Following a tsunami of opposition – over 23,000 responses – Labor has temporarily withdrawn the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill to add clarifications for the ‘protection’ of religious speech.

The Albanese government is also hoping to water down the backlash by delaying the Bill until 2024.

It comes after successful campaigns by Senators including Malcolm Roberts and Alex Antic who alerted the public to Labor’s intention to limit the speech of citizens and rogue media commentators which threatens the integrity of unpopular policies.

The digital world is the public forum, and yet sluggish legislators have failed to protect it, instead favouring those who seek to manipulate the reach of social media for partisan ends.

Promising that government would ‘take on board responses’ and ‘improve the Bill’, the Communications Minister Michelle Rowland somehow missed the thrust of the complaints which stated, effectively, ‘SHRED THIS PIECE OF DANGEROUS, SELF-SERVING GARBAGE!’

‘The government is considering refinements to the Bill, including to definitions, exemptions and clarification on religious freedom, among other things. In the face of seriously harmful content that sows division, undermines support for pillars of our democracy, or disrupts public health responses, doing nothing is not an option,’ said Rowland.

Rubbish. The government has shown itself to be the worst offender of dangerous misinformation operating, at times, in the interest of corporate profit margins rather than public safety. Regardless of whether it is ruled by a Labor or Liberal Prime Minister, the government has no position from which to command control over ‘truth’.

Which brings us to Labor’s plan to bribe the Bill’s passage into law by promising to ‘protect’ religious speech.

We write ‘protect’ with a dubious air because in practice this is likely to mean that certain religious speech advantageous to Labor’s voting base will be protected, while other religious speech will not. How often do we see double-standards in relation to culture play out in this country? Where is the evidence this Bill is any different when its existence is designed to quieten political dissent?

Weighing into religious exemptions effectively allows the government to not only determine ‘truth’, but to adjudicate on what is and isn’t protected religious speech.

Any religious person or organisation that falls for this promise is mad.

And too bad if you are irreligious. Your ability to criticise certain religious rhetoric will be stripped to protect the feelings of volatile communities where criticism is a healthy moderator of extreme behaviour. This Bill, in its amended form, will invite religious groups to squabble over the validity of their irreconcilable beliefs while the agnostic remain duct-taped in the corner.

Will Christians be able to write critically about the trans movement and surgical affirmation for children? Probably not. Will Islamic radicals be able to shout, ‘From the River to the Sea!’ in the face of Jewish people? Almost certainly.

Religious freedom laws work a lot like ‘equity’ and ‘diversity’ policies. In other words, they don’t work.

Labor has, unsurprisingly, chosen to frame this amendment from the Christian perspective.

We call on freedom and democracy-minded Christians to see through the ruse and reject Labor’s religious Trojan horse. Think carefully. When has Labor moved to protect Christians and their beliefs in recent decades? If you trust them now, why? On what evidence?

Yes, the original Bill received complaints from the Australian Christian Lobby. No, that doesn’t mean the Bill should have a religious clause added – it means the Bill needs to acquaint itself with oblivion.

In their submission against the Bill, Freedom for Faith wrote, ‘The Bill is clearly inconsistent with the protections to religious speech under international law. Article 18 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966.’ They are correct.

If you silence speech online, it moves to the streets to vent its frustration. There, we see police embrace a two-tiered response to protesters. Australian citizens who march in the name of freedom get shot in the back with rubber bullets and those who call out ‘Gas the Jews!’ are softly ‘managed’ to avoid trouble, even though the latter category contains those suspected of breaking anti-terror laws by associating with Hamas.

If the government insisted on existing laws being policed more stringently, online speech would not boil over in frustration.

Furious speech is often the result of policing failure, weak judges, and a morally bankrupt political class. Silencing public debate cannot fix this problem. It will make it worse.

Let us test the Bill with a recent example.

Would ACMA remove posts put up by the government that falsely stated mRNA vaccines were safe, effective, properly tested, and correctly licensed? Would they have corrected the misleading claims that Covid vaccines stop transmission? Would they delete posts about unvaccinated people ‘killing grandma’? Would they call out accounts from government-endorsed doctors who falsely painted Ivermectin as ‘horse de-wormer’ during a smear campaign?

Do we trust ACMA to correctly navigate this issue when the Minister uses the phrase ‘disrupts public health responses’ in their intention for the Bill?

Freedom of Information releases requested by Senator Alex Antic showed what sort of behaviour the government expects out of its digital regulators when it asked Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter to remove posts that were factually correct but harmful to the reputation of health policy.

As The Australian reported:

For instance, the then Coalition government sought the removal of an Instagram post in April 2021 that claimed “Covid-19 vaccine does not prevent Covid-19 infection or Covid-19 transmission”. That statement clearly was accurate yet the official intervention via the Home Affairs Department claimed it breached Instagram’s community guidelines because it was “potentially harmful information” that was “explicitly prohibited” by the platform.

Tell us, is that what we define as safe? Senator Antic made the below comment regarding the censorship decisions made by the then-Morrison government:

‘During the Covid period, Home Affairs actively sought censorship of true statements such as ‘lockdowns are ineffective’ and compelled social media companies to penalise dissent from the government’s position.’

The Coalition must continue to reject this Bill – wholesale – including Labor’s astonishingly dangerous amendments which amount to wrapping a bomb in Christmas paper.

Shadow Communications Minister David Coleman is right to say the Bill should be ripped up and that, ‘Freedom of speech is fundamental to our democracy, and the Coalition will always fight for it.’

Coleman is about to have his nerve tested.

The answer to Labor’s threat to free speech is not to invite them to appoint themselves the moderators of religious speech. Labor is offering sweets to the religious right in the same way a farmer baits the mouse trap with cheese.

No amendment can fix this Bill. It is poison.

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