A friend of Socrates once visited the Delphic oracle to ask who is the wisest man in the world. The oracle told him that Socrates was. Socrates could not believe this, as he believed he knew men who were wiser than him, such as a politician friend of his. But when Socrates spoke to his friend he realised that the politician ‘thinks that he knows but he really knows nothing’. Socrates then went to speak to the poets and artisans but came away with similar conclusions. He then realised that, ‘The men most in repute were all but the most foolish; and that some inferior men were really wiser and better.’

Things have not changed much from Ancient Greek times. We still have politicians that think they know more. Our government wants to make sure it silences the ‘inferior men’ with its new misinformation laws.

No healthy society would empower a bunch of politicians to define what is true or false. Imagine living in a country where the politicians have the gall to tell the rest of us not to lie.

The Albanese government’s misinformation laws are fundamentally un-Australian. The Australian way is to thumb our nose at authority. The Australian way is not to suffer tall poppies telling us what to do.

But the Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill would see a two-tier society established when it comes to free speech. The Bill, astonishingly, exempts the media from being accused of spreading misinformation or disinformation. Just last month, the ABC was caught airing doctored footage from Afghanistan in an attempt to tar Australian soldiers as war criminals. This clear form of misinformation would be exempt from Albanese’s censorship regime.

The protection of the Australian military does not even rate a mention in the Bill. If you were going to protect a class of Australians from the spreading of lies, there is probably no more deserving group than those of us who put their life on the line to protect us.

Instead, the Bill defines ‘serious harm’ to be that which could damage electoral authorities, various identity groups, public health bureaucrats and, perhaps most amazing of all, the banks.

What marks this eclectic group out is that almost all of them have been guilty of propagating misinformation in recent years. Our banks have been found to have regularly defrauded their customers, public health authorities have admitted they lied to the public for the ‘greater good’ and even our otherwise decent electoral authorities lost 1,375 ballots during the 2013 Western Australia Senate election, causing a strange recount at the cost of $20 million.

All authorities, especially those that benefit from public funds, should be subject to free and unfettered criticism from the Australian public.

There is another more explicit way that this Bill is un-Australian. The new misinformation regime does not directly establish a government Ministry of Truth, but rather it requires social media companies to establish their own internal Ministries of Truth to police the speech of Australians.

Almost all of these social media companies are foreign-owned. I do not think we need our fellow Australians policing each other’s speech, but I definitely do not want tech billionaires in San Francisco deciding what is said in Sydney.

Of course, there is another social media company called TikTok. This Bill would deputise TikTok to apply a censorship to the Australian people. The provisions of the Bill are so broad that TikTok would have no problem in applying the Chinese Communist party censorship regime to Australians, astoundingly with the backing of the Australian government.

Authorising foreigners to control what is discussed is the opposite of what should happen. In the last parliament, I co-authored a Bill with George Christensen that would outlaw the censoring of political discussion among Australians by foreign social media companies. Not only will I do everything to try to stop Labor’s Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill from becoming law, I will re-introduce a Bill to protect Australians’ right to speak freely online.

The prospects of stopping the new misinformation regime in the Senate are not great but I would hope that my friends on the left think deeply about this intrusion into people’s rights. The current Bill is clearly designed to combat anti-Voice and anti-vaccine views. The Explanatory Memorandum to the Bill defines misleading information to include attacks on ‘referendum proposals’, and vaccines are mentioned eighteen times.

In the future this Bill could easily be weaponised to silence anti-war or anti-big business views. A few months ago, the Australian Conservation Foundation was briefly cancelled on X after it made some claims about nuclear energy. I thought its statements were wrong but I do not want an American social media company to have the power to silence an Australian organisation from speaking about an important public policy issue.

One of the most important reasons to allow free speech is so that we can listen and not just speak. When someone is silenced it is not just the rights of the person to speak that have been breached, it is also the rights of everyone else to listen to that person. I, as an Australian, have the right to listen to my fellow Australians, even the ones I disagree with.

A healthy society encourages the airing of different opinions. That is how we test and strengthen our own ideas. That is how we correct our mistakes. The duration of a lie depends on how quickly someone is allowed to point it out.

The government will probably ram its misinformation laws through the parliament. Ironically, laws designed to silence the Australian people will likely be passed by silencing the parliament and limiting debate.

But, even if we end up with a misinformation tsar, we should not be downcast. This desperate move is a sign that the left are losing. Every cancellation will be a vindication that we are right.

There is always a silver lining. If established, the misinformation tsar will become the best barometer of truth since the Delphic oracle. Except this time it will work in reverse.

Whatever the misinformation tsar says is false will actually turn out to be true.