Sarah Gall is a political data scientist and membership secretary for the UK’s Conservative Friends of Australia. She previously headed up political and policy research for the Prime Minister of Australia.
For many school children, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 were part of the curriculum. And while these works of fiction were viewed by many as a cautionary tale against authoritarian regimes, much of what was depicted now reflects the policy and political agenda of the Australian Labor Government.
Opposition Leader, Peter Dutton, drew this delineation last month when speaking on a bill to hold a referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament (the Voice), stating: “It will have an Orwellian effect where all Australians are equal, but some Australians are more equal than others.”
The Voice is a proposed permanent Indigenous advisory body that would “make representations to the Parliament and Executive Government on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples”.
This proposal however, implies that Indigenous Australians do not currently have a voice in parliament. In reality, they, like non-Indigenous Australians, have representatives who were democratically elected to the Australian Parliament.
In fact, nearly five per cent of parliamentarians are Indigenous, all of whom have a voice and make representations to the parliament and government on matters relating to Indigenous Australians who make up just over three per cent of the population.
Despite this, Labor’s Voice proposal aims to give some Australians a greater say on legislation than others, based solely on their race. The details of this body, including its “composition, functions, powers and procedures”, are to be determined after the vote has occurred.
The wording of this proposed constitutional amendment has led to a divide within the legal community. Several eminent legal experts, including former High Court justices, have raised concerns over the potential for the High Court to determine that the government is legally obliged to consult the Voice on a range of issues and failure to do so could be challenged in the court.
Other constitutional experts have disagreed with these concerns, stating that it would be unlikely that the High Court would take this view.
However, several examples have been cited of circumstances in which the High Court’s interpretation of the constitution has surprised the government, solicitor general, and many legal experts (one only needs to think back to the Citizenship Saga for such an example).
This matter has therefore given rise to the debate of what the Voice could give advice on as currently all non-Indigenous legislation affects the lives of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, making the body’s remit incredibly broad.
It is unsurprising that as the government is pushed for more detail, support for the Voice has progressively fallen, with a trajectory of certain defeat come referendum day.
Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister, has equated the opposition asking questions on the detail with undermining the Voice. Linda Burney, the Minister for Indigenous Australians, also accused the opposition of “misinformation and scare campaigns” about the Voice, and put social media companies on notice to tackle misinformation and disinformation online regarding the debate.
In response, the Labor government approved £5 million in funding for an “awareness and education program” aimed at providing voters with the “facts of the voice”. The government also insisted that the programme was not a de facto Yes campaign, and reiterated that it was not providing any public funds to either campaign.
This funding, and privately-raised funding, has not stopped the continued decline in support for the Voice and Noel Pearson, the architect of the proposal, is now pushing for a change in the messaging for the Yes campaign. Pearson claims that the Yes campaign has been “snookered by deceptive arguments” and that “the Voice is just the means; the core of the reform is recognition”.
This fundamental shift, to what is essentially the argument of the No campaign, (who advocate for constitutional recognition but oppose the enshrining an Indigenous bureaucracy into the constitution), is opposed by the Labor government.
Instead, despite the Yes campaign outspending the No campaign eight to one, it has turned to censorship as its latest tactic.
Last week, it released an exposure draft of its Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation Bill. This draft legislation defines misinformation as content containing information that is “false, misleading, or deceptive; and… reasonably likely to cause or contribute to serious harm”.
If the legislation passes parliament in its current form, it would grant the Australian Media and Communications Authority (ACMA) – a body whose members are appointed by the government – the power to issue hefty fines to social media companies where it deems they have not adequately censored misinformation from their platforms, and to individuals it deems to be in breach of the provisions of the bill.
Most concerningly, the draft legislation exempts anything from the government or media from being considered mis- or disinformation. Anyone else, including political parties not in government, however are not exempt and are subject to censorship and fines.
It is unclear as to who determines what the truth is, but given the exemptions provided under the draft legislation, one can presume it is the government and its new Ministry of Truth, ACMA.
This could therefore have severe consequences on debates and what the government deems to be mis- or disinformation; an accusation already made against the Opposition Leader after he claimed that the Voice would “re-racialise the nation”.
What is now clear is that the Labor Party will do anything to try and get its Voice proposal across the line, including taking an Orwellian route of creating a bureaucratic state, denying truth, and crushing individual freedoms.