We have a serious problem in this country with governments wanting to silence views they don’t like. Let me remind you what happened after last year’s constitutional referendum in which nearly 61 per cent of Australians (and a majority in every state, even Victoria) rejected the Albanese government’s Voice proposal. More than a few of the leading proponents of this Voice proposition soon came out and explicitly blamed their loss on ‘misinformation and disinformation’. This was a preposterous claim, let’s be clear. But it got a lot of airtime in the left-leaning legacy press. I’m sure, in part at least, this was because it’s a lot easier to think, ‘all those benighted fools on the other side voted without understanding what they were doing or because they are closet racists’ rather than to face up to the various actual flaws in the proposal (not least that it licensed judicial activism, that it gave different rights to citizens based on immutable characteristics they were born with, and that it would take our already sclerotic form of bicameralism and make successful law-making considerably harder again, especially for any Bills disliked by the Aboriginal activist caste).

So take a second and consider what is being alleged when someone these days throws around (with gay abandon it often appears) the charges of ‘misinformation’ and ‘disinformation’. Generally the former term applies to information that is alleged to be false and inaccurate, together with the further connotation that if believed and acted upon there will be harmful consequences. Something like that. Then the distinct charge of ‘disinformation’ adds on to this the notion that the information is known to be false and nevertheless is being deliberately and knowingly disseminated. (If you want a handy mnemonic then just recall that the ‘d’ in disinformation in effect means ‘deliberate misinformation’.) These are, of course, jargony terms of the sort so beloved by the wokerati and identity politics brigade. You could just say, ‘I think these claims you’re making are false or that they are deliberately false.’ Or you could allege someone is mistaken or lying. Nope. When it comes to wanting to censor or cancel people, especially your political foes, it’s better to wheel out the five-syllable bureaucratese. ‘I think you’re wrong’ becomes, ‘You’re peddling misinformation.’ And, ‘That is a deliberate lie’ transmogrifies into, ‘That’s disinformation.’ Jargony word salad stuff beloved in the universities, from which it emerged no doubt.

Of course, it gets worse. When people make arguments they deal in two things – alleged facts about the world and then their own opinions. Start with facts about the external world. These are sometimes straightforward but often are very complex and debatable and hard to know. For instance, think back to the whole sorry lockdown saga and recall a few of the things that governments and the public health caste alleged to be ‘misinformation and disinformation’ or (to use regular English) were factually wrong, either unknowingly or knowingly so.

1) That the virus escaped from the Wuhan lab. That’s either true or false. We decide based on all the evidence to hand and may never know for sure. The censors and social media cancellers and ‘fact-checkers’ quickly called this alleged fact false – it was misinformation and disinformation. Yet the preponderance of evidence today strongly, if not overwhelmingly, points to the fact-checkers being wrong, not the other way round. It is far, far more likely the virus did escape from the lab situated some hundreds of yards away from where it was early on discovered. (Mirabile dictu!)

2) That the vaccine would not stop the contracting and transmission of the virus.  Fact-checkers and social media cancellers at the time went into overdrive alleging this was mis and disinformation. Wrong!

3) That natural immunity was at least as good as the vaccine, if not better. Fact-checkers said this was mis and dis. Again, wrong.  The facts were and are plainly otherwise.

I could go on and on. The key point here is that even in the realm of facts and of claims about what is happening in the external, causal world, the line pushed by supposed experts or the government may not be true. If we cancel or suppress or even ‘fact check’ anyone who differs from the party line we will get a lot of things wrong. We will silence plenty of true claims. This was J.S. Mill’s core point in his famous defence of free speech; that you get closer to truth when you allow all points of view to be heard in the cauldron of competing positions. Many today, especially on the political left but let’s be honest also well-represented in the Liberal party, prefer to deem the expert/government position the correct one and then try to shut down dissident views. (Or suppress them on social media or drive away advertising from its podcast or TV show, etc). This, I’m afraid, is the mindset of the Soviet politburo.

But then we leave the realm of facts and move into the realm of opinions. Here, having some government or social media fact-checker make official rulings is even more absurd. I was involved in last year’s No campaign. I argued relentlessly that the Voice, if adopted, would license judicial activism in a decade or so. The fact-checkers deemed that to be mis and disinformation. Why?  Because the Expert Panel – other constitutional lawyers like me, just ones handpicked by Team Albanese and in fact paid by the government – had a different opinion. Now I am prepared to argue any lawyer anywhere that I am right about that – to start we have a current High Court that is as activist as any in decades already. But leaving that aside, what is going on when supposed two-bit ‘fact-checkers’ deem one opinion to be false (mis and dis) and another correct solely based on which one has the government imprimatur? This is bonkers and the road to serfdom. Look around you and ask yourself how often governments get things right? Or bureaucrats? If you pick a percentage even near 50 you’re related to Pollyanna.

All of this leads me to the Albanese government’s proposed Acma Bill. This is incredibly dangerous legislation and a massive attack on free speech. It’s flat out censorship, made worse (if that’s possible) by exempting government, the ABC and legacy press and the universities, as outside its aegis. All the people who got near-on everything wrong during Covid, in other words, are exempted. (Remember the words of world-leading epidemiologist, Stanford’s Jay Bhattacharya, who claims to this day that the biggest source of misinformation during the whole pandemic was government. And we now know there was an awful lot of disinformation in there too.)

No one with a liberal bone in his or her body could support this sort of licensing of what amounts to ‘correct opinion’. Correct opinion is likely often to be wrong. This is illiberalism on steroids. The fact an earlier iteration of this Albanese Acma Bill was initiated by then Coalition minister Paul Fletcher just tells us what a disgrace the former Morrison government was.

And don’t forget it was the Coalition, incredibly, that appointed the current eSafety commissioner. (Do the Libs ever appoint any actual conservatives to anything?) She wants to take down one video revealing true but violent facts – so ‘misinformation’ is now to encompass the patently true – while not demanding videos showing incredible anti-Jewish venom at the Opera House be taken down. Or remember the George Floyd videos? Would those go too under this woman?  If not, why not? We’ve got a free speech problem. Let’s hope the Coalition goes in hard to oppose this, as they did the Voice.