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Authorities that can’t define the word woman and that pursued Covid zero with reckless abandon now want to silence “disinformation” online. What could possibly go wrong?

The Albanese Government plans to fine social media companies millions of dollars for allowing ‘misinformation’ on their platforms, under an Orwellian draft bill unveiled last week.

Announced by Communications minister Michelle Rowland, the law, if enacted, will give the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) sweeping powers to define truth according to the government’s own agenda.

The bill’s exposure draft clarifies that “content that is authorised by the Commonwealth or a State” along with “professional news content” will be granted immunity from the autocratic powers.

Vaguely defined ‘fake news’ and ‘disinformation’ will also be targeted under the proposed bill, which has been titled the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023.

From the Authorities Who Spread Misinformation

The Commonwealth’s cynical crackdown on accountability comes in the wake of Australian authorities’ own spreading of misinformation and false narratives throughout the Covid era.

Government ministers swore black and blue that Covid-19 killed indiscriminately, even though early data showed the virus to be mild for approximately 100 per cent of healthy people.

For years, state premiers pursued destructive lockdowns and border closures with reckless abandon using the false promise of Covid zero.

Federal and State governments forced Covid-19 injectables into millions of their citizens under the pretence these products conferred immunity from sickness, transmission, hospitalisation and death. Demand for the injections plummeted as Australians learned otherwise.

Australia’s national broadcaster smeared as ‘misinformation’ and a conspiracy theory the now-favoured hypothesis that the SARS-CoV-2 virus leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The Misinformation Kept Coming

Covid hospitalisation numbers peddled by health bureaucrats and “professional news” outlets to frighten the public were later revealed to be vastly inflated. Tens of thousands of ‘Covid patients’ were actually admitted for other ailments in NSW, and only later discovered they had the virus.

Australian governments gave precisely zero advice to encourage healthy eating, exercise, sunlight or Vitamin D supplements, all known at the time — and confirmed since — as vital in boosting immunity against Covid-19.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA), the Commonwealth’s peak medicines regulator, banned Ivermectin for the treatment of Covid-19 despite its record of safety and efficacy shown in dozens of peer-reviewed studies. It has since quietly lifted the embargo.

Beyond Covid, the Albanese Government promulgated the false claim that more renewable energy will mean lower electricity prices; the Bureau of Meteorology has fudged past temperature records to elevate fears of a ‘climate crisis’; and the Department of Health can’t even define what a woman is.

Yet the same centralised powers now deign to decide for everyday Australians what is true and what is false, and to punish any platform that disagrees.

Australians do well to note the Prime Minister’s apparent design for such powers at the upcoming referendum. Speaking during Question Time in November, Albanese belled the cat, claiming “there’s been a lot of misinformation already out there” about the Indigenous Voice to Parliament, choosing language that now appears in his government’s draft bill.

The Power to Rig Elections

Perhaps the greatest irony surrounding the Albanese Government’s 1984-style power grab is its timing.

Just days ago, a U.S. Department of Justice whistleblower confirmed President Joe Biden’s involvement in corrupt foreign business dealings with his son Hunter. The scandal was first exposed by the New York Post on the eve of the 2020 election, but before American voters could see it, Twitter and Facebook branded the truthful reports as “misinformation” and censored them.

It was election interference of the highest order. Even worse, evidence has since emerged that the FBI colluded with social media platforms to bury the story, while 51 former intelligence officials used their clout to publicly claim — without a shred of evidence — that the report was “Russian disinformation” aimed at getting Trump re-elected.

If America’s spy apparatus could so manipulate social media to covertly rig an election, how much worse will it be in Australia when the Commonwealth gains official powers to decide truth from lies and silence its critics?

Have Your Say

Bad actors will always use the internet for malevolent ends, making regulation both necessary and inevitable.

But one of the world wide web’s redeeming features is its democratisation of truth and truth-telling.

For a sovereign state to give itself the power to decide which facts are convenient, who must be silenced, and that it deserves immunity from its own rulebook is the opposite of democracy — it is despotism.

And its citizens stay silent at their own peril.

Use your freedom of speech while you still have it. Provide your feedback on the proposed bill here by 6 August 2023.