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Given Albanese's warm welcome of Bill Gates to Australia, it would appear the Australian Prime Minister is less concerned about election interference by foreign elites than the political leanings of those elites.

Thinking you are a good person so you have nothing to fear about our growing surveillance state is both naive and reckless. In truth, we are all at risk.

On 24 November, Parliament abandoned the Misinformation Bill. Just two weeks later, Zoe Daniel MP re-introduced it under a different name. Here is an initial brief analysis of the Online Safety Amendment (Digital Duty of Care Bill) 2024 and its implications.

Putin's censorship of a theologically sound sermon as a national security threat exemplifies how easy it will be for governments to abuse misinformation and disinformation legislation.

While the federal Misinformation and Disinformation Bill has been abandoned, planned new Victorian anti-hate speech laws will widen the net of draconian federal, state and territory laws crushing freedom of speech in Australia.

The Federal Labor Government has officially withdrawn its Misinformation Bill in a massive victory for free speech. The bill's defeat represents the power of ordinary people to make a very real difference.

In recent weeks, many Australians have voiced their opposition to Labor’s Bill which could see social media platforms and users fined hundreds of thousands of dollars over “mis or dis information” online.

Despite stiff pushback from legal experts and the public, the misinformation bill passed in the House of Representatives on 7 November. It now goes to the Senate, where Labor, with the possible support of the Greens, needs to shore up the votes of enough crossbench senators to pass it into law.

How ironic that our Labour Government should be at pains to pass a "misinformation" bill to ban propaganda, and their government agency will decide what is and isn’t propaganda!

Despite widespread opposition from the Australian public, Labor’s "Misinformation and Disinformation" Bill has passed the House of Representatives by 78 votes to 57.

The government wants to pass its Misinformation Bill before the end of the year. But its success or failure is on a knife’s edge. Here are the independent senators who will decide its fate.

First, those in charge of adjudicating what is and is not misinformation are sometimes wrong, resulting in the censorship of true information. Second, there are harms associated with the suppression of true information.

Most of us know there is a draft bill before the Parliament with a verbose title: Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill. Its name alone should tell us something smells. The answer to bad speech is MORE speech, not less.

From our initial analysis, we have significant concerns. While the Misinformation Bill is an improvement on the previous iteration, and provides some protections for religious speech, it still puts the power of censorship in the hands of unaccountable private corporations.

As with bits of most government legislation, the Misinformation Bill is worded in such a way as to sound quite innocuous and safe – even helpful and necessary. But that is so often not the case, and the opposite outcome is what we must fear.

Labor’s Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 attempts to label opinions and facts, that don’t suit the government’s narratives, as “misinformation”, “disinformation”, or “harmful” on social media.

The problem with the government’s approach is that it goes way beyond truth and lies, but about an arbitrary judgment by faceless bureaucrats of what is or isn’t true or what is or isn’t harmful. 

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland tabled a new version of the bill which she said is intended to “carefully balance the public interest in combatting seriously harmful misinformation and disinformation with the freedom of expression that is so fundamental to our democracy.”

Today is the darkest day for Freedom of Speech in Australian history. The Labor Party has introduced its revised misinformation legislation to Parliament.

Artificial intelligence is opening up new avenues for fraud. If the Albanese Government thinks that a misinformation and disinformation bill will serve to counter the effects of the coming explosion of fake news, images, videos, essays and academic writings, it is delusional.