In Praise of Do-Nothing Governments

The compulsion to look busy is a curse to which progressive prime ministers are particularly prone. It can be intense before an election, manifest in a sludge of vanity legislation with no purpose other than to flatter the government’s record and enhance its moral standing. At best, the legislation wastes Parliament’s time, like the 2013 Homelessness (Consequential Amendments) Bill. Its purpose was unashamedly symbolic. The explanatory memorandum said it was “aimed at increasing recognition and awareness of people who are homeless or at risk of homelessness”.

Yet the consequences of twilight legislation fast-tracked through Parliament can be severe, propelling the nation on an illiberal course that is nearly impossible to correct. The Racial Discrimination Act 1975 was enacted four months before Gough Whitlam’s dismissal, spawning the Office of the Commissioner for Community Relations, the forerunner for the Australian Human Rights Commission. The Racial Hatred Act 1995 was a parting gift of the Keating government. It included the notorious clause 18C, which lowered the bar of discrimination to include acts deemed to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate persons on the grounds of race. The Sex Discrimination Amendment (Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Intersex Status) Act 2013 was passed on June 25, 2013, on the penultimate day of Julia Gillard’s prime ministership, enshrining the concept of gender identity in law.

The Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill follows this great Labor tradition of saving its most dangerous legislation to last. It will secure Anthony Albanese’s place in the list of Labor leaders who have taken Australia further along the road to tyranny by increasing the state’s powers to police civic debate.

Whitlam’s legislation confined the state’s ability to dictate what could or could not be said about race-related matters. Gillard widened the net to include gender identity and sexual orientation. The Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill extends to everything, making an unelected government authority only loosely accountable to Parliament the ultimate arbiter of truth. The Australian Communications and Media Authority will be deemed infallible in distinguishing between misinformation and disinformation, words that wouldn’t look out of place in George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.

Like most lurches towards state control, this one begins by fuelling moral panic over a threat to society of such proportions that the government must step in. There is no shortage of genuine risks to our safety and wellbeing that might keep the Prime Minister awake at night: China’s threat to invade Taiwan, the arrival of thousands of unscreened Palestinian asylum seekers, and the rise in violent crime, to name but three. Yet Anthony Albanese’s government refrains from discussing those by focusing instead on the danger posed by imagined bad actors on the internet, who harness social media’s power to mould individuals’ minds in nefarious ways.

The narrative of shadowy figures intent on undermining our way of life is a classic tool to justify the expansion of state control. It typically follows a structured formula designed to create fear and position the state as the sole protector of the nation.

For Benito Mussolini, these unseen presences were portrayed as degenerate cultural critics, liberals, and decadent intellectuals who were plotting to destroy Italy and its traditions. Joseph Stalin talked about the wreckers and saboteurs who were undermining the Soviet economy. Robert Mugabe demonised white farmers, sellouts, and the remnants of colonialism to justify land seizures.

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland points the finger at “bad actors”: unspecified individuals, groups, or organisations that engage in malicious behaviour with the intent of causing damage, disruption, or manipulation. She hints at an orchestrated social media campaign to spread disinformation.

It follows a familiar pattern. After the Voice referendum, Albanese blamed the No campaign for misinformation rather than the flaws in his proposal for the referendum’s defeat.

Last month, Rowland announced the re-introduction of the Combating Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, claiming that misinformation and disinformation “pose a serious threat to the safety and wellbeing of Australians, as well as to our democracy, society and economy”.

Rowland produced no evidence to back up her hyperbolic statement. She merely asserted it as fact. Nor did she clarify what misinformation and disinformation mean. Instead, she resorted to the dangerous excuse that the government had to do something. “Doing nothing and allowing this problem to fester is not an option,” she insisted.

Yet doing nothing is usually the best option when governments cannot precisely explain the problem they are addressing and how the proposed measures will fix it.

When there is a compelling reason for government action, there are almost always better options than the ones the government proposes, and they will be further enhanced by vigorous debate. Yet the government is in no mood to compromise on its censorship bill. Instead, it resorts to the time-worn political device of muddying the waters.

A few days before the government revealed that the censorship was back in play, it announced the long-overdue step of raising the age at which teenagers can leave a family’s social media account and set up one of their own. This measure is overdue, given the mounting evidence of the dangers of giving teenagers uninhibited smartphone access. The current age of consent is thirteen.

Yet there is a world of difference between measures allowing parents to control their children’s online activity and allowing a government body to dictate what responsible adults can say, read, watch or share. Giving the Australian Communications and Media Authority the power to decide what misinformation is, as opposed to information, has nothing to do with “keeping Australians safe online”, as Rowland piously pretends it will. It has everything to do with granting extra-judicial powers to a body that already interferes far too much in the public debate on radio and television.

Extending ACMA’s powers to online media is a move that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Its officials are unelected and only loosely controlled by Parliament. It has a track record of mission creep. Its principal role is to license a scarce resource, namely electromagnetic frequencies between 3 Hz and 300 GHz, used for everything from maritime and aeronautical communications to 5G. Its job is to ensure that frequencies are allocated efficiently and avoid interference.

In recent years, however, ACMA has expanded its view of what constitutes “interference”. It is no longer limited to the disruption or degradation of a wireless signal by users on the same or nearby frequency. It now includes interference in civic debate to silence opinions with which ACMA disagrees. Last year, for example, ACMA ruled that Rowan Dean had undermined climate science and played down the threat of global warming on the Great Barrier Reef in four segments broadcast on Sky News.

Since ACMA’s powers to sanction broadcasters are extensive, rulings like these have a chilling effect on debates on contentious issues like climate change, transgender rights, and the management of pandemics.

John Stuart Mill clearly articulated the risks of allowing a body like ACMA to rule on such issues half a century before the start of broadcasting and well over a century before the internet. It assumes that the authorities are infallible, which, however noble their intentions, they are clearly not.

What happens if the opinion the authority is attempting to suppress is true? “We can never be sure that the opinion we are endeavouring to stifle is a false opinion, and if we were sure, [suppressing] it would still be an evil,” Mill writes. It would be an extraordinarily conceited government that pretended that such mistakes could never happen and that ACMA’s word should be taken as final on every subject it chooses to judge.

That certainly wasn’t true of the authorised line on lockdowns, the origins of the Covid virus and much more of what social media chose to censor for the supposed benefit of public health. Many of those censorship decisions were made unilaterally, and some were made under the threat of coercion by the government. The Albanese administration has employed the same method to support drastic measures under the pretence of protecting our safety.

Last month, Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Facebook’s parent company Meta, recalled in a letter that the Biden White House “repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content, including humour and satire”. “I think we made some choices that, with the benefit of hindsight and new information, we wouldn’t make today,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I regret we were not more outspoken about it. We are ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Let’s hope that is true, since our shambling, dissembling excuse for a government is intent on granting summary powers to censure Facebook, X and the rest for publishing opinions or even facts that challenge the conventional wisdom on any topic.

The best way to separate fact from fiction is through open, public debate. A dissenting opinion commonly contains a proportion of the truth, Mill writes; the prevailing wisdom, on the other hand, is seldom the whole truth. Mill concludes: “It is only by the collision of adverse opinions that the remainder of the truth has any chance of being supplied.”

Barring an unexpected development, this deceitful, corrosive piece of legislation will be passed by Parliament with the collusion of the Teals and Greens. Amendments will almost certainly worsen it, since the only criticism of the current Bill the Greens are likely to offer is that it doesn’t go far enough.

Peter Dutton may win if Albanese’s decline accelerates. Dutton’s challenge is considerable, but if anyone is capable of generating an “It’s Time” factor in just three years, it is our thirty-first Prime Minister, the leader of a shabby government that has wasted too much of its first term paying off its debts to the unions and attacking its opponents.

Should the Coalition win the next election, repealing this vanity legislation must be a top priority. Dutton’s challenge is to do what no previous incoming Liberal leader has managed to do: rewind the extravagant progressive legislation passed by Labor in its dying days.

Clearing up after Labor’s fiscal incontinence has been the unpleasant duty of incoming Coalition governments since 1975. In this term of government, Labor hasn’t stopped at that. It has greatly impoverished our democracy and civil society in ways that might never be reversed.

Nick Cater is the author of The Lucky Culture.