We need a Liberal Party – heck, I’d take a National Party – that believes in free speech. I think it’s plain to everyone that we don’t have one. The costs of that are about to get really high. Last week’s leading article set out how Labor’s proposed Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 will empower a two-bit Canberra agency – the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) – and how bad that is going to be. Horrifying, to be blunt. As the erudite editorial made clear, the ‘new powers’ will authorise ACMA to make a final determination on what counts as ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’ and with huge fines lurking in the background, to advise (think the sort of ‘advice’ you’d get from Al Capone) social media platforms to clamp down on it. It’s all based on an amorphous, incredibly left-leaning notion of ‘harm’ (one that would have John Stuart Mill turning in his grave). Of course, the government is exempting itself (and other institutions now captured by the political left) from this new censorship regime – and flat-out censorship this is. The dangers of this new Bill are myriad. In no particular order here is a sample.

Recall what world-leading epidemiologist Professor Jay Bhattacharya said about the two-plus years of pandemic lockdowns; that ‘the biggest source of disinformation came from government’. Professor Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, maybe even more eminent as an epidemiologist than Bhattacharya, broadly agrees. We lived through nearly three years of brutal suppression of views that were dubbed ‘disinformation’ but turned out far more likely than not to be correct – think lab leak theory (emails show the main players in the public health caste who censored others thought it was true); think costs of lockdowns being far greater than benefits; think vaccines’ ability to stop infection and transmission (not even tested for in trials); think police thuggery enforcing pandemic laws; think unequal treatment of those wanting to protest (BLM v anti-lockdowns); think the whole gamut of ‘we’re all in this together’ lies; and so on. And then imagine how the ‘official’ government line would treat dissenters over climate change, the trans movement, the Voice, mass immigration, heck even scepticism about compulsory superannuation.

This Bill disguises a core truth, namely that the notions of ‘disinformation’ and ‘misinformation’ are highly politicised. We saw this in the US with the whole Russia collusion scam (all untrue from start to finish) where any right-of-centre people who doubted that Trump’s win was a function of Russian help were labelled ‘deniers’ and all evidence pointing out that it was a pack of lies was dubbed (you guessed it) ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation’. The same goes for the Hunter Biden laptop and its contents.

The great Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume (on anyone’s first eleven) made a crucial distinction between facts and values. The former, he said, are imposed on us by the external, causal world. Your own personal druthers or preferences (‘I wish I’d been born a woman’, ‘I don’t think men are on average bigger, stronger, faster’) are neither here nor there. Your feelings or subjective sense of well-being doesn’t alter the imposed facts. But values, said Hume, are related to the sentiments one brings to the table. There is no true answer as to what is the best flavour of ice cream. It depends on the assessor’s taste buds. Any time values are mixed with facts any governmental attempts to label things as ‘disinformation’ are dangerous. And will be politicised. This is one of the big dangers with these laws. The other  is  that the two-bit, officious ACMA bureaucrats will simply get the facts wrong, perhaps due to the politicised values they bring to the table.

Mr Albanese (no surprise here) seems not to have read his J.S. Mill. The best way of combatting errors that are distributed on the internet is through the open, unhindered expression of competing views. An official government position on anything will soon collapse into protecting its arse. (Remember the pandemic, anyone? Speaking personally, my trust in the elite caste has completely cratered and polls in the US and UK show that is true across society there too. These boffins brought it on themselves by censoring dissenters who proved to be correct.)

That’s just three of many problems and dangers. But here’s the thing. We lack in this country an Opposition party any of us can trust to fight this Bill and its motivating ethos. Readers can remember that the same sort of scheme was being mooted by the Morrison government, probably not in as insidious a form as Labor’s but once you open the door you are partly responsible for the resulting expansionary problems – or have we forgotten Morrison’s attack on superannuation? Or watch Senator James Paterson on Andrew Bolt a fortnight or so ago as the supposed ‘free speech warrior’ of the Liberal Party half-defends the need to have this sort of Bill. Res ipsa loquitur.

Here’s my take. The Liberal Party went off the rails after Tony Abbott’s crushing victory in 2013. Abbott had pledged to repeal the s.18C hate speech laws. He ran into enough opposition in his own party room (and probably from poll-driven advisors who have no strategic nous, just short-term tactical obsessions) that he pulled the attempt. Mr Abbott made a terrible mistake in doing that. It would have been far better to put it to the Senate and make them block it. I can attest (as someone who stayed in Abbott’s corner) that that pusillanimity lost him massive support amongst conservatives who value free speech. More importantly, it made all of us conservatives incredibly sceptical of any core pledges we hear from current Liberal party leaders. So yes, Mr. Dutton says he is wholly opposed to this censorious Labor Bill. So what? What we need is a firm, no exceptions-no-matter-what pledge to repeal it when next the Coalition takes office. Even then there’d be room to doubt today’s Liberal party with all its many Labor-lite MPs (think of all the state Liberal parties who have vigorously opposed the woeful, judge-empowering state Bills of Rights when proposed by Labor only eventually to come into office and do nothing at all about them, a la Ted Ballieu).

Personally, I think we need to hear Mr Dutton say that he will make the repeal of this Bill the top priority of any future Coalition government and he’ll get it done even if it means forcing a double dissolution election. That’s how dangerous this Bill is and how little trust any of us can have in today’s Liberal party when it comes to free speech. Because, readers, the Libs’ opposition to the terrible Voice proposal has put them in the running to win the next election and this sort of value-based position would only further those prospects (Mark Textor’s ‘ignore the base’ tactics be damned).

PS While Mr Dutton’s at it he could repeal s.18C, the Simon Birmingham/Julian Leeser wing of the partyroom notwithstanding.