It takes a special kind of political genius to turn the likes of progressive ACT independent Senator David Pocock and ultra-conservative propaganda outfit Advance Australia into virtual allies. But the Albanese government has managed to pull it off with its troubled Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill before the Parliament, known fittingly enough to many as the “MAD bill”.
In its preferred mode of cautious and calculated centrism, the government wears it as a badge of honour if its self-styled “sensible solutions” are being opposed in equal measure by the “far left” and the “far right”. We must be hitting the mark for the greater good, you’ll hear ministers proclaim as they lament whoever’s blocking their latest would-be enlightened reform, whether it’s the Coalition, the Greens, the crossbench — and sometimes all of them.
Weak spots
Another way of looking at it is that the bill’s legislative imbroglio speaks compellingly to Labor’s soft underbelly, its perceived weakness and ineffectiveness, which Peter Dutton’s Liberal-National opposition targets at every opportunity.
The wannabe strongman opposition leader, meanwhile, has ruled out supporting this anti-misinformation and dis-information push, greenlighting community opposition too. This forces its rivals to seek votes in the Senate from the frequently hostile Greens, and an unpredictable hotchpotch of crossbenchers, teals and others.
It’s a mess. With a federal election looming, Labor finds itself in danger of sensible-solving itself right out of power after just one three-year term, with this bill a classic example of how it is floundering inside and outside the Parliament.
The lessons of the US election and the Trump presidential resurrection are ringing in its ears too. In a thankless political environment where incumbents are being blamed by too many for their inflation-driven cost-of-living woes, wimpy wokeness just doesn’t cut it against red-blooded make ‘em angry MAGA-style politicking.
Danger money
Putting the best face on it, the MAD bill is a principled attempt to place some guardrails around the social media multibillionaire barons and their empires of influence. Think Twitter/X’s Elon Musk (world’s richest man and incoming Trump administration powerbroker, net worth circa US$290 billion), and Meta/Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg (net worth US$192 billion), and their secretive algorithms.
Tackling Musk and Zuck is fair enough. Many see them as dangerously unaccountable, a clear and present danger to democracy, threatening the privacy and ultimately the freedom of Australians, Americans and people across the free world. But they never go down without a fight — they can afford the best lawyers and lobbyists — and here’s the rub: one person’s freedom of speech is another person’s mis- or dis-information.
That’s the nub of the virulent opposition to the legislation that’s doing the rounds in far-right rallies and networks around the country, that the government is trying to shut down their free speech to stop them from “telling the truth” about things such as nuclear energy vs renewables. The arch irony that spin and propaganda are being used to sideline action to combat mis- and dis-information, which benefits the world’s richest and most influential businesspeople, is lost to crude politicking. Nuance be damned!
Advance notice
Advance Australia, which orchestrated much of the successful anti-Voice campaign at last year’s referendum thanks to a $10 million kitty, is using the legislation to fuel a Trumpian “deep state” conspiracy theory, with its national spokeswoman Sandra Bourke accusing “activists, elites and bureaucrats” of making a power grab.
Bourke and Advance Australia interweave their MAD bill alarmism with their mainstream political targets, especially climate action, net zero and renewable energy, which presumably suits their wealthy vested-interest funding puppetmasters just fine. This reporter witnessed this two months ago at a conservative “energy and environment forum” in western Sydney, where Bourke was a panel speaker and opposition maverick MP Barnaby Joyce was a surprise guest, as recounted in The Politics in “Inside the MAGA mind of Barnaby Joyce”.
In a recent piece headlined “Lies, Lies and the Damn Misinformation Bill”, Bourke wrote: “Now Labor, the Greens and the teals want to shut down free speech under the guise of ‘safeguarding Australians’. They want power to control the narrative and stop the ‘lies’ because clearly every ‘right-thinking’ Australian lacks the ability to do this.”
We’re all ears
Advance Australia is doubtless peddling self-serving censorship conspiracy theories for cynical reasons, but an entirely different audience listens when somebody such as Pocock speaks. It’s highly debatable whether he can be labelled “far left”, when he’s more consultative progressive than anything else. But last week he went to the trouble of sitting down for a video recording to demonstrate his determination to oppose the MAD bill saying:
“Freedom of speech and the freedom to protest are critical parts of our democracy, and in Australia we don’t have an overarching human rights act that entrenches these rights, so we need to tread very carefully whenever we make changes that may impact on them.”
The gist of Pocock’s hardening opposition to the legislation is that it’s too weak or misdirected in terms of its real purpose to force transparency and responsibility onto the social media barons:
“There’s no doubt that mis- and dis-information is causing harm, but people are also entitled to their opinion, whatever it may be, and it seems that the issue is not people with 100 or 1,000 followers online saying things, but more with social media algorithms that then boost that content to others. So I find it very strange that the government wants to trust these giant corporations who have, at best, very questionable reputations, with deciding what is or isn’t mis- and dis-information.”
Pocock arrived at his position after participating in a parliamentary inquiry into the bill, which is due to report by next Tuesday, just two days before this Parliament is scheduled to wrap up for the year — and possibly forever. He’s no dummy, and he takes his political responsibility seriously, so he is worth listening to whatever the spin coming from the government about its plans to further empower the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) to mediate solutions with the private social media platforms.
Bulk-billing
The government has just this week and next to pass masses of outstanding legislation that is locked up in various ways in the close-out months of the 47th Parliament, before both the House and the Senate rise for the lengthy Christmas-new year break. There are two weeks of sittings scheduled for February, but political pundits are already debating whether a struggling government will want to reconvene Parliament before going to an election in a March-April-May window.
So what to do with the MAD bill? Fight on despite the strange bedfellows opposing it? Kill it off? Or let it linger, hoping for the chance to push on in a further term of government with some kind of mandate from the people, but risking it becoming an election deadweight.
On the latter score, Labor hardheads with long memories might remember the Australia Card debacle in the mid-1980s. The Hawke Labor government was nearly brought unstuck when its initially popular bid to introduce a national ID card went seriously awry — arguably giving political birth to today’s privacy and data protection concerns — and ultimately was abandoned on a convenient legislative misdrafting pretext after mass outrage.
An analysis of what went wrong by the Australian Privacy Foundation some 15 years later reported: “The key element in the campaign launch [opposing the Australia Card] was the diversity of speakers. Right-wing broadcaster Alan Jones, Democrat leader Janine Haines, America’s Cup hero Ben Lexcen and rock singer Peter Garrett provided an unprecedented mix of famous talent, and the launch enjoyed saturation coverage. Ben Lexcen threatened to leave Australia forever if the scheme proceeded. Peter Garrett called it ‘the greatest threat Australia has ever faced’.”
Listen and learn
It would be careless, to say the least, to leave a ticking political timebomb like that lying around, unresolved and open to waves of mis- and dis-information, along with well-meaning criticism and counter proposals — with a tough election due by May. Pocock might have an answer for Labor, if it’s in any mood to listen: “The government keeps delaying meaningful changes to the Privacy Act that would actually go a lot further to protecting Australians online.”
Relevant to the echoes of the Australia Card, and the remarkably diverse allies who came together to fight it, Pocock warned in his video: “The truth is really hard to define and often changes over time, so there’s a risk platforms could just end up unintentionally censoring people. This was highlighted by the Human Rights Law Centre, constitutional law expert Dr Anne Twomey, the Victorian Bar Association and the Human Rights Commission. We’ve all expressed serious concerns about how this bill is being drafted and how it would operate. What I would like to see is far more transparency through data access for researchers, so that we can better understand how these companies operate and how content is prioritised.”
The truth really is hard to define, and politics is unforgiving. But Musk and Zuck keep laughing all the way to their banking algorithims.
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