Committee Secretariat contact:

Committee Secretary
Senate Standing Committees on Environment and Communications
PO Box 6100
Parliament House
Canberra ACT 2600
Phone: +61 2 6277 3526
[email protected]

Public submission regarding: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combating Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024.

The Misinformation Bill is not just wholly unnecessary, it’s an abject travesty. How did such a preposterous overbearing, undemocratic, anti-science and dangerous piece of legislation get past the first focus group? It wouldn’t survive a high-school debate, and yet, here it is?

Misinformation is easy to correct when you own a billion dollar news agency, most academics, institutions, expert committees and 25% of the economy. The really hard thing, even with all that power and money is to defend an absurd lie and stop people pointing it out, which is surely the main purpose of the Misinformation Bill amendments. The government can already correct any misinformation that really matters, so these amendments curtail our freedom of speech for no benefit at all.

Guilty until proven innocent?

The amendments turn free speech on its head — instead of having the implicit right to criticize the government, everyone now needs to prove to some judge that their views are “reasonably” satire, or reasonable dissemination for an “academic, scientific or religious” purpose, and that their “motive” is honest and their behaviour is “authentic”.

When it comes to reasonableness in a democracy the highest court should be the court of public opinion, but how can the people decide if they are not allowed to hear it?

How is it even a democracy still if the government is allowed to take our money to force feed us the governments view on the ABC and in every captured university (dependent on government funds), but the people cannot even reply through sheer unfunded creative wit?

This legislation puts a very unfree cloud over all groups, forums, blogs, and social media.

The fines (and all legal fees today) are so obscenely, disproportionately harmful to Australians that few will risk going to court, instead the platforms will be preemptively second guessing what a judge might say is reasonable, and people with serious social media accounts will be second guessing the second-guesses of their platform controllers in fear that they might be thrown off, and lose years of work if they guess wrongly.

Worse, the big platforms, supposedly so “independent” will become unaccountable but de facto arms of the government. The platforms will know if they don’t perform as expected and favorably to the incumbent masters, that the rules will get more onerous, the fines bigger. And thus and verily will the unholy alliance of Big-Tech and Big-Government will become Big-Brother in your conversations, and Big Bankrupter in your nightmares.

The government claim they are not censoring anyone, but it’s just done at arms length with “implausible” deniability. Obviously the laws will censor all of us who are not already controlled by the government through a public salary, a grant, or a Code of Practice written into the the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Act.

Who silences the government misinformation, then?

We were there when the government experts told us margarine with hydrogenated fake vegetable fat would be great for our hearts. We heard them when they told us an ice age was coming, and antibiotics were useless against stomach ulcers. We noticed they told us to hold off on the peanut butter for babies to prevent allergies, only to find out that all these things were misinformation.

What happens when the experts are wrong, but the people who are unconvinced can’t speak up because they might “harm… the efficacy of a preventative health measure”? These health measures may take a … lifetime… to even measure the efficacy. Does the government get a free pass for 40 years?

It was estimated dietary trans fats (found in margarine) were killing 82,000 people a year in the US. (Danaei et al 2009). Should we have fined all the people who talked about this, and perhaps delayed things, and killed a half a million more? Someone speaking against hydrogenated margarine could have been deemed to be spreading “misinformation causing harm to public health in Australia”. So 20 years later, they turn out to be right — will the government compensate the families of the dead who might have chosen a different sandwich spread had they heard another opinion and been able to make up their own mind? Will Facebook and Twitter need to block the accounts of experts who were wrong?

Or, are there two kinds of citizens in Australia — one sort that work for the government, who can give their opinions and get things wrong without losing their right to speak, and the Untermenschen, who cannot speak, even if they are right?

Confidence has to be earned, not ordered

Apparently the citizens of Australia are not allowed to say anything that might harm the confidence in the banking system or the financial markets. But if our banking system is so fragile, or our currency so fake, that it needs a law to force people to “feel confident” then we are in a trouble already.

Nothing damages confidence like making a law to silence critics.

As adults, we filter misinformation our whole lives, it’s our job

We are all adults in this room, and we have lived our whole lives filtering out advertising spin, ignoring political lies, and reading books telling us we can stops storms if we just ride a bike. Since the stone-age we’ve spent our lives climbing from one misinformation-swamp to another, but as adults, it’s our job to figure it out. Free will and all. How dare you treat us like children.

And even the children about to enter the room have to learn how to deal with misinformation. How exactly can we teach them, if the government serves up one permitted line to protect us from accidentally hearing something “wrong”?

It’s not just that this misinformation bill is egregiously wrong, it’s that we shouldn’t have one at all in the first place.

REFERENCE

Danaei et al (2009) The preventable causes of death in the United States: comparative risk assessment of dietary, lifestyle, and metabolic risk factors, PLoS Med, . 2009 Apr 28;6(4):e1000058. doi: 10.1371/journal.pmed.1000058. Epub 2009 Apr 28.

Over three years ago (on 29^th July 2021) Millimetres From Disaster saw the light of day here at Cliscep. It was a bit of a mickey-take about a scare-mongering BBC article bearing the title “What will climate change look like near me”. In it I pointed out that inputting my post code produced a series of distinctly non-scary results regarding the BBC’s prognostications for the climate where I live if global temperatures increased by 2C or by 4C.

I had completely forgotten about it until I noticed an article in the Guardian (or, given the fact that it appeared today, a Sunday, perhaps the Observer) titled “The UK will get hotter and drier for plants… except in Manchester”. This reminded me about the BBC article and my observations on it, and I wondered if it still exists.

It does, but something strange has happened. Apart from being padded out to try to increase its scariness, quite a lot has changed. Three years ago I was told that “[t]he hottest summer day of the past 30 years near you was 29.7C”. Today I find that the 30 year timescale referred to is no longer the last 30 years, but is instead the 30 years from 1991-2021. During this period apparently the hottest summer day near me was 29.4C, so 0.3C less than the temperature suggested when I looked three years ago. The discrepancy may only be small, but it is real. It can’t be explained by reference to different timescales, because effectively “the past 30 years” when I looked in 2021 and the 30 years from 1991-2021 are the same. So did the BBC get it wrong three years ago, or are they getting it wrong now?

Much more curiously, though, is the fact that the alarmism has also been toned down slightly with regard to my fears of being boiled alive in summer by increases in temperature of 2C or 4C. Whereas three years ago I was earnestly assured that “[i]f global average temperatures increase 2C above pre-industrial levels, the hottest summer day could be about 31.6C. If global temperatures rise by 4C, it could be about 35.3C” I now find that those highs are expected to be 31.2C and 35.1C respectively. In other words, the highs are 0.4C and 0.2C less respectively than I was told three years ago that I should expect them to be. What hasn’t changed is that there is still no explanation as to why if world temperatures increase by 2C, the temperatures where I live will increase by only 1.8C, but a global 4C increase in temperature will see the temperature where I live increase by a staggering 5.7C.

When it comes to winter temperatures there is still no discussion of how cold things will be, which is a shame, as that’s what really concerns me, given that it rarely gets very hot where I live, but it’s often very cold. Three years ago I was informed by the BBC that “[t]he warmest winter day of the past 30 years near you was 16.7C”, but now I learn that it was 16.6C. As discussed above, the 30 year time slot referred to, although referred to using different language is in fact the same. I accept that a change by 0.1C isn’t very significant, but one of the versions (at least) was therefore inaccurate.

And whereas three years ago I was told that “[i]f global average temperatures increase 2C above pre-industrial levels, the warmest winter day could be about 17.2C. If global temperatures rise by 4C, it could be about 18C”, those temperature increases have now also been revised downwards, to 17C and 17.9C respectively.

With regard to temperatures, the other thing that has changed is that the BBC has taken the opportunity to repeat the dubious claim about the alleged 41.3C record high temperature, which it continues to refer to as being at Coningsby rather than where it actually was, namely at RAF Coningsby just as three jets came in to land.

Turning to rainfall, I was advised three years ago that where I live “[i]n the past 30 years, there were 13 rainy days on average per month in summer” but now they tell me it was in fact 14 days. Three years ago they told me that the number of rainy days in summer would stay the same at temperature increases of 2C and 4C, but now they tell me those days will fall to 13 at 2C (and it is a fall if the average was 14 rather than 13), and will fall further to just 11 if the global temperature rises by 4C. Why the change and how come the Guardian/Observer thinks that Manchester will still be wet? In any event, given how wet Cumbrian summers can be, this is welcome news (if true).

As for winter rainfall, three years ago I was told “[i]n the past 30 years, there were 15 rainy days on average per month in winter” but now I learn that it was in fact 16. The only consistent thing about the BBC piece three years on is that both three years ago and now it informs me that winter rainfall (or, more specifically, the number of rainy days) where I live is likely to remain unchanged with global temperature increases of both 2C and 4C.

On the other hand, turning to rainfall amounts (as opposed to the number of wet days), I was told three years ago that “[o]n the wettest summer day of the past 30 years, 70mm of rain fell in your area” but now I’m told – rather astonishingly – that it was in fact 87mm, which is quite a large difference. Once again, one (at least) of the BBC reports must have been factually inaccurate. Both reports predict an increase at 2C but a decrease at 4C, although on neither occasion was an explanation given for this strange forecast. Three years ago a 2C rise would have seen the heaviest summer rainfall day rise by 4mm to 74mm but today it would apparently rise by 3mm to 90mm. Three years ago it would fall with a 4C rise by 3mm to 67mm (a 4% fall), but today it would fall by 5mm to 82mm (a 5% fall it tells me, though in fact it’s approximately 5.75%).

As for winter, three years ago I was told that “[o]n the wettest winter day of the past 30 years, 72mm of rain fell in your area” whereas now I’m told it was 86mm. The 2C and 4C global temperature rises would, three years ago, have apparently seen rises of 3mm to 75mm and of 13mm to 85mm (which the BBC said was a 19% increase, though actually it’s 18%). Now, however, the forecast is for a 9mm rise to 95mm at 2C and a whopping 23mm rise to 109mm (or a 26% increase).

So there it is. Nothing stays the same, neither the past nor the future. I’m reassured to know, however, that whatever else changes, the science is settled, and also that we can continue to rely on good old Auntie to scare-monger about climate change.