In this interview, Professor Michael Shellenberger appeared on Credlin Sky News Australia 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.
Peta Credlin:
Welcome back to the programme, Kevin Rudd breaks cover says he’s ready to engage with the second Trump administration. Question is, do they want anything to do with Heavy Kevy? But first, Labor’s disastrous Misinformation Bill that is intent on passing into law before the end of year. Already it’s through the House. We can only hope sanity prevails in the Senate and it is blocked. Despite a truncated consultation period with stakeholders barely given a week to comment on really complex legislation, the outpouring of concerns being immense and cuts across the political divide, even Left-leaning groups like the Victorian Bar Association and the Human Rights Commission have expressed concern. But the reach of this bill has not just alarmed experts in Australia, overseas Australia is making headlines for all the wrong reasons.
My next guest is Michael Shellenberger, a leading free speech advocate, chair of politics, censorship, and free speech at the University of Austin, as well as an award-winning journalist and author. I’m pleased to say Michael joins me now from Canberra. Well, I know why you’re in Canberra. You’re in the belly of the beast and I hope you’re doing good work. Are you getting a fair hearing, Michael Shellenberger from the MPs about this legislation?
Michael Shellenberger:
Yeah. Well, it’s great to be with you. The senators that we’ve been meeting with and members of the House of Representatives are very concerned about this legislation and with good reason. It’s extremely, extremely radical. People have to remember that we have a really good solution to misinformation, which is free speech. That’s the only way we know how to combat misinformation is to talk back to it. If you censor so-called misinformation, then you disallow the kind of conversation that’s required for people to learn about things. But this legislation would give the Prime Minister extraordinary powers to essentially criminalise anything he wants to criminalise, including what’s so-called misleading information, which would be information that people might get the wrong idea about what to do with, but it would criminalise satire, humour, sarcasm, jokes. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s a shocking piece of legislation.
Peta Credlin:
How does it sit against what’s happening around the world?
Michael Shellenberger:
It’s one of the most extreme things we’ve seen. We saw in Ireland, there was a piece of legislation that would’ve allowed the police to go into people’s homes and read what’s on their phones and computers. In Brazil, we’ve seen the Supreme Court Justice ban people entirely from social media. This legislation though here in Australia would allow for criminalising so many different things: speech that supposedly creates harm, that’s misinformation, that’s misleading. Essentially, it gives the Prime Minister total power, total power to criminalise anything he dislikes.
And like I mentioned, I think it would have a huge impact on people just trying to make a joke. And in fact, the Prime Minister himself raised the concern about memes that attached his head as a cartoonish way to other figures. He raised that as a concern. It shows the thin-skinned nature of politicians that they would want to censor jokes about them. I think if you can’t take that kind of humour, then you have no business being in politics.
Peta Credlin:
One of the concerns I have with the legislation is it’s got all these overt, if it passes, overt controls using ACMA, which is the media regulator to get material taken down and then heavy fines on big tech if they don’t do that. It’ll lead, I think to less action required of the regulator, but risk averse big tech taking down information or taking down posts in the event that they’re worried that they’ll get fined, that they’ll self-centre, so there’s an overt control in the legislation, but there’s a covert power in it that they will just get rid of everything that they are uncomfortable about.
And we’ve seen this with Covid, obviously, Michael, but in Australia last year when we debated a race-based amendment to the Australian constitution. Now fortunately it was defeated. Programmes like mine that argued against this referendum vote. We were disappeared from the internet. Now, fortunately, I’ve got an army of lawyers here at Sky News and they got my content back online, but if this legislation had been in place, I’m not so sure we would’ve won that debate, and I’m not so sure that content would’ve stayed on air.
Michael Shellenberger:
Yeah, you’re absolutely right. I think it’s important to remember that the worst cases of misinformation over the last several years was government misinformation. The government said that Covid came from a wet market in China. Now, most intelligence agencies in the United States think it escaped from a lab. That was being censored. We also saw claims by the government and the pharmaceutical companies that Covid vaccine would prevent the infection of Covid and the transmission. That turned out to be false. Look, I think the fact of the matter is that we discover the truth through dialogue, through debate, and that’s what this would criminalise. You see, for example, there’s a very important debate to be had around whether biological males should be allowed to compete in female sports or go into female restrooms, or whether or not children, we should block their puberty through puberty blockers or through surgeries. These are very big controversial issues. The proposed legislation would allow that entire debate to be censored according to the particular agendas of whoever’s in power.
So I think we have to remember that our democracy depends on freedom of speech. Scientific progress depends on freedom of speech, and what you’re seeing in Australia is one of the greatest assaults on freedom of speech that we’ve seen in this century.
Peta Credlin:
Do you have any sense how the vote might go?
Michael Shellenberger:
Well, look, the senators that I’ve talked to are very optimistic that they’re going to win. Apparently every senator on the cross-bench, the non-aligned senators are against it. I met with one senator yesterday, Senator Van, who said that he would vote against it. I do hope that it does come for a vote so that the senators who are in support of freedom of speech are able to register their commitment for freedom of speech, and those senators who want censorship are also on the record defending censorship because I think that’s a vote that people will really remember and it will really last for years, particularly younger voters who don’t want to be censored online and they want to be able to hear what they want to hear. I think they’ll remember that, and it’ll be quite a lasting legacy either for the better or for the worse, depending on how they vote.
Peta Credlin:
Look, this would be [inaudible 00:07:01] not to ask you now that we’ve got a new President-elect, but what’s free speech going to look like after the 20th of January?
Michael Shellenberger:
Look, president Trump was banned from Twitter before Elon Musk bought it. I think he’s been affected personally. Few people have been censored more than Bobby Kennedy who President-elect Trump would like to head up our major health agencies. We’ve seen Elon Musk is a big supporter of free speech, he’s backed President-elect Trump. So I’m very optimistic that President-elect Trump will dismantle and defund the censorship industrial complex and the thought police. One of the expressions that Elon Musk has made here is we need to make Orwell history again. Anybody who has read 1984 will be shocked to see so much of what’s taking place in that dystopian novel occurring in real life. It’s like a Black Mirror episode. The effort here by the governments of the world, and it’s not just Australia, it’s in Canada, it’s in Britain, it’s in the European Union, it’s to control what we think. It’s a kind of mind control. They want to control the entire information environment. They not only want to censor us, they also want to teach our children that there’s only some acceptable sources of information, always government-approved sources of information.
This is anathema to the people who created our countries several hundred years ago, Australia, the United States. They knew that freedom of speech was the essence of having a democratic system and of having scientific progress, of having free markets. We’re not going to survive as a civilization if we allow our governments to decide in advance what’s true and false before there’s a chance to really weigh the evidence and have those debates.
Peta Credlin:
I’m really glad we ended up at that point, Michael, because I don’t think enough people in Australia in particular understand this is part of a global push. This misinformation disinformation campaign is being pushed right around the world in democracies like ours. All the best with your negotiations. I’ll let you get back to it. Thanks for joining me.
This transcript with Professor Michael Shellenberger talking on Credlin Sky News Australia 20 November 2024 has been edited for clarity.
