Labor’s Awful Misinfo Bill Rightfully Quashed

The Albanese government has dumped its awful misinformation bill, conceding there is “no pathway” to getting the proposal passed through the Senate, with not a single non-Labor senator supporting it. You may have noticed that I basically didn’t talk about this bill on this channel, because from the start, I was kind of hoping it would just go away. I honestly thought it had no way of succeeding. Now that’s not me tooting my own horn. In this topsy-turvy world, it could easily have gone the other way, but sanity has prevailed, and Labor have scrapped it. In true Labor style, I could imagine them trying to blame harmful disinformation for the failure of their misinformation bill. The only way this bill would have passed is if we had lost all sense of democracy and the Parliament no longer represented the people.

Apart from Labor apparatchiks, pretty much everybody disagreed with the proposed law. Human Rights Commission: “Why Misinformation Bill risks Freedoms it Aims to Protect”. Left-leaning sites like Crikey: “Albo’s reckless and draconian misinformation legislation completely undermines itself. Censorship done at arm’s length is still censorship.” Church groups and libertarian groups were against it. Of course, many fellow YouTubers spoke out against it, from all sides of politics. Even the notoriously progressive Greens were against this bill. On their website, they were calling for the Government to scrap it. Now that’s saying something. Everyone hated this law except Albo and his censorship cronies. “Misinformation is harmful! (to me staying in power).”

The scrapped legislation would have given the Australian Communications and Media Authority power to monitor digital platforms and set rules to remove certain speech that they deemed misinformation or disinformation. The argument was always, who gets to decide what is truth? For a simple mathematics problem such as, Sam has three bananas, I give her two more bananas, how many bananas does she now have? Well, the answer of five is obvious. Nobody is trying to spread misinformation about this scenario, as the truth is not debatable. But for example, if a company creates a new medication that claims to increase your life expectancy, or protect you from a certain illness, well that’s a much harder thing to prove, or disprove for that matter. So obviously, in these situations, misinformation is bound to occur, but is it the place of the government to dictate what is true and what is not? Giving government the power to define truth is reminiscent of George Orwell’s 1984 Ministry of Truth – “The truth is what we make it.” Such laws will always be abused by those in power to stay in power and maintain control.

The bill did explicitly exclude misinformation if it was reasonably considered to be parody or satire, professional news content, or for any academic, artistic, scientific or religious purpose. So an academic could spout whatever rubbish they wanted to, but a Facebook user could not. So I always figured, if this bill actually became law, I would have continued making content, but just done it in an obviously satirical way. “I’m the best Prime Minister in the world! (Just ask anybody in cell block C).”

Anyway, the bill is done, but it does remind us of that old adage, “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” People have an innate desire for power, so we must remain ever watchful to prevent it from being concentrated in the hands of a few.

Do we trust Albanese to stop there, or is his thirst for power unrelenting?

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Allégro by Emmit Fenn