Australian Mis/Disinformation Bill Dead

A Win for Freedom of Expression

On October 9 and 10 I posted two articles about proposals in Australia to address misinformation and disinformation. The articles can be found here and here.

The Bill before the Australian Parliament was the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024. What was proposed – in brief – was that social media companies would be forced to police misinformation and disinformation on their platforms.

Did you notice the use of the past tense.

The reason for that is that the Australian Government has scrapped the Bill which was widely criticized by legal experts, media companies and the Opposition.

On the morning of Sunday 24 November 2024 Communications Minister Michelle Rowland confirmed the misinformation bill was dead.

She made the following comments:

"Based on public statements and engagements with senators, it is clear that there is no pathway to legislate this proposal through the Senate,"

The Coalition committed to legislating safeguards when in government, but chose to place partisanship above any attempt to navigate the public interest."

The Labour Government needed support from the Greens who said they would vote against the Bill in the Senate. The Greens spokesperson Senator Sarah Hanson-Young described the Bill as “half-baked”.

"[It] was with all good intent, this policy, but badly and poorly explained and implemented. The practical implementation was just not there.”

The withdrawal of the Bill was hailed by Opposition Leader Dutton who said

“as a win for free speech and democracy. No minister and no bureaucrat has a monopoly on truth. And yet, Labor's legislation sought to make government and unelected bureaucrats the arbiters of truth."

I considered that the major unspoken premises behind the Bill are designed to ensure orthodoxy of messaging. If it were to act as a discouragement to platforms to do business in Australia it is a simple matter for citizens to access the information offshore. VPNs are one example. There are others. As Charles Clarke said, many years ago “The answer to the machine is in the machine”.

This would have had serious implications both in the context of respect for the law as well as the enforceability and practicality of the law.

The withdrawal of the Bill is a major victory for the free exchange of ideas – no matter how wrong-headed they might be. A further positive step would be to withdraw the proposals limiting access to social media by young people under a certain age.

The implications of that proposal are frightening in that if access to social media was dependent upon an age verification system, the database could potentially mean that every citizen would have to be registered. And of course the database would be a State one.

What is it about the Governments of the Left that they are so insistent upon control – not only of the messaging but also of the whole population?