Of the many lessons of Saturday's referendum on the Voice to Parliament, there is one which must be more urgently addressed — our appetite for mistruths, writes Linton Besser.
A Watch and Act advisory is in place for Wutul, near Dalby, in Queensland. For the latest warnings, search on
Since 2019 the Commission has been doggedly responding to peddlers of conspiracy and mistruths; on occasions, those peddlers have been politicians. For a statutory body, this is a radically new approach., duly reported by the media, that the AEC disallowing crosses on ballot papers would "stack the deck" against the No vote.
"It's getting worse," Ekin-Smyth said. " if we funded 50 people to be across social media all the time, people would accuse us of misusing taxpayer money.
The parliament asked a salient question: Which security agency is in charge of protecting the very institutions of democracy upon which the Westminster system relies? After a protracted inquiry, the answer it produced was: "No one." The department also confessed it had been forced to do this additional work "within existing resources".
"We have definitely seen some actors trying to interfere in the Voice," disinformation researcher Albert Zhang told me. "Some actors were amplifying both pro and anti-Voice sentiments … trying to sow discord and undermine public trust in the Australian government itself."It's in response to this vulnerability that the AEC has been lobbying its partners on the integrity taskforce to do more.
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