The Australian Government’s proposed misinformation bill is “dead in the water” following significant pushback from opposition Senators in the upper house of the federal Parliament, according to Sky News Australia’s Political Editor Andrew Clennell.
This claim was backed up by Liberal Senator Alex Antic, who has cast doubt on the Government’s ability to muster enough votes to get the Bill through the Senate, where it only has 25 of the 76 seats.
For the avoidance of doubt, the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023 really is as illiberal as its detractors claim – we’ve written about it in more detail here.
So, that’s the good news.
The bad news is that, like some grim, deeply unedifying version of Whack-A-Mole, in which the referee rashly decides to place George Soros in charge of the lever and crank mechanism, two other, equally dystopian proposals have now popped up in other legislative systems.
One proposal recently passed by a national assembly will punish people who, inside or outside the country, disseminate social media posts deemed likely to cause “alarm, fear, panic, or distress” or “incite hatred”, with prison sentences of up to 15 years, plus fines.
Another proposal from elsewhere in the world could see people sent to prison for up to five years for “hate speech” – under this law, it becomes an offence for anyone, anywhere in the world, to “incite hatred against, serious contempt for, revulsion towards or severe ridicule” of a person or group based in this particular country on the basis of their sex, gender identity or race.
One of these proposals is from a liberal democracy, while the other is from an increasingly authoritarian Latin American country recently criticised by the UN for its “persecution of opponents of the Government or those perceived as dissenting voices in the country”.
See if you can guess which is which.
The details are here and here.
