We were right to be sceptical of the Liberal Party’s denouncement of Labor’s Misinformation and Disinformation Bill.

Having gained the first positive political traction from the Blue Ribbon base since their opposition to the Voice to Parliament, Senator Jane Hume has summarily dismantled any delusions that the Liberals have learned their lesson or committed themselves to civil liberty.

(And if the following is a mistake, or a misspoken reply, by all means let us have the Coalition step forward and forever promise to leave this legislation in the shredder.)

Speaking to the current bill on Sky News Australia yesterday, Senator Hume said:

‘The Coalition will deliver its own policy prior to the election, but our priority right now must be to defeat this very bad bill.’

The Liberals were told that the only way to salvage their battered reputation would be to publicly denounce their former role in the creation of this ‘very bad bill’.

Voters have begged the Liberal Party to abandon, in its entirety, any Parliamentary desire to curate the public conversation through various censorial laws disguised as ‘misinformation and disinformation’, ‘digital safety’, or the ‘protection of children’.

The wider Australian community has expressed, through thousands of submissions to this bill, an overwhelming demand that the government stop messing around in the public forum where they are not needed, invited, or wanted. Their problem is not with this specific bill, it is with the lurch within politics to obsess about public speech.

Nobody trusts the government with censorship powers. News that the Coalition will be busy drafting Misinformation and Disinformation 2.0 once they finish voting down Labor’s bill comes as a cold chill through conservative politics.

This refusal to give up on digital censorship sadly fits with the pattern seen in the leadership of the Opposition, where Peter Dutton frequently voices his approval for various infringements on digital liberty. Some of the worst thought bubbles in this field are his.

The most dangerous of these is the age restriction of social media via facial recognition – something Labor has taken and run with. Turning social media access into something done at the pleasure of the government (first through age, then through whatever it likes) paves the way for government to grant access to the public forum. It is a provision that effectively erases the concept of a free and open environment for speech.

Citizens may like to remind the government that it did not create social media, nor would it ever be visionary enough to do so. Attempts to regulate social media come from an allergy to the chaos of unfiltered thought which Parliament wrongly sees as a threat to stability. It remains my hope that with enough vocal opposition to these censorial bills, the Coalition will finally drop the bone that is censorship from their policy portfolio.

As for the views of Senator Hume, if I were able to interview her, I have some questions in relation to the protection of medical freedom and ensuring that government opinion regarding medical ‘misinformation’ is not allowed to silence whistle-blowers and victims who expose drug companies on social media.

I notice that in the past, Senator Hume has expressed a negative view of ‘dangerous’ medical information that appeared on social media during the pandemic.

On August 27, 2021, Senator Hume said:

‘Misinformation is dangerous. Ignore those pushing it, like Clive Palmer. Let’s stick to the National Plan, get vaccinated and get back to the lives that we want.’

Those left permanently injured or dead from vaccine side effects of course, cannot return to the lives ‘they want’. During the pandemic, most of what the government and its health authorities published turned out to be misleading, fictitious, or false. Admissions have been made that many of the pedantic pandemic rules were employed to manipulate public behaviour and compliance. That, to me, is a misuse of government trust. In everything from social distancing rules, to contact tracing, to safety and efficacy claims – the government has acted as a purveyor of misinformation. Meanwhile, the truth found on social media was wrongly misidentified. Why should the government have a say in the truth when its current track record is in tatters? Trust is earned, not legislated.

Senator Hume also said in March of 22, ‘The tech giants – the largest digital platforms – have transformed from tools that index context or enable communication, to surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation.’

Remind me, is it X or the former Liberal government that drafted Digital ID legislation to track citizens through the digital world and tried to claim that there was no safe way forward for the digital economy following Covid except through the gatekeeping of government ID?

The point here is not to drag Senator Hume over the coals but to point out what an increasing number of health experts are saying in response to Labor’s current bill – the government is not fit to make decisions on truth and that it made serious mistakes during the previous pandemic.

No matter what their ‘good’ intentions are, the Coalition should not be seeking to replace Labor’s Misinformation and Disinformation Bill with another one of their own. Even if their next bill were ‘perfect’, it would set in law the ability to censor public speech and open the door to constant amendments which would, over time, create a tyrannical mechanism for government to misuse. Just. Stop.