false, misleading or deceptive is either mis- or disinformation, depending on how intentional it is, which, of course, is also a highly subjective matter.

It's worthwhile casting our minds back to the COVID period to recall that, in those days, misinformation and disinformation essentially meant any claim that contradicted the government's often spurious health advice. Those claims were perilously verified against the Therapeutic Goods Association's advice or the advice of the various health departments. Examples included saying lockdowns were illogical, masks didn't work or that the vaccines carried dangerous side effects and didn't prevent transmission and so on. All of these statements turned out to be true. It wasn't difficult to know that. Thanks to a freedom of information request from my office last year, we know that the Department of Home Affairs paid a foreign company more than $1 million to monitor COVID-19 posts online and then alert the various social media companies of the controversial material. Home Affairs hired a London based company to monitor social media posts during COVID and then notify the department, who then required social media companies to either remove or minimise the reach of these posts. As many as 4,000 social media posts were secretly censored during the height of the COVID pandemic. Many of them contained factual information and reasonable arguments rather than misinformation. Examples of targeted posts included claims that COVID-19 was released or escaped from a Wuhan lab in China, that the vaccine didn't prevent infection or transmission and that lockdowns were ineffective. These are no longer controversial statements, or at least they shouldn't be.

Misinformation, disinformation and harm are all crucial concepts in this bill. There are many avenues I could take in discussing this, but, to focus on one, the bill would make the following an offence: harm to public health in Australia, including to the efficacy of preventive health measures in Australia—and we saw how that played out in recent years—and vilification of a group in Australian society distinguished by race, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. The question is: Who defines this? The government? The courts? The bill provides an easy platform for governments to silence political opponents and those who hold inconvenient but true beliefs. Why should Australians trust that the regulatory authority ACMA's powers wouldn't be politicised? If this legislation had been operative during COVID, people could have been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for posting true statements online.

Furthermore, the content that is excluded from the penalties includes professional news content. Professional news content means the traditional news outlets: newspapers, six o'clock news, radio and so on. The bill appears to be effectively aimed fairly and squarely at alternative internet platforms that defy the government approved narrative. Is this all about Twitter, X? Why is the establishment so against X? Why is this government so against Elon Musk? Trust in our institutions and corporates like the mainstream media is in freefall. Social media presents challenges regarding free speech—that's not in doubt—and there are criminal matters which should never be promoted by algorithms, but the discussion that must be had is the desire to balance individual liberties with the stability of society. As usual, this government's approach is heavy handed and rushed.

Orwell said, 'If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don't want to hear.' I'm certainly going to keep saying what I believe to be true and what I believe Australians of good faith wish to hear expressed in their parliament. This bill must be defeated for the good of our nation.