Australia, we have a civics crisis. The referendum has shone a spotlight on how little we know about how we are governed.
The entire voice process has become an overdue civics lesson. Sadly, many failed the test. This is not a comment on “yes” or “no”, but about how poorly law-making as an act of governance is understood. An informed choice – whichever way – was preferable to swallowing conspiracy theories and misinformation.
So many social media messages about the referendum went “viral” even though they can only be described as drivel, spouting views about the parliamentary and legal system that were not just demonstrably wrong but laughingly muddleheaded.
I will not amplify the misleading messages by referencing, linking or naming them here. The specifics barely matter – it was the appetite for this rubbish that startles me. That so many swallowed such nonsense and thought it worth circulating as “truth” is of deep concern.
Social media misinformation is no less than a scam on democracy and an insult to our values, a threat to our social fabric. We are at risk of being slowly undermined by malicious mendacious gobbledegook.
When the “sovereign citizen” movement emerged during the stress of lockdowns in the Covid pandemic, I – like so many – dismissed the phenomenon as the inevitable byproduct of the unprecedented times that we were living through. I naively thought this novelty was a passing fad, even slightly amusing. It did not trigger any alarms.
Now, as the post-pandemic dust settles, we still see a surge in devotees to these conspiracies. The sovereign citizen cult is not shrinking but continues to grow. To stop our slide down the slippery slope to Trumpism, it is incumbent on anyone even vaguely fond of democracy to take note and respond.
How is it that a recently retired high court judge, rationally explaining how laws are made, can be breezily dismissed by people who have not an inkling of understanding how the legal system works? How can someone so confidently but wrongly assure their followers that you can opt out of being bound by the law as if it is a clause in a contract? How can an assertion that the UN wants to take over Australia not only gain traction but be believed by thousands of citizens?
We saw the frequent undermining of the validity of science during Covid, with often tragic and fatal outcomes. Now the same bombastic approach has been applied but this time not to medical science but the foundations of our democracy.
What do we do about it? First of all, take this seriously, and stop dismissing it as a fad while laughing at the absurdity of it. The threat is real. All hands to the pump.
We need to urgently develop and roll out a civics education program to inform and educate the population with nontechnical language, free of legal jargon. A “slip-slop-slap” type of campaign but about civics, not cancer.
Ironically, we have recently started to offer civics education about the rule of law and democratic values to nations across the Pacific, to counter the influence of China. We need to do the same at home.
Parliamentary lawmakers [federal and state] from across the party divide together with the legal profession must stand up and explain why their work is central to our social fabric. The Law Reform Commissions, law foundations and societies and legal aid providers all need to invest in public engagement and legal education. University law schools must project their expertise beyond their own walls, amplifying knowledge and engaging with the public in plain English.
The media needs to be rigorous in calling out nonsense when encountered, never letting it go unchallenged. Conspiracy theories are never “fair comment”: nonsense is just nonsense, not commentary. We must immediately address the absence of meaningful regulation of the social media giants who profit from the online traffic while taking no responsibility for the damage caused.
Crucially, if this message is to have integrity, we must acknowledge and fix the shortcomings of our way of governing. Pleas about holding power to account, procedural fairness and equality will fall on deaf ears for those who in their everyday lives experience the opposite. We have to walk the talk, and make the system we seek to defend live up to its promise of integrity and equality before the law.
We ignore this at our peril.
• Jon Faine is an ex-lawyer and former ABC broadcaster, currently a VC Fellow at the University of Melbourne based in the Melbourne Law School. He was MC at several Yes23 public meetings
• This article was amended on 18 October 2023 to clarify that Jon Faine hosted some meetings with the Yes23 campaign in the lead-up to the referendum
