In this interview, Margaret Chambers appeared on Reality Bites with Nick Cater to discuss the IPA’s research on misinformation and disinformation laws.
All media appearances posted onto the IPA website are directly related to the promotion and dissemination of IPA research.
Below is a transcript of the interview.
Nick Cater:
Joining me now, James Mathias, deputy executive director of the Menzies Research Centre, and Margaret Chambers, Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. Both of them joined me from Melbourne. Welcome to both of you. Margaret, Labour has proposed changes to Victoria’s anti-vilification laws. There are so many attacks on free speech these days that I must admit I haven’t got across the details of this one. Enlighten me, please.
Margaret Chambers:
You’re absolutely right, Nick. Across our country, there are efforts to undermine and attack free speech. Now, the latest is Victoria’s proposed changes to its anti-vilification laws. Now, what the state government is seeking to do is to expand the scope and reduce the standard for unlawful speech within Victoria, essentially making unlawful anything that a complainant could find to be hateful towards them based on certain protected attributes. Now, I’m sure you agree, Nick, that hateful is an entirely subjective standard. What I consider to be hateful is completely different from what you might consider to be hateful. And there’s a deep problem with legislating standards like that into Victorian laws.
Nick Cater:
James, we’ve seen this before, haven’t we? A law rests on a very subjective concept like hate, and it can be applied just in any way people want, can’t they? It is dangerous in that regard.
James Mathias:
That’s right. And to just build on what Margaret has just said, the Victorian government has established a commissioner or an office of a commissioner called the Victorian Equal Opportunities and Human Rights Commission. And what this legislation does is allows somebody with even more streamlined access to that commission and even more streamlined access to make a complaint. And then the lower standard of the burden of proof, it even gets to an area where it’s almost flipped, where the burden of proof is actually on the person that the complaint is made against rather than the person that is making the complaint. And that is what is entirely very upsetting about this legislation.
Nick Cater:
Yeah. Once again, Margaret, it seems that they’re passing legislation that makes it very easy and cheap and free, in fact to be the complainant, but it’s a very expensive and difficult and long and painful process if you are the one who’s complained against. It reverses the principle of your innocent until you’re proven guilty, doesn’t it?
Margaret Chambers:
That’s right. Yes. So the punishment is absolutely in the process with laws like these, and we’ve just seen similar proposals passed in Queensland with the respect at work laws, which is a very similar series of laws to the ones that Victoria is debating the passage of. But the problem here is that a principle of the rule of law is that its requirements have to be understood by the people who are subject to them. And if they can’t understand what the requirements are, then it’s a bad law and we can’t pass laws like this in Australia.
Nick Cater:
And as we saw during COVID, James, I know you were there in Melbourne, you went through the whole thing. We saw during COVID that they were using laws that have been passed essentially to crack down on terrorists after 9/11 were being used to crack down on COVID dissenters. This is what happens, isn’t it? Once they get something into legislation, then it’s up to the creativity of the legal profession, how far this goes.
James Mathias:
And it should never happen again like that, Nick. COVID was not a precedent for what should happen in the future for creating laws. And essentially what this does is continue that on. And the reason why I say that is that, again, we’ve discussed the burden of proof, but more so in the current environment where there’s an outraged community who are trying to overreach into the realms of legislative power, then we should not be having legislation that actually emboldens these people. So the outraged community are essentially winning on this one. And the reason why it matters is because you can essentially, from what I can see in this legislation, have the person who cries the loudest in the courtroom or in front of the equal opportunities commissioner be the person that’s victorious. And that is not how the court system should be run. That is not how legislative democracy should happen.
Nick Cater:
And if that nonsense wasn’t enough, we’ve now got at a federal level, a Labour government desperate to get something on the scoreboard before it retires hurt is pushing ahead with this misinformation, disinformation, laws under which the broadcasting authorities will be empowered to impose penalties on social media platforms when they decide it’s misinformation. Once again, what we’re seeing here, Margaret is a very loose and loosely defined law that could basically be used to shut up anybody and we know who they will shut up. Of course, it’ll be people like you, me and James.
Margaret Chambers:
Yeah. It’s a serious problem. I can hardly believe that the federal government is proceeding with these terrible laws. Part of what is so problematic about it, which there are many parts, is the definition of serious harm. And actually within the part of the bill that defines serious harm, it talks about vilification and it talks about threats to public health and the economy. And these terms are a nebulous. We don’t know what they mean, but we do know that we’ll be shut down and the ability for all Australians to express themselves online will be shut down. And that’s a feature of the bill.
Nick Cater:
I don’t want to sound like the old bloke, James, but when I grew up, we had a Cold War on, and there was a very clear example of the opposite of freedom on our doorstep, and that was the repression that happened behind the iron curtain. I just wonder whether people who didn’t go through that experience for now, it’s whom distant history like the two of you, whether the lessons that were learnt have worn off and we are walking into a sort of tyrannical era carelessly. What do you reckon?
James Mathias:
Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, Nick. When people are armed with the facts, and perhaps on this one, given it’s been a sleeper issue for about six years, people aren’t necessarily informed on this. The genesis of this misinformation, disinformation bill, tongue twister, comes back to 2019. That’s five years ago. And the Australian Communications and Media Authority, ACMA were always trying to have a little bit more of a powerful hand in this area. So they proposed a review be done, and then they did their review. And then 2022, there was a discussion paper that was put out. ACMA went to the extent of being able to censor people in private messaging services in their report but notwithstanding that.
In their initial report, they said, “Before any legislation should come before the Parliament, there should be a follow-up report that happens to advise the government.” In between that though, when ACMA were doing their report and then advising government that Australians were sick of misinformation and disinformation was during the height of COVID. Now, to base this legislation on a report that was done during the height of COVID and when people’s senses were towards government and misinformation and disinformation at their most high is wrong. ACMA should go back, do another report, and the government should hold off on putting any legislation before the parliament on this area.
Nick Cater:
Well, we know that the government put off that legislation initially because it wasn’t expecting quite the backlash it got. And the backlash comes because people like you have had to speak up on it. So thank you so much for joining us, James Mathias from the Menzies Research Centre, and Margaret Chambers from the IPA.
James Mathias:
Pleasure.
Margaret Chambers:
Thank you for having me.
This transcript with Margaret Chambers talking on Reality Bites 18 October 2024 has been edited for clarity.
