Michaelia Cash: Anthony Albanese has put freedom of speech in Australia under attack

Governments censoring freedom of speech. You hear about it but never in your wildest dreams would you imagine an Australian government censoring its own people.

But that is exactly what the Albanese Government wants to do. They put freedom of speech in Australia under attack.

And although Albanese Labor’s so called Misinformation Bill was withdrawn from the Senate this week, that’s not the end of this story.

The Coalition was never going to agree to this outrageous attack on free speech.

But Labor only withdrew the Bill as the Greens refused to support it because they didn’t think it went far enough.

So Prime Minister Albanese must immediately rule out any future iteration of this legislation.

The big danger for Australians will be a minority Labor government after the next election with the Greens making demands for such legislation to be reborn in a strengthened fashion. In other words, censorship on steroids.

When this Bill passed through the House of Representatives it had the support of all Labor members in WA and Kate Chaney, the teal Member for Curtin.

Their vote for this Bill shows that they do no respect or support the fundamental right of Australians to free speech.

Members of the Liberal and National Party did not support Labor’s assault on free speech.

This is a Bill which has no place in Australia.

Freedom of speech is a cornerstone of democracy and a crucial component of individual liberty.

But it often comes as a surprise to many Australians that our Constitution does not explicitly protect freedom of speech, although the High Court has held that an implied freedom of political communication exists.

This is very different to the United States where their constitution, via its first amendment, directly protects freedom of speech.

So, when the Albanese Government proposes laws that will have a direct and devastating impact on freedom of speech in our country, every Australian should be extremely concerned.

The now withdrawn Bill would have directly compromised the free speech of Australians, including but not limited to political speech.

It would have been more accurately named the censorship Bill.

The Bill gave the government regulator, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, extraordinary powers to regulate speech.

The ACMA would have been able to decide what misinformation rules must be followed by digital platforms.

And “digital platforms” doesn’t just mean the tech giants. It meant most of the internet, large sites and small, based in Australia and overseas.

The whole purpose of the Bill was to impose government-mandated rules which require digital platforms to “prevent and respond” to so-called misinformation.

The ACMA would determine whether or not a digital platform is compliant with the legislation.

To avoid the risk of fines, digital platforms would have to censor content which ACMA may see as “misinformation” or “disinformation”.

If the ACMA determined that a platform was not taking adequate steps over what it deemed as misinformation, it could have issued fines of up to 5 per cent of a company’s global turnover.

The Government’s own notes to the Bill talked about digital platforms suppressing specific pieces of content to comply with the law.

The Bill captured opinions that are held in good faith as potential misinformation.

There was no requirement that the maker of the statement was acting maliciously or setting out to deceive people.

If something was “reasonably verifiable” as misleading, and “reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm”, it could be captured as misinformation.

It was possible that a large amount of material could be captured as potentially causing “serious harm”.

Some of the topics on which “misinformation” could be “serious harm” include elections, referendums, public health and preventative health measures and imminent harm to the economy or financial markets.

The Communications Minister has existing powers which could have been used under this Bill to order the ACMA to conduct specific investigations.

The Minister would have been able to order public hearings. This power was wide open to political abuse and was inconsistent with basic democratic values.

The Minister could have excluded any platform from the operation of the Bill. So a digital site with politics favoured by a Government could have been excluded.

Leading constitutional lawyer Professor Anne Twomey told a Senate inquiry into the Bill that she was worried that the Government would “create worse problems through large scale censorship of contested views and the undermining of democracy in the name of cleansing it from misinformation”.

“It could all go very wrong,” Professor Twomey said.

Religious groups expressed deep concerns that the Bill empowered digital platforms and government bureaucrats to determine whether a religious belief was “reasonable”.

That is an extraordinary power that should have had all people of faith up in arms.

I know from the hundreds of emails I received that there were many Australians who were very concerned about the limits this Bill would have placed on their right to freedom of speech.

Governments or their regulators should never be the arbiters of what is the truth or of our right to express our truly held beliefs.

Where would this leave Australians who don’t agree with the woke agenda of the Albanese Government?

It was an unacceptable and terrible piece of legislation and it is good that it has been stopped for now.

But it directly speaks to the ideology and beliefs of the Albanese Labor Government and as such is instructive to all Australian voters.

Free speech is fundamental to our democratic society. If you don’t have free speech, you don’t have democracy, and the Coalition will always defend both.

It is clear the Albanese Labor Government won’t.

Michaelia Cash is a Liberal Senator for WA