Australia strikes a blow against online censorship

Against the odds, a blow for free speech has just been struck in Australia. This week, the Labor government’s communications minister, Michelle Rowland, confirmed it would withdraw its ‘disinformation’ bill from the Senate. In the end, its defeat was surprisingly comprehensive: not a single non-government senator had committed to voting for it.

The Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill (or MAD, as it was disparagingly referred to by its opponents) would have allowed the powers-that-be to censor social-media content they consider to be ‘false, misleading and deceptive’. It was a close relative of laws already in place in Europe and the UK, such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and the UK’s Online Safety Act.

Under the Australian model, social-media companies that failed to remove so-called disinformation would have faced the wrath of the Australian Media and Communication Authority. This authority would have been empowered to demand tech platforms not only keep records of how they police their own users, but also hand them over on request. That’s not all: under the bill, tech platforms would have been fined five per cent of their global turnover for failing to censor users.

MAD’s emphatic defeat is a moment of rare unity in Australian politics. The bill attracted around 15,000 written-evidence submissions, a number unheard of in a country known for its somewhat laconic attitude to politics. Constitutional lawyers, woke senators and the opposition Liberal-National Coalition formed an unlikely alliance against it. Even the Australian Human Rights Commission did its job for once, opposing the bill on the grounds that ‘freedom of expression was not sufficiently protected’. The version of the bill set to be debated in the Senate had even been watered down by the Labor government in an attempt to win greater support. But, in an unfortunate irony for Rowland, the only consensus she achieved was uniting normally conflicting politicians in opposition.

Why has Australia, at least for now, been one of the few countries to reject the pervasive rise of online censorship? The public’s unpleasant experience of the authoritarian Covid lockdowns has certainly played a role. People will remember when, for example, a pregnant woman was arrested at her house for sharing an anti-lockdown event on her Facebook page. Or when police fired rubber pellets and detonated smoke bombs at heavily outnumbered protesters in Melbourne.

It is also clear that many in Australia have seen what has happened in nations that have imposed online censorship. Speaking alongside the American journalist Michael Shellenberger in Parliament House this week, one senator referred to the bill as a ‘co-ordinated, global effort to silence people’. This may be overstating the case, but Australian MPs would have been well aware of just how draconian the attempts to clamp down on disinformation have been in like-minded countries.

The battle, however, is far from over. The Labor government’s plans to restrict social-media access for children under the age of 16 is almost certain to be passed into law after it won the backing of the Coalition. And who could forget Julie Inman Grant? Australia’s eSafety Commissioner, and head of the 500-employee strong ACMA, has repeatedly used her opaque powers to censor content not only in Australia, but globally. Inman Grant only recently dropped a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s X, which she took to court after it refused to remove videos of a stabbing in a Sydney church. As long as the smooth-talking, telegenic Grant remains in her role, Australians, and the world for that matter, will need to be on their guard.

Still, the defeat of the disinformation bill strikes a critical blow against online censorship. Let’s hope it’s the start of a global fightback.

Hugo Timms is an intern at spiked.