Counsel on Markets, Capital & Commerce
There was a time when institutions — courts, universities, the press, the church, the public service — were expected to say things that were true even when they were unwelcome. That expectation has not merely weakened. In many cases it has inverted.
The Australian government's attempt to regulate misinformation online — the Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024 — failed to pass the Senate. It failed not because the problem it addressed was imaginary, but because the solution it proposed was worse than the disease: a regulatory framework that would have handed government-appointed bodies the power to determine which speech was harmful and which was not.
The failure was instructive. Critics from across the political spectrum identified what the bill's architects could not see: that the power to suppress misinformation is, inevitably, the power to suppress inconvenient truth. History provides no example of a government that used such powers exclusively against those who deserved them.
But the failure of the bill does not resolve the underlying problem. Platforms that operate with no meaningful accountability for the consequences of their content moderation decisions represent a genuine threat to public discourse — not because they allow too much speech, but because their decisions about what to suppress are made on commercial and political grounds that are never disclosed and rarely consistent.
The honest answer is not government censorship. It is transparency — about how platforms make decisions, who makes them, and on what basis. That is a demand that can be made without surrendering the principle of free expression. It requires institutional courage of the kind that is currently in short supply.
An institution that cannot tolerate a rigorous argument against its own orthodoxies has ceased to be a university and become something considerably less useful.
More articles coming soonThe principle of free expression exists precisely to protect the speech that powerful people find objectionable. The moment it protects only the speech everyone agrees with, it protects nothing at all.
More articles coming soonThe cost of living crisis is real. It is also substantially a product of deliberate policy decisions taken by governments that are now pretending they had no alternative. They did.
More articles coming soon"Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the decision that what needs to be said is more important than the comfort of not saying it."
Alan Jones QC — On Public Discourse