Labor has “missed a huge opportunity” to roll out truth in political advertising laws, experts say, as pamphlets outlining the Yes and No cases for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament are readied for distribution without being fact-checked.
On Tuesday the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) published the Yes and No cases that will form an educational pamphlet to be distributed to the homes of all voters ahead of the referendum later this year. Neither campaign, however, is required by law to peg its campaign messaging to facts.
In Australia, the Electoral Act outlaws misleading voters on the machinations of an election or referendum, like how to cast a vote or how votes are handled. But the act doesn’t account for how one campaign might try to mischaracterise the other, and how each might try to mislead voters.
University of NSW Professor George Williams, an advocate for reform on misleading political advertising, said any debate over the contents of the pamphlets or the way they’re characterised after they’re distributed will come “too late”.
He said that while a current parliamentary process could well see truth in political advertising legislated in time for the next federal election, it should have been squared away before the upcoming referendum.
“It’s a real pity that we haven’t put something in place earlier,” Williams told Crikey. “This is the primary method of taxpayer-funded communication to voters … and there’s no guarantee it’s correct.”
The government-backed Yes campaign’s pitch to voters, published Tuesday, includes endorsements from rugby league legend Johnathan Thurston and former tennis world number one Evonne Goolagong Cawley, and focuses on “recognition”, “listening” and getting “better results” in Indigenous health, education, employment and housing.
It claims the Voice would make the government “work better”, and deliver “better outcomes”.
The No case, led by Coalition Indigenous Affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, gives voters “10 reasons to vote no”, including claims there are “no details”, and that the “risk of legal appeals” would lead to a “dysfunctional government”.
It also includes an inference that Australians would no longer be “equal before the law” should the Voice be enshrined in the constitution.
Various iterations of the claim, including that the Voice would give “special rights” to one group of people under the constitution based on race, have been disputed by constitutional law experts. Some of the sources cited by the No case include Twitter, Spectator Australia and the Daily Mail.
The No case also included a quote from constitutional expert Professor Greg Craven, who described the draft constitutional amendment as “fatally flawed”, but has since thrown his support behind the Voice. He told the Australian Financial Review he was “apoplectic” over the quote.
A parliamentary inquiry into the 2022 federal election appears likely to recommend the government legislate truth in political advertising laws ahead of the 2025 federal election.
In its interim report, the electoral matters committee pointed to broad support for what Williams described as a modest change, referencing a submission from Williams himself, along with submissions from the Labor Party, Greens, and independent MPs Dr Monique Ryan and Zali Steggall, among others. The Liberal and National parties argued against the proposed reforms.
“Good governance is predicated on voters having faith in the strength of the democratic process. In the business world, it is illegal to mislead or deceive consumers. It seems very strange that we hold our politicians to a lower standard than our businesspeople,” Ryan said in her submission.
In terms of the Voice referendum, the only government agency currently charged with moderating misinformation is the AEC, but even then the commission’s mandate is considerably narrow, as defined by the Electoral Act.
As part of its mis- and disinformation counteroffensive, the AEC has launched a disinformation register that keeps a running list of “prominent pieces of disinformation” circulating online.
Some of those false claims include the constitution being “invalid since 1973”, and that the AEC is campaigning for or against the Voice to Parliament, or that the commission will be “throwing out ‘No’ votes”.
Beyond the AEC’s mandate, though, fact-checking will be left largely to the news media and political organisations.
“We’ve missed a huge opportunity,” Richard Denniss, executive director of left-leaning think tank the Australia Institute, told Crikey.
“Unfortunately, rather than improve the quality of our electoral debate before having a big electoral debate about the referendum, we’ve chosen to do it in the other order. And that by definition must mean there will be more disinformation, more misleading information around the referendum than there needs to be.”
