The War on Words
Written by editor of The National Observer and host of the Backbench Drivers podcast, John Lawson.
Both of Australia’s major parties have suffered serious blows to their credibility in recent years. In August 2023 the Albanese Labor government announced its intention to propose a referendum, which if passed, would see an Aboriginal advisory body enshrined within the Australian constitution. Throughout the length of Albanese’s ‘Voice to Parliament’ campaign, despite celebrity endorsements and a huge ad spend polling showed the gap between opposition to and support for ‘The Voice’ widening slowly into a chasm. Opposition to ‘The Voice’ unexpectedly united Australia’s terminally divided right wing and saw hundreds of thousands take to social media to vocalise their opposition to Albanese’s proposition.
In the days leading up to the decisive defeat of the ‘Voice to Parliament’ on the 14th of October 2023, PM Albanese made clear the reasons why he believed the campaign appeared to be failing: Misinformation and Disinformation. These are two words that at this point were intimately familiar to Australians owing to their heavy use beginning only a few short years earlier…
The COVID-19 Pandemic represented a highly contentious period in Australian politics which gave rise to populist movements whose driving impetus was to oppose, whether rightly or wrongly is beyond the scope of this article, the government’s various attempts to end the pandemic. It is broadly recognised that given large amounts of free time while cooped up indoors and jobless, a vast swathe of the public searched beyond mainstream media and discovered the world of ‘conspiracy theories’ and the ‘far-right’. This had the expected immediate effect of catalysing mass anti-COVID-Regime street protests and the less visible long-term effect of contributing to the drift away from major party support and the growth of independent candidates and minor parties. Throughout the Liberal Party’s attempt to end COVID, the Party was constantly hounded by the media and opposition alike regarding concerns that members of the Coalition were spreading misinformation & Albanese has since used the anti-COVID-Regime movement as an example of purveyors of misinformation he wishes to target with the new legislation.
Now with COVID and The Voice campaign in the rearview mirror, the government’s fixation on identifying and eliminating information deemed intentionally malicious or accidentally harmful has only ramped up. Beginning in 2024 a massive ad campaign was launched alongside an in-school course in an attempt to ward young boys away from the supposedly harmful influence of online influencers promoting ‘toxic masculinity’. Just as the initial popularity of Tate-style influencers began to flatten out, the Labor government has been confronted with a new ideological threat, this time emerging from the left: the pro-Palestine movement. Since the 7th of October attack the popularity and relevance of the pro-Palestine/anti-Israel movement has drastically increased – even leading to the defection of one Labor MP who has since broken away to form a new political force intent on consolidating Australia’s Muslim vote. Albanese, once a founding member of the ‘Parliamentary Friends of Palestine’ and anti-Israel protestor in his youth has been confronted with the hard blue-and-white reality of holding political leadership in a Western nation. Unfortunately for the Prime Minister, most of his Party’s rank-and-file members (and especially those born since the year 2000) fiercely oppose Israel. The popularity of the pro-Palestine cause within the Labor Party is largely a product of the immense popularity of the pro-Palestine movement on social media. Albanese’s response to this conundrum should be predictable at this point: he levelled the accusation of ‘misinformation’ at the pro-Palestine movement.
Laws being proposed
The Labor Government’s response to growing distrust in the status quo has been to, with the varied support and opposition of the Coalition, introduce four separate pieces of legislation:
1. The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill
Aims to award the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) the ability to fine social media companies of up to 5% of their global revenue should they refuse to adopt editorial standards that would see content the ACMA defined as misinformation or disinformation removed.
2. The Under 16s Social Media Ban
Purportedly intended to curb the negative effects of social media on young Australians, Albanese listed protecting kids from concerns about ‘body image’ and ‘misogyny’ as his primary motivations. Much like the above Misinfo/Disinfo Bill, powers will be awarded to the E-Safety commissioner to oversee social media companies’ enforcement of age limits. Although we are yet to see concrete details on how the ban will be enforced, UK-style ‘biometric scans’ cross-referenced with a government database appears to be a leading contender.
3. An anti-doxxing amendment
After the names and chat logs of 600 Jewish writers and artists in a Whatsapp group chat dedicated to lobbying for Israeli interests in Australia was published by pro-Palestine activists earlier this year, Jewish Atorney-General Mark Dreyfus, spurred on by groups such as the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, has put forward an amendment which will heavily penalise similar attempts at doxxing in the future. Considering doxxing has been a common means of attacking right-wing Australians for years without recourse, it is hard to see this as anything other than a blatant attempt to shut down journalistic inquiry into certain topics.
4. An expansion of anti-hatespeech legislation
Another piece of legislation introduced by Mark Dreyfus in reaction to the domestic effects of the Israel/Palestine conflict. Ostensibly meant to place harsher penalties for calls to violence, especially those targeted against minority groups, the initial media release also states the new laws will strengthen the ban on symbols “likely to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate a member of a group distinguished by certain attributes” (such as the ‘nazi salute’ and various other nazi symbols banned earlier this year). According to Sky News “The proposed laws have reportedly targeted derogatory remarks based on gender, sexuality, race, disability and religion”.
All of the above serve to curb the freedom of Australians to freely disseminate and access information online. Though elements of any of these bills may be positive in theory, they each must be viewed in the context of a broad-spectrum attack on the right of Australians to free speech led by a government that has demonstrated an acute interest in targetting specific political opponents from both the left and right.
How will the various Bills limit Freedom of Speech?
A clear pattern emerges in the types of information and speech the Albanese government has targeted for removal: So-called ‘Mysoginy’, ‘racism’ & ‘Anti-Semetism’; a clear reaction to the skyrocketing popularity of various pro-masculinity influencers, the growing scepticism towards the multicultural/racial consensus and the widespread opposition to Israeli war crimes and influence. The sudden mainstreaming of these long-taboo topics can largely be attributed to the success of TikTok, the sudden relaxing of X’s censorship policies and the success of free-speech video alternatives such as Rumble. We know that one factor in the US TikTok ban was the unfettered proliferation of pro-Palestine content on the app, I do not believe it unreasonable that similar motivations inform the current campaign to ban and censor social media in Australia.
Notably exempt from the consequences Misinformation and Disinformation Bill were major news companies. If the law were to pass, it would immediately have the effect of dragging Australia back to a pre-internet era of centralised information delivery in which meaningfully dissenting opinions never approached power or mainstream acceptability.
This appears to be the exact intended effect: to prevent the destabilising effects of dissent. Under the definitions of ‘serious harm’ laid out in section 14 of the proposed Misinfo/Disinfo legislation are of course restrictive speech codes many Westerners have grown all too familiar with “vilification of a group in Australian society distinguished by race, religion, sex, sexual orientation etc etc” but also the strange addition of “harm to public confidence in the banking system or financial markets”. Obviously, there are many legitimate questions to be asked on the topics of Australia’s banking system, race or religion, but the answers to these questions have wide-reaching societal consequences that in no way benefit the decrepit class of politicians currently in power.
The Explanatory Memorandum provided to accompany the Bill explicitly states that by limiting ‘misinformation and disinformation’ it hopes to prevent the rise of a potential new force in Australian politics, the example of just such a force given is the ‘Alternative for Deutschland’ whose meteoric rise in Germany has been driven by an enthusiastic Gen Z, many of whom discovered the party and nationalist politics through social media. A similar example of the success of populists in Italy is also listed.
It is clear to see how the provision within the hate speech legislation which attempts to further the ban on prohibited symbols will be used to crack down on free political expression as the current ban has already been used to arrest and investigate right-wing political activists several times just this year. Meanwhile, the doxxing laws appear to mainly affect journalists and their right to report information that may be in the national interest, such as the chatlogs that inspired its introduction in the first place.
How the under-16s social media ban will limit free speech is less immediately obvious, but no less distressing. Although the prospect of protecting kids from the myriad dangers of the internet may seem tempting on the surface, the deeper implications – particularly to do with implementation should dissuade any reasonable person from supporting the bill. First, the creation of a central database with the private information of every Australian social media user stored will make for a soft target for politically or maliciously motivated hackers. Considering the scale of target activist hackers have recently targeted, archive.org for example, this is a serious concern.
Second, and more worrying, is the fact that the bar to exposing someone’s identity through lawsuits will be significantly lowered in regards to both price and time.
A perfect point of comparison is Rebel News presenter Avi Yemini’s 2022 attempt to legally reveal the identity of previously anonymous left-wing Twitter user @PRGuy17. Yemini first had to take out a court order against Twitter to reveal the IP address and carrier service of the account owner which turned out to be Telstra. Yemini then had to take out a second court order against Telstra to reveal the name of the account owner, but before this order could be approved the user voluntarily revealed his real identity.
Yemini’s was a costly and time-intensive ordeal. Should the Australian government force social media companies to require an individual’s private details upfront while creating an account, or creates a central database containing the same information, it stands to reason using the legal system to dox anonymous social media users will become a much easier task and thus have the effect of dampening the dissemination of dissenting opinions.
The attempt to censor Australians from discussing legitimate and necessary topics, and strangle potential political threats in the crib, is the stated intention of the Albanese government’s proposed censorship regime. Any potential good that might be delivered by theoretically protecting kids under the age of 16 from the internet, or preventing the malicious dissemination of private information is overshadowed by the stated bad intentions of those in charge of administering the policies and for that reason must be wholesale opposed.
Prospects
That Labor would be able to push the Misinformation bill through the Lower House using their majority was never in doubt, now that the bill has reached the Upper House its fate will be decided by the four independents on the crossbench. Fortunately thus far commitments from independents Fatima Payman, David Pockock and Lidia Thorpe appear to indicate the bill will be rejected. This is greatly reasuring considering the consequences of implementing the Misinfo/Disinfo Bill would be the most restrictive of all the above-listed pieces of legislation were it to go into effect.
Less optimistic are the chances of a rejection of the Under 16s ban bill, owing to the fact it is currently receiving bipartisan support from both major parties with leader of the Liberal Party Peter Dutton indicating his desire to urgently rush the legislation through parliament before the new year. We are yet to hear the Coalition’s position on the doxxing and hatespeech legislation, though in light of Dutton’s strident support of Israeli interests in Australia, it would be a safe bet to predict he reverses his initial criticisms of the bill’s anti-free speech implications and pledges support.
Hope
There have been signs the recent Trump regime will impose pro-free speech conditions on military allies, with Vice President JD Vance stating in an interview that NATO allies who do not support American values such as free speech should no longer receive military assistance, it would be reasonable to assume similar pressures might be applied to the members of the AUKUS alliance. Elon Musk who has grown to become one of Trump’s biggest supporters over the course of the 2024 election campaign and victory has a vested interest in protecting X’s free speech status from prying governments around the world. Musk recently replied to an account on X posting about the draconian legislation that has been proposed to signal his disapproval:
By publicising the bills on the global stage, and especially by continuing to bring them to the attention of Elon, it is possible that the Trump admin can lean on an Australian government fearful of falling from the good graces of the US and protect the right of Australians to speak freely.
