Politics and society

Taking the antisocial out of “social media”

Draft legislation before Parliament is designed to give users of social media more control. True “conservatives” should support it.

Legislating to give people control over social media algorithms gives the Albanese government an opportunity to redeem itself a little after its disgraceful cave-in to the gambling and sports lobbies.

The government’s My Feed, my Way proposal would give users of social media the power to choose whether to be fed unsolicited content generated by recommender algorithms. It would also hold social media more accountable for content on their platforms, particularly but not only for those under 18.

The draft legislation provides examples of what the government sees as harmful:

Tama Leaver, of Curtin University, has a Conversation contribution describing the initiative in detail, and the ABC’s David Speers has a post reporting on political reactions to it.

In an open letter to the Prime Minister, Teach us Consent concisely describes their concern:

The algorithms that curate our feeds are designed to keep us scrolling. They prioritise content that provokes the strongest emotional reactions; outrage, validation, fear, arousal and anger drive ‘successful’ posts. In turn, our feeds have become fertile ground for extreme, misogynistic content.

The letter is signed by most independent Members of Parliament, Malcolm Turnbull, and many prominent Australians in all walks of life. Teach us Consent reports that polling reveals that 78 percent of Australians think social media users “should have full control over what they see online”.

While the government’s draft legislation has an “opt out” choice for users who don’t want algorithmic feeds, Teach us Consent and many others are calling for an “opt in” choice. That means as a default users would not receive feeds generated by algorithms.

Spokespeople for the established political parties are yet to state their formal reactions to the proposal. One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce has jumped in however, accusing the government of censorship and a “socialist” desire to silence conservative viewpoints. (No – don’t try to make sense of his arguments.)

Others on the right, including Angus Taylor, are also talking about “censorship”. It’s incongruous to hear parties that are supposedly pro-market complaining about an initiative that offers people choice, but policy consistency never was a hallmark of the Liberal Party. Some Coalition parliamentarians, however, seem to be more open to the government’s proposal.

The issue for the right is not really about “censorship”. That’s an outstandingly weak argument. The government is not trying to stop me from searching and finding advertisements for oversized utes, enticements to engage in BASE jumping. watching performances of mixed martial arts, invitations to the manosphere, pornography, or feeds of One Nation and Liberal Party propaganda. The government’s legislation is about protecting me from having that content forced on me when I try to find stuff I actually want. That’s not censorship because I can still easily find it if I want to.

The concern of the legislation’s opponents, here and overseas, is about protecting the voice and the influence of those who are trying to persuade us to buy stuff we don’t need, to be led into the dark world of the manosphere, to believe that concern about climate change is left-wing conspiracy, and to stop supporting the Palestinians or Ukrainians to list some of the current messages of the far right.

As the philosopher Karl Polanyi pointed out 80 years ago, over most of human history people chose when, where and how to participate in the market, but he prophetically saw the emergence of an age when we would lack that choice: all public space would become market space, and we would be forced to live in the market abiding by its rules, rather than having the market, or agora, as a separate part of our lives, subject to society’s norms and moral code.

That’s the world the social media companies, the Liberal Party, and big business want us to live in. Some small business people have hooked into social media as a means of advertising, naïve about the way they will inevitably get screwed by others with more power.

The government’s proposal is about giving back choice to the users of social media.

The Coalition’s concern is also about a fear that those who opt out (or do not opt in) will miss the campaigns of lies and misinformation generated by bots mounted by its supporters on the far right. The Guardian’s Benita Kolovos and Henry Belot describe a campaign of realistic but blatantly misleading AI-generated images flooding social media, that go far beyond normal political criticism of the Victorian government, suggesting that the state is on the brink of catastrophic collapse. Because those who pay for these campaigns use front organizations such as “Fix Victoria” and “Better Victoria”, and because they cleverly use wording that exploits a loophole in the state electoral laws on disclosure, it is hard to identify who is funding them, but all evidence points to well-heeled members of the Liberal Party who have much to gain financially from a change in government.

This is legislation that true “conservatives” should surely support.

More sports rorts

The Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program was a stupid idea from the outset.

It’s Labor’s turn to be exposed for electoral pork-barrelling.

The Centre for Public Integrity has taken it upon itself to audit the Commonwealth’s $560 million Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program, a program designed to deliver the government’s projects promised in the 2025 election campaign.

Its well-researched report – Public money, political advantage? Community infrastructure grant program raises serious integrity concerns – is highly critical of the government, pointing out that 73 percent of funds went to projects in Labor-held seats, with a particular weighting to marginal seats. In considering this outcome we might recall that going into the 2025 election Labor held only 51 percent of the seats in the House of Representatives.

Government spokespeople are finding it hard to justify the program. You can hear Assistant Treasurer Daniel Mulino on Radio National doing his best to defend it. Mulino is one of the government’s best and clearest communicators, but his defence of the MLCI program has about the same clarity as Barnaby Joyce’s defence of One Nation superannuation policy. To paraphrase Mulino’s rationalizations, they seem to be “every other government has done it” and “because we won more seats it was inevitable that more went to Labor electorates”. You don’t need a Jesuit education to see the weakness in those pathetic arguments.

The Centre for Public Integrity is particularly concerned about the invitation-only nature of the grants. It describes the process:

Eligible entities must have been identified by the Commonwealth government and invited to apply for a maximum funding amount specified in the invitation. Entities not invited to apply were not otherwise eligible to apply for funding.

Such a process could be justified for very small projects where the transaction costs of competitive tendering outweigh the benefits of competition, but the median grant size was $1.5 million.

It has also emerged that one of the projects funded under the program was the Marrickville Golf Club in Albanese’s Grayndler electorate. It appears that Albanese was given an honorary membership, accepted on his behalf by the staff, and that he did not declare it on his register of interests. Materially it’s not a significant issue: Albanese reasonably claims that he did not know about his unsolicited honorary membership, and the benefits of membership of a suburban golf club are not on a Trumpian scale of corruption. In fact he doesn’t play golf. But these are close to the conditions that led to then Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie resigning in 2020. (I can recall occasions when ministerial staffers and sycophantic senior public servants did “favours” for their ministers, which actually led to political embarrassment when they came to light.)

The issue is about corruption of government processes. It’s less obvious than the corruption of a shopping bag stuffed with banknotes handed to a planning minister. But in many ways it is worse, because usually no law is broken and it becomes accepted as the way politics is done. It’s not far from Trump’s promise to give every adult $5000 if the mid-tern election returns Republican majorities in both houses.

The Centre for Public Integrity is mainly concerned with the processes employed in the MLCI program, and it states what shouldn’t need stating: “Public money must be allocated based on merit and need, and in a transparent and procedurally fair way”.

When we look at the nature of the projects – sports facilities, public parks, playgrounds, local clubs, walkways, and swimming pools – we might ask by what criteria the Commonwealth should be involved in such projects.

For a start to call them “infrastructure” is a misnomer: they are simply community facilities. And more basically they are functions that really belong to state and local governments. There is no justification for Commonwealth involvement, as there may be in real infrastructure projects – an electricity transmission line in the national network, a road that crosses state borders, regulation of pollution that violates international obligations.

The projects funded under the MLCI program may all be worthy on cost-benefit grounds and community needs, but that doesn’t justify Commonwealth involvement. If the Commonwealth believes, for public health reasons perhaps, that we don’t have enough community sports facilities, they can make tied grants to the states, leaving specific evaluation and supervision up to the states who do a far better administrative job than the Commonwealth.

Far worse than such administrative clumsiness and a breach of the Constitutional separation of powers, is the message they send to the electorate. That’s the message that elections are about buying votes with local boondoggles, rather than consideration of a principle-based policy platform. A description of the processes in the MLCI program is close to cringeworthy, because it’s the way cheap drama programs portray the politics of imagined backward countries.

No wonder people are cynical about the behaviour of our established parties.

A small state in Germany

The success of the extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland in the Sachsen-Anhalt election has similarities with our own politics that we should not ignore.

There are two ways to look on the outstanding success of the far right Alternative für Deutschland in the Sachsen-Anhalt state (Länder) election.

One is to see it as a resurgence of the far-right extremism that arose in Germany in 1933, that was to lead to the Holocaust and the death of 50 million people. Now, as then, many are wondering how people in a country that represents the best of “western” civilization can support such vile politics.

The other way is to regard Sachsen-Anhalt as something atypical of Germany, in the same way as we might regard One Nation’s successes in Secret River and Farrer as manifestations of aspects of those electorates that differ significantly from Australia as a whole.

Probably a graph

How most Germans see the far right (“racism kills” painted on a cycle path)

To deal with the first perspective, it is indeed serious, as Laura Tingle explains in her post Alternative for Germany's state election victory a “serious moment in Europe”. The party’s platform includes a stop to the teaching of Germany’s Nazi past, and an expansion of Russian language instruction in schools. Children with disabilities and those without permanent German residency would be stopped from attending regular schools. It proposes to establish volunteer vigilante groups to bring to order, through summary justice, those who it describes as constituting a dangerous part of the population.

AfD spokespeople have not held back on their affinity with the Putin and Trump regimes, or their opposition to NATO and to Germany’s support for Ukraine. Trump has congratulated the AfD on its election victory, describing it as a “movement on the rise”, and urged Germans to become great again. (I am still trying to find Trump’s message of support to Labor on winning the South Australian election, a state about the same population as Sachsen-Anhalt.)

There is no doubt about AfD’s support in Sachsen-Anhalt: it won 44 percent of the vote, up from 21 percent in the 2021 state election, and turnout was 78 percent, up from 60 percent. The biggest swings to AfD were from those who hadn’t voted in 2021 and from those who had previously voted for the incumbent Christian Democrats. Other parties seem to have held their ground.

With 39 seats out of the 83 seats in the state parliament (Landtag) AfD is 3 seats short of a governing majority, and the question arises whether any of the other 5 parties would join them to form government. If the German right were as opportunistic as the Australian Coalition parties, who will join with any right-wing group who isn’t outwardly wearing jackboots and displaying a swastika, the remaining Christian Democrats would be on a unity ticket with AfD, but the Germans have a “firewall” (Brandmauer) agreement among the main parties that they will not form a coalition with the far right. Observers are wondering if the firewall will hold up in the current circumstance: according to a rapidly-conducted opinion poll just after the election Germans are split about 50:50 as to whether other parties should allow AfD to govern in Sachsen-Anhalt.

According to opinion polls AfD enjoys 28 percent support nationally. That’s substantially less than its support in Sachsen Anhalt, but it has been gaining ground from the Christian Democrats whose national support has fallen to 21 percent. Chancellor Merz’s CDU remains the stronger of the two parties in the Christian Democrat – Social Democratic coalition, but Germans are becoming disillusioned with the Merz government, and there is fear that AfD’s success in Sachsen-Anhalt will lead to instability nationally.

The less alarming perspective on AfD’s success is based on particular conditions in Sachsen-Anhalt. It’s part of the old East Germany, where all five states have been struggling since 1989. Sachsen-Anhalt used to be East Germany’s main coal mining region, and has been going through a difficult adjustment as Germany phases out coal.

Its population is 2.1 million, having fallen from 2.9 million just before reunification, and its average age is 48, compared with 45 nationally. It has only two cities with populations over 100 000 – Halle and Magdeburg, both with populations of 240 000. The state’s unemployment rate is 8.1 percent, compared with 6.4 percent nationally, and average earnings are 17 percent below the national average. Its demographics are generally those of a depressed region.

In all age groups up to 60 it has significantly more men than women, this imbalance having started after reunification when young people, particularly women, headed west. See the graph below.

Probably a graph

This imbalance may go part of the way to explaining why AfD claims to have significant support among young men – a feature that distinguishes it from our One Nation and other parties on the far right.

Although opposition to immigration is one of AfD’s main platforms, Sachsen-Anhalt has only 9 percent foreign-born people, compared with around 20 percent nationally. This seems to be a common phenomenon: the immigrants trying to invade our space are a greater threat than those who have actually come.

For comparison with Australia, we might reflect that in the Secret Harbour by-election One Nation won 39 percent of first preferences and in Farrer it won 40 percent. These are not far short of AfD’s 44 percent vote in Sachsen-Anhalt, and the party’s national support at 28 percent is close to One Nation’s 27 percent support in our Morgan Poll.

There are some differences, however. In Australia we don’t have the scale of regional disparities experienced in Germany, which is still recovering from 38 years of political, economic and social separation. In the old East Germany many still have an attachment to the time before reunification, with a feeling that life was better then.

In fact materially life in the old DDR was pretty lousy, but it offered order, security and certainty, without the burden of having to cope with too many decisions, just so long as one got on with life and didn’t do anything that would come to the attention of the Stasi. We loosely call AfD and similar movements “right”, but they can appeal to those who were comfortable with life in a communist state, not because they were revolutionaries – they weren’t – but because they had adjusted to that life where they knew their place and they didn’t like the adjustment of being thrown into a different world. There’s a lesson here for those trying to combat One Nation.  

Nor do we have Germany’s turbulent history, a history that provides examples for nationalists who conjure images of a glorious past. In comparison to AfD, One Nation comes across as a rather banal mob. If only Hanson and Joyce had an Australian version of the Holy Roman Emperor or Otto von Bismarck!

Also One Nation has had the good fortune to be able to contest casual vacancies in two electorates that are as different to the rest of Australia as Sachsen-Anhalt is to the rest of Germany. You can follow Barrie Cassidy and George Megalogenis in a 30-minute podcast hosted by The Guardian – Back to Back Barries: The forces that can stop One Nation’s rise – in which Australia’s electoral geography and demographics are described: they’re not particularly friendly to One Nation.

But that doesn’t mean we can ignore the rise of the extreme right globally or here in Australia. In Germany the echoes of 1933 are too strong; in other European countries including France, Italy and the UK, the extreme right is only just kept at bay; and in the USA a populist movement, backed by oligarchs, has done terrible damage to democratic institutions. Here, even if One Nation suffers some setbacks, the grievances that give it a platform are also taken up by politicians in parties that used to be on the centre right. We should watch European politics carefully and learn from it.

Our contested tobacco market

There’s a contest between criminal networks for control of the market.

Who is in the market

There are two criminal networks vying for control of Australia’s tobacco market.

One relies on physical intimidation, particularly firebombing of rivals, to secure its turf. The other network uses more genteel strategies, generally involving donations to political parties, and they abhor the label “criminal” because they can claim they are not in breach of any statute law.

They share a contempt for people’s suffering, and they have no moral misgivings about pushing a product that has killed more than a million Australians and is still contributing to the deaths of 20 000 Australians each year.

They share a disappointment and frustration about their industry’s loss of the Australian market, smoking rates having fallen from 20 percent at the turn of this century to around 6 percent now. They also fear that Australia’s success in curbing smoking establishes a strong model for public health authorities in other “developed” countries.

Higher excise rates have led to an established black market

Successive Australian governments have been committed to a National Tobacco Campaign, using a set of public health measures to discourage smoking. Earlier strategies relied heavily on media campaigns, but as smoking rates fell away more emphasis has been placed on increasing the price of cigarettes by raising the level of excise. Mass media campaigns become pointless when 94 percent of people need no convincing.

There is no doubt that a $40 to $60 price for a pack of 20 cigarettes is a deterrent. As economists would put it, there is high price elasticity in the market, particularly because smoking rates are highest among those with the lowest incomes. A pack-a-day smoker would be paying upwards from $14 000 a year to sustain his (smokers are disproportionately male) habit or addiction.

The rapid emergence of a black market has clearly caught Commonwealth policymakers off guard, as is illustrated by the shortfall in expected revenue from tobacco excise. Successive budget estimates have overstated tobacco excise receipts by around $1 billion. According to 2026-27 budget papers, revenue from tobacco excise fell from $8 billion in 2024-25 to $4 billion this year and is expected to fall to $2 billion by 2029-30.

Black marketeers saw an opportunity that Canberra-based bureaucrats didn’t. They knew that our import controls had been weakened when the Abbott government replaced Customs with Border Force and that they still haven’t fully recovered, even as the physical volume of imports has grown strongly. They realized, as any savvy businesspeople did, that communications technologies were making it easier to establish import and distribution networks. And they knew that there were plenty of small-shopfront retail outlets, some operating under the label of “tobacconists”, others as convenience stores, whose proprietors were none too concerned about the niceties of the law.

This is the market reality overlooked by well-meaning people who believe that if we bring the excise back to some historical level, the market for excise-paid cigarettes will return to that level.

The low-price market has been established, and estimates of price elasticity, reported in the Parliamentary Budget Office paper Nicotine prices upon which the opposition relies, are next to useless, because our behaviour in response to rising prices is not the same as our behaviour in response to falling prices. Elasticity is a neat teaching tool in Economics 1, but in application it defies any attempt to be expressed as a firm number with reliable predictive power.

The black marketeers have made a large sunk cost investment into their businesses. They have learned who to trust and who not to trust. They can get cigarettes at a low free-on-board price, in attractive packaging without those horrible health warnings. They have their distribution networks, and a pool of naïve young men to do their deliveries and firebomb a rival’s premises for a $2000 payment. It’s all low-cost and efficient. And they have a customer base: it takes a bit of work to find your friendly black marketeer, but once you have you may as well keep going back, and you have the comforting feeling that you’re not paying tax, because you have probably been taught to loathe the government.

That is a loose summary of the points made by Simon Chapman, in his post Why the “lower tobacco tax” emperor has no clothes (with links to other sources), written before One Nation and the Liberal Party engaged in an excise race to the bottom. In fact even if there were zero excise, the black marketeers would still have a substantial market. Three researchers from the University of Sydney make the same point in a Conversation contribution One Nation wants to cut the tobacco tax. Would that curb the illicit cigarette market?

Public health experts have no doubt that a lower price for excise-paid cigarettes would result in an increased rate of smoking. In a post – Amid concerns about industry influence, Coalition’s tobacco policy slammed as a public health disaster – Croakey has summarised the considered opinions of the Australian Council on Smoking and Health, the Public Health Association of Australia and the Australian Medical Association, and has provided links to sources of information on tobacco issues.

Tobacco politics

The ABC’s Clare Armstrong has a post on the ABC website One Nation, Coalition bank on cigarettes staying uncool as they get cheaper. She reminds us that the Coalition is not only proposing to drop the excise by 80 percent. It is also proposing to legalise vapes and oral nicotine products.

On Late Night Live David Marr interviewd Becky Freeman of the University of Sydney’s School of Public Health: How Big Tobacco still wields influence in Australia. She described how cigarette companies are still making political donations. (She doesn’t name parties but we know that the National Party has been a recipient, while the Greens, Labor and Liberal Parties ban donations from tobacco companies.) She also describes how a Coalition-dominated Senate committee allowed Philip Morris executives were permitted to give their evidence in a secret session, on the basis that their physical safety had to be protected!

You can read the Coalition’s policy in Angus Talyor’s recent speech to the Menzies Research Centre. The theme is a familiar “we are tougher on crime than Labor”, and their concern seems to be mainly about re-claiming revenue. Their public health concerns are limited to the nasty unhealthy stuff found in black market cigarettes – contrasting with the nice healthy stuff found in big brand cigarettes. There is no mention of probable increased smoking rates: the Parliamentary Budget Office work is based on a model that assumes “the total proportion of adults using nicotine products would be stable”.

The spin in his speech is about the best Taylor can do to screen the public from the influence of One Nation in driving the Coalition’s policy. One Nation proposes a 75 percent in excise; the Coalition goes for 80 percent – with vapes thrown in. And there is the profile of smokers to be considered – likely to be older, male, without tertiary education, and with below average income. That’s much the same dominant profile of One Nation supporters. It’s a reasonable bet that a disproportionately large proportion of smokers are One Nation supporters, and Taylor wants them in his camp.

What a politician leaves out of a speech is as important as what goes into a speech, and it is notable that Taylor makes no mention of the National Tobacco Campaign, which in essence is aimed at reducing smoking to zero and the public revenue from tobacco excise to $0. (Without even the cover of net zero!)

Neglected public values

The National Tobacco Campaign neatly fits with Australian values: we are liberal, not libertarian, and we care for one another to the extent of sharing most of our health care costs through Medicare. The backlashes against the Fraser and Howard governments’ attempts to destroy Medicare confirm the strength of that community value. Australians generally care about public health, confirmed by our compliant behaviour during the Covid pandemic, and accept the directions of authorities when they are seen to be acting in the public interest.

It’s a sad reflection on the state of our politics when a party in office can implement a policy on gambling, and when three parties competing for office can put forward a policy on a deadly addictive curse, without reference to the principles behind their policies or reference to public values.  

What we expect from government

Australians want competent and capable government, not “small” government.

The Centre for Policy Development has produced a well-researched document – Purpose of government pulse: Australian attitudes towards government and democracy, based on surveys of people’s expectations of government, democracy and politics. They find that:

People are asking for a system that is honest, ambitious and capable of delivering. The challenges facing the country are vast and complex, but they provide a rare opportunity for governments to show they are up to the task and listening to what people need.

That may come across as a generic statement of people’s expectations, but in fact it asserts that we want capable governments, in contrast to a belief that people want “small government”, and in contrast to the belief, driving anti-democratic movements on the far right, that democracies are intrinsically incapable of satisfying people’s needs. We haven’t given up on democracy.

We want governments that can anticipate emerging problems and deal with them. That goes against the conventional wisdom that the electorate will always punish a government that asks us to make immediate sacrifices for future benefits.

We are enthusiastic about universal services in health and education. That’s an endorsement of the basic principles of Medicare and is possibly a reaction against the residualisation of school education as a service only for those who cannot afford private schooling.

Gareth Hutchens has used his summary of the report to draw attention to unease in other areas where voters feel governments have rushed into major decisions, taking into account the views of lobbyists but not those of the electorate. The Morrison government’s AUKUS is a standout example, but as he points out the current government has been no less secretive on major defence deals, and has embraced data centre investment with enthusiasm before discussing the industry’s costs and benefits with the public. (By contrast think of the extensive consultation that accompanied the Hawke-Keating industry policy changes.)

The Centre for Policy Development has done a service in reminding policymakers about what Australians reasonably expect from government. As one reads the report, however, it becomes clear that we want more from government than we are currently paying through our taxes.

That omission leaves the work vulnerable to the accusation that it’s simply a confirmation of the age-old contradiction that we want more from government than we are willing to pay, and that there is no way we would consent to higher taxes because everybody knows Australia is already a high-tax country.

Both the assumption and the assertion in that accusation are wrong. There is a solid body of research showing that we are willing to pay more in tax, provided it is collected fairly, spent in accordance with our needs, and is not wasted. And the assertion that we are a high-tax country is plain wrong: as has often been pointed out in these roundups. In comparison with other high-income OECD countries, our taxes are close to the lowest.

It would strengthen the message in this and similar work if it were to pay more attention to the ways we can collect the revenue to provide the type of government Australians want.