Political elites have much to fear from the ‘little-people’ talking among themselves. It is perfectly understandable that the government would hate uncontrolled conversation.
At a time when productivity is collapsing, along with real wages and our standard of living, the Albanese government has decided that people mocking government is the greatest challenge facing the nation. Online bullying of vulnerable public servants and politicians needs to be addressed. Australia is lacking a “digital duty of care”.
As always, political censorship is being packaged as protecting children, fighting terrorists, and generally keeping us all safe from unknown harms.
Anxiety and juvenile delinquency have long been blamed on rock ‘n’ roll, comics, heavy metal, video games, and now social media. Celebrity academics have dined out on stoking the latest moral panic. But it usually turns out that the arguments and evidence are somewhat more nuanced, the effects much smaller than first thought, and soon there will be another innovation to blame for youthful exuberance.
The arguments for law enforcement are a bit more serious. Yes, criminality and terrorism are a scourge on our society. What the government is doing here, however, is requiring the private sector to police behaviour. Not just protect their own property – but to generally protect society. Governments do not tend to approve of vigilantism, so this is something far more sinister.
“Banning people from mocking the government and public servants appearing before the Senate estimates would be a bridge too far.”
The government is subcontracting some of its own law-enforcement duties to the private sector. This isn’t occurring via a contractual payment, but via conscription. The government is forcing private actors to protect the community from perceived – and undefined – harms. Generally, I’m a huge fan of privatisation, but this is not that. Conscription is repugnant.
It gets worse.
Governments can very often bully the private sector into doing things that they otherwise cannot do. We saw this during the Biden administration when it was pressuring Facebook and Twitter (now X) to adopt self-censorship regimes. This was a workaround of the US First Amendment. Australians have no right to free speech beyond what the High Court will tolerate and the bourgeois sentiments of the electorate. Yet banning people from mocking the government and public servants appearing before the Senate estimates would be a bridge too far.
Much better that the government introduce some vague, undefined duty of care that sounds like it should be tort law but just isn’t.
Political elites have much to fear from the “little people” talking among themselves. Access to communications technology has tended to favour elites throughout most of human history. Even the printing press – that great liberaliser of human potential – had huge costs and gatekeepers. The digital economy? Not so much.
Now anyone can speak to their hearts content. Michael Oakeshott’s “conversation of mankind” has evolved from the spoken word to the digital space. To be clear, Oakeshott would probably have loathed TikTok – but that too would be a conversation.
It is perfectly understandable that government would hate uncontrolled conversation. This is especially so when we have a government that is beyond “mean and tricky”. The disinformation and misinformation from government itself is now so outrageous that even stand-up comedians are scandalised and not merely inspired.
Beyond the digital duty of care being a protection racket for political elites it will impose unnecessary costs on the community. We have been here before. The anti-money laundering laws, for example, conscripted banks into surveilling their own customers and being responsible for failures and breaches of the legislation. Unsurprisingly, many law-abiding individuals found themselves being debanked without recourse, while there is scant evidence that this very expensive surveillance regime has actually inhibited money laundering.
Then there are the unintended consequences. Remember the metadata retention scheme? It was designed to counter terrorism and serious crime, access would be strictly limited. Within a year even the RSPCA was applying to access the data. Not to mention the outright failure of the under-16 media ban: the BMJ reports that 85 per cent of under-16s still make use of social media. The bottom line is that the parliament has poor form when legislating in this space. Bad ideas do not make good law.
In any event, it doesn’t seem to offer much that is new. For example, my X feed already has a “For you” and “Following” function – as do most online platforms. The minister concedes most users will stick with the algorithm anyway. So the flagship reform compels platforms to offer a choice Australians already have and mostly don’t want. To be fair, Canberra offers so much that Australians don’t want.
We already have laws against child exploitation and terrorism and what-not. The parliament has awarded police astonishing online powers to pursue criminals. We have multiple government agencies already keeping us “safe”. If these agencies need more powers or more budget, let’s hear the argument.
