The Albanese Labor government confronts public hostility to its Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, which is a form of political censorship. The bill faces defeat in the Senate, adding to the government’s growing crisis, despite it managing to push the bill through the House of Representatives last Thursday.

A Senate committee inquiry into the bill is currently underway, after the planned legislation triggered more than 24,000 mostly critical submissions. This public response reflects wide concern over the government’s bid to suppress online material that is deemed by a government agency or the social media giants to be politically or economically harmful.

At a hearing on Monday, legal experts also warned that the bill could be unconstitutional. It could violate even the weak, implied freedom of political communication that the High Court has found in Australia’s colonial-era 1901 Constitution.

Nonetheless, the government is intent on trying to get the legislation through parliament before the next federal election, which must be called by May. It has spent the past year revising and honing the bill to attempt to quell opposition. 

The bill is a centrepiece of Labor’s four-pronged attack on the basic democratic right of free speech.

Labor’s other legislation would (1) ban access to social media for teenagers up to the age of 16, (2) impose jail terms of up to seven years for revealing publicly-unavailable information about supporters of the Gaza genocide and other warmongers, and (3) set prison sentences of up to seven years for supposed “hate speech” that threatens “the peace, order and good government of the Commonwealth.”

The Misinformation and Disinformation Bill seeks to give the government-appointed Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) unprecedented powers, including to fine social media platforms for not adequately shutting down “harmful” material.

The bill would also hand the communications minister powers to personally order what would be stage-managed “Misinformation Investigations and Misinformation Hearings.”

The bill’s official explanatory memorandum points to the legislation’s far-reaching potential to silence dissent. It defines misinformation as content containing information that is “reasonably verifiable as false, misleading or deceptive.” Information includes “opinions, claims, commentary and invective.”