“Good afternoon, today we are fortunate to have the pleasure of interviewing, Miss Information, who works for the Proper Gander Party. First question, why do you have a problem with the proposed laws threatening to ban you from being heard?”
”Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?”
”Can you elaborate?”
”It’s perfectly clear that this is the government’s way of trying to shut me up. I have as much right to be heard as anyone…”
”Some people are suggesting that you never tell the truth?”
”What’s truth? I mean what you consider truth, I might consider is nonsense.”
”But certain things are facts, aren’t they?”
”That’s true but what if I have alternative facts?”
”Are you referring to Kellyanne Conway’s statement where she defended the lies about the crowd numbers at Trump’s inauguration?”
”Not specifically but that gives me a case in point. If you ban misinformation how would she have been able to counter what the people were saying about the numbers being lower?”
”Er… she wouldn’t because they weren’t!”
”Exactly. If you banned people from making things up, then you’re giving an unfair advantage to those political parties who are telling the truth.”
”Is that a problem?”
”Well it is for me.”
”But shouldn’t political parties who tell the truth be given credit?”
”I don’t see why? Can you show me one example of the truth doing anyone any good?”
”Lies certainly don’t help.”
”Who says? I mean Tony Abbott lied about his views on climate change and that helped him get elected.”
”They may have helped him but they didn’t help the country.”
”So you’re saying that we’d have been better off with a Labor government. It’s clear where your political leanings are.”
”I just meant that we’d be better off with a government that didn’t say one thing to get elected then do something else when they were in power.”
”You mean like the current Labor government? After all, Albanese promised on four hundred occasions that he’d end the war in Ukraine and provide a yacht for every family but did he keep that promise?”
”He didn’t do either of those things.”
”But that’s the problem with the proposed law. You’d be banned from saying what you just said.”
”No, you’d be the one who’d have to justify what you said because it isn’t true!”
”Wouldn’t that be the problem? Deciding which of us had the right to speak.”
”Look, some things are clearly facts and some things are matters of opinion…”
”But isn’t it a matter of opinion what things are clearly facts?”
”Not always. If we take the cricket, for example, people can argue about whether Jonny Bairstow’s dismissal was in the spirit of the game, but everyone agrees that he was given out.”
”That’s just a point of view. I can find plenty of people who have not only have no idea about whether he was out or not, but they don’t even know who Bairstow is, and their opinion is just as good as anyone else’s.”
”But they won’t have an opinion because they don’t know what we’re talking about.”
”You’ve got an opinion and you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
”I do know what I’m talking about!”
”That’s your opinion.”
”So you would have no problem if someone were to say that interest rates have gone up every week since Labor got in and that it’s all their fault?”
”I don’t think people should be censored.”
”Even if they’re saying something that is demonstrably untrue?”
”Again, who is to say what’s untrue?”
”I do agree that that’s the question, however, some things are clearly disprovable.”
”Such as?”
“You say: ‘Peter Dutton is an intelligent man who’d make an excellent PM’ and you also say: ‘Peter Dutton has a policy of introducing slavery into Australia’, one is a matter of opinion and the other is clearly a lie.”
”Yes, but which?”
“Look, are you against misinformation laws in principle or is it just because you’re worried about how they’ll hamper you?”
”I don’t understand what you mean by ‘in principle’.”
”I see. Well that’s all we have time for. Thanks for being here.”
”I wasn’t.”
”Whatever!”
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