‘Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,’ said Lady Caroline Lamb after meeting Lord Byron with whom she had a tempestuous and ultimately unhappy love affair. The phrase could just as easily be applied to the Albanese government’s latest foray into censorship, the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2023.

The most honest element of this deeply deceptive bill is the informal acronym that has been adopted to abbreviate Misinformation and Disinformation – Mad.

When Communications Minister Michelle Rowland tabled the revised version of this Bill after the first one was shot down in flames last year she said it was 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’.

This is clearly a case of a minister spouting seriously harmful misinformation since this legislation cannot possibly combat seriously harmful misinformation because the only way to establish whether something is true or false is to subject it to public scrutiny and debate, the exact opposite of the legislation’s intended purpose which is to remove from the public sphere anything deemed to be untrue and seriously harmful.

If the government genuinely respected the importance of debate in sifting fact from fiction, it wouldn’t be attempting to ram this Bill through the parliament giving stakeholder groups only until Monday, 30 September to provide feedback to a parliamentary committee examining the Bill so that it can meet a similarly rushed deadline to report in November.

The  fundamental problem with the Bill is that the authors simply assume that either the Australian Communications and Media Authority or social media platforms can simply and easily establish the truth or falsehood of any statement and that having done so, the appropriate response is to censor it.

It is a sad comment on the enfeebled state of our education system that so many people on both sides of politics have succumbed to this dangerously simplistic and tyrannical thinking.

If our schools and universities attempted to educate students in the foundations of Western civilisation every school child – and every politician, do I repeat myself? – would understand that since the time of the Ancient Greeks – Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle – philosophers have wrestled with the conundrum of determining what is true. All disciplines have methods for establishing the truth of any hypothesis and epistemology studies the justification of claims to knowledge.

Yet it seems as if all those centuries of structured thought were for nothing. One suspects that even Monty Python’s ‘Philosopher’s Song’ – Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, ‘I drink therefore I am’ – might require a level of erudition that eludes them. The vast majority of our politicians seem untroubled by the centuries old epistemological struggle to know what is true. And thus unburdened, as Alexander Pope observed in his Essay on Criticism, ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread’.

Rowlands baldly states that social media platforms ‘need to have methods in place to be able to identify’ misinformation ‘and do something about it’. If it is so easy to identify ‘misinformation’ and ‘do something about it’ why is the government still telling Australians that Covid vaccines are ‘safe and effective’ when it has been shown in highly reputable large studies that they increase the risk of infection and for a growing number of people the side effects – including death – are worse than the disease?

If members of the government reflected honestly on their own expositions on what is true they would see that they themselves have misinformed, disinformed and mal-informed the public or at least changed their minds. Why shouldn’t others have the same right? As recently as 2010, Senator Penny Wong voted against gay marriage because, as she said at the time, ‘On the issue of marriage I think the reality is there is a cultural, religious, historical view around that which we have to respect’.

Wong now supports gay marriage but where is the respect for Christians who continue to support the traditional view of marriage and are increasingly subject to persecution and prosecution? For example, a Queensland bill rushed through parliament this month before the state election next month will make it all but illegal to preach the traditional view of marriage.

That is not a novel state of affairs. Archbishop of Hobart Julian Porteous was subjected to ongoing attack since 2015 for arguing against gay marriage, for expressing scepticism about climate change, exposing the ‘modern green religion’, and denouncing ‘woke ideology’ and ‘the radicalised transgender lobby’.

Respect for ‘trans’ ideology and insistence that gender identification results in sex change is increasingly enforced in courts. One can only hope that sooner rather than later those who claim that they can change a child’s sex by surgically removing or mutilating its secondary sexual characteristics or prescribing drugs used for chemical castration will at the very least be prosecuted for false advertising, particularly if they make the claim that these processes are safe or reversible. Young women who find themselves suffering from early onset osteoporosis or infertility are now coming forward and arguing that they were criminally duped. Who protected them from the misleading claims, the outright lies and the dangerous consequences they have suffered?

Most importantly, does anyone imagine that Labor’s ‘mad’ misinformation bill would protect such children from being lured into harm? That hardly seems likely. At the moment, legislation makes it all but illegal to get a child a second opinion.

The fact that one of the clauses of the Bill defines serious harm as ‘harm to public health in Australia, including to the efficacy of preventative health measures in Australia’ tells you everything you need to know about the deceitfulness of this legislation.

Harming public health is obviously a bad thing but the disgraceful yet still unacknowledged truth is that it is the state and federal governments who have done the most harm to public health this decade. Their massively dishonest mass vaccination campaign has seen a striking increase in excess deaths which have yet to return to normal levels.

It was US president Ronald Reagan who said in a press conference in 1986 that, ‘The nine most terrifying words in the English language are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help”.’ Ironically – in a perfect illustration of his dictum – it was Reagan who granted vaccine manufacturers immunity from liability for the harms caused by vaccines, removing the commercial incentive to ensure the safety of their products.

Is it monumental chutzpah that politicians would presume to legislate to protect the public from harmful lies, or is it a measure of the extent to which they are detached from reality? Are they so surrounded by sycophants that they have forgotten how the public sees them? In the real world, the old joke still rings true. How do you tell when a politician is lying? Answer: his lips are moving. The promotion of this Bill is a perfect example.