Justice David Mossop of the ACT Supreme Court has issued a call to arms for lawyers generally, and the High Court in particular, to prepare for palpable threats to “a small, naive democracy like Australia”.

A repost from 27 August, 2025

In a swingeing 38th Blackburn Lecture, delivered and seemingly ignored by the legacy media in May, and carried in full in the ACT Law Society’s recent edition of its tri-annual Ethos, Justice Mossop, a judicial officer for 13 years, described Australian democracy currently as “pretty good”.

However, via a combination of foreign interference and individualised algorithms, now supercharged by generative artificial intelligence, “a well-targeted intervention in the political process could”, he declared bluntly, “change the outcome of an election”.

He admitted he had no “uplifting conclusion” to the problems he outlined, but suggested lawyers had a duty to work to preserve what we had.

The scope of foreign interference should have been well aware to us all since the alleged Russian intervention in the 2016 United States presidential election, which helped cruel the chances of Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton.

The power of individualised algorithms was rarely better observed than in Myanmar when, absent evil intent, the Facebook model of maximising user engagement had a pivotal effect after the end of military rule in 2011.

“Content demonstrating outrage generated more user engagement,” the judge noted. “In Myanmar, this drive towards user engagement led watchers of videos toward more extreme content, in particular........

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