The stunning rebuke of the federal government’s proposed misinformation laws has seen freedom of speech live to fight another day. But now the dust has settled on the final sitting week of Parliament, the elitist obsession with controlling opinions in the name of fighting misinformation must forever be consigned to the dustbin of history.

The federal government’s misinformation bill was so bad that it brought together the Senate crossbench and Coalition to reject it, albeit for different reasons. But Australians have every right to be concerned that similar proposals could be brought back from the dead in 2025. As former Prime Minister Tony Abbott warned on the Institute of Public Affairs’ Australia’s Future podcast, ‘If the current government is re-elected come March, they’ll bring it back.’ This would be particularly so if a minority government is formed after the election due early next year.

Make no mistake, the politicians who wanted to dictate what opinions are acceptable yesterday will still want to do so tomorrow. Even in defeat, Federal Communications Minister Michelle Rowland stubbornly insisted that misinformation remains an ‘evolving threat’ from which Australians need ‘better protections’. Rowland has already telegraphed the federal government’s commitment to ‘other proposals’ that will ‘strengthen democratic institutions’ and ‘keep Australians safe online’, including so-called ‘truth’ in political advertising laws.

Mainstream Australians saw through the agenda to silence them, understanding that the ‘protections’ from misinformation were in fact designed to regulate what they could and could not say online. After the release of the exposure draft in 2023, over 23,000 Australians made submissions on the legislation, including citizens, civil liberties groups, and legal specialists. The overwhelming consensus of the public was that the proposed laws constituted an egregious and brazen attack on freedom of speech in Australia.

Far from wanting laws to control their speech, Australians are concerned that such laws would be manipulated by the government. According to polling commissioned by the Institute of Public Affairs in October 2024, 68 per cent of Australians were ‘concerned’ that the laws would be used by government officials for political purposes, such as limiting public debate and censoring certain opinions.

Since Brexit, Donald Trump’s election in 2016, and the success of other anti-establishment candidates, there has been a concerted effort by elites and the political class to control social media. There is solid evidence that President Trump’s latest victory was aided by the newly liberated X, formerly Twitter, and podcasters on media platforms hosting opinions deemed unacceptable, but not easily controlled, by legacy media.

Elites understand the capacity of social media to empower ‘quiet Australians’. And they fear it. Indeed, since the divisive Voice to Parliament was rejected by 60 per cent of Australians in a resounding referendum defeat, key Voice proponent, Professor Megan Davis, has repeatedly decried the role of ‘Trumpian disinformation’ in the debate. She has insisted that misinformation laws are needed too.

But freedom of speech is freedom of reach. More than ever before, social media has allowed ideas to spread quickly and freely. While social media is truly democratic in platforming all voices, the political class understands its inherent threat to elitist control of information. This is why they are so hellbent on controlling the ability of Australians to express themselves online.

In November, the Institute of Public Affairs hosted global free speech advocate, Professor Michael Shellenberger, to share his insights into how the (now defeated) misinformation bill was a threat to freedom of speech, and to brief our leaders in Canberra on the threat of the censorship-industrial complex.

In an IPA X post, reshared by Elon Musk and now seen by over 12 million people, Shellenberger responded to a journalist’s question: ‘The solution to misinformation is freedom of speech. And that’s been the solution to misinformation for several hundreds of years.’

Now that the final sitting week of federal Parliament for 2024 (and perhaps the last before the next federal election) is done and dusted, a clear takeaway from the year is that mainstream Australians have had enough of elitist efforts to control their opinions.

Our leaders must now commit to ensuring such offensive laws never rise from the dead.

Margaret Chambers is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs