I have absolutely no idea how we as a nation are going to fight the whole disinformation about the Voice. No matter how many times Peter Dutton and his henchpeople spread bollocks, no matter how often they are called out, they continue to do it.
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We read the misinformation in newspapers (apparently it qualifies as balance). We hear the misinformation on our favourite programs. I usually hate interruptions but for lying I can make an exception - never have I enjoyed Patricia Karvelas's interruptions as much as I do right now. She needs to do training for some of our colleagues across broadcast media.
"If we don't interrupt, we can't hold them to account". Perhaps she could run Parliament.
I also have no idea how we can get our politicians to behave like decent human beings who don't lie. Honestly, they are entirely disappointing to me. They lie in Parliament. They lie on social media. I bet they lie in their sleep.
Here's a really good example of what I mean. Meet 41-year-old George Beck, a sheep farmer, whose place is just outside Mount Gambier (that's the place with the Blue Lake) in South Australia.
Beck says he was a member of the Liberal Party until five or so years ago. He's got five kids and many sheep who keep him pretty busy but he's not too busy to share his family story (I love blokes who are never too busy to share their family stories). He likes his local member, Liberal Tony Pasin, who Beck says has worked hard to get the area a much-needed radiation unit.
Anyhow Pasin gave a speech in Parliament about the Voice. It was the usual "Noalition" Voice vibe: "Australians like my parents, who held that certificate of citizenship, will never be able to claim they are as Aussie as Indigenous Australians. Exclusive rights will be conferred on those individuals."
And Beck wasn't having any of that. He posted the heartbreaking story of his own family's experience. Under Pasin's Facebook video of the speech, Beck calmly called out his misinformation and shared his own family's experience of the trauma caused by poor government policy.
And Pasin deleted it. I know it was Pasin and not his people because, as a Pasin staffer told me: "Tony manages all his comments on his Facebook page." I wrote to Tony Pasin asking for an explanation and nada. Nothing.
So if the Facebook page of a local politician can't take a bit of to-and-fro, I do not know how we are going to get to the stage where we can share stories with decency and good intent.
Here is Beck's story. His grandmother was a Luritja woman, named Linda after Lyndavale, a place near Alice Springs where she was stolen from her parents as a child. She eventually had a child, who was also forcibly adopted. And Linda was sterilised, without her knowledge, after the birth of her baby. That baby was George's mum. George's mum, Kathy, didn't meet her own mother for 30 years. And George remembers that meeting only vaguely. Now Kathy and George's older sister Sally work as Aboriginal educators in Mount Gambier. His grandfather Robert fought at Kokoda and in the '50s was granted a soldier settlement block in honour of his contribution.
He is a farmer, a landowner, and embraces his Luritja heritage. He is involved in the local community and was one of the constituents who supported the campaign to get the radiation unit.
But he's not confident or trusting of politicans or even of politics. Time after time, politicians, especially Liberal ones, have worked against the interests of Indigenous people.
George says Australians should vote for the Voice to ensure policies such as forced adoption are never implemented again. "It is an opportunity to look at the examples of what has happened in the past, when Indigenous people have not been able to contribute to policies which affect them. The Voice is not giving them any special rights."
Then he says a very farm-y thing. He says it's like approaching the local member to talk about mandatory sheep tags.
But is George furious with Pasin for deleting his comment?
The man has the patience of a saint.
"There is no time to be furious at people. I want him to reflect on his behaviour."
The ABC has some policies for its broadcasters. Facebook has some too.
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Under the ABC's editorial policies, ABC interviewers and panel moderators have an obligation to appropriately challenge interviewees - not just politicians, but others too - when they make assertions which are known to be incorrect or appear to be dubious.
This is excellent. I know some people hate the interruptions - but maybe it's true that you have to do it at the very point of the lie. "If an interviewee says something demonstrably inaccurate (about the Voice or any other subject), the interviewer would be expected to address that in some way, usually via a follow-up question or a direct clarification of the point.
It won't always involve interrupting the interviewee; there's room for judgement from our interviewers about precisely how to do it," says an ABC spokesperson.
Facebook (will I ever get used to calling it Meta? Doubt it) too has policies. A Meta spokesperson says it partners with independent fact checkers here. The fact checkers themselves decide which posts to review and if the content is false - or partly false - Meta reduces its distribution so that fewer people see the misinformation. It also provides a link to the debunking article on the fact checkers' website.
It also rejects ads rated as false by fact checkers. The best bit is that it apparently also removes content from politicians that breaches its misinformation policy. If a politician says something that breaches Meta's hate speech policy it gets removed.
The price of truth is eternal vigilance. And spending a lot of time on Facebook.
- Jenna Price is a regular columnist and a visiting fellow at the ANU.