The Albanese government’s Communications Legislation Amendment (Combatting Misinformation and Disinformation) Bill 2024, a.k.a. MAD Bill, proposes nothing less than to make the federal Communications Minister the sole arbiter of truth on the internet. It would use the threat of crippling fines to force social media and video-sharing platforms to stifle public debate of important policy issues (Media Release, p. 3), while exempting so-called “professional news content” from being considered mis- or disinformation at all. The presumably intentional result is that both elected government officials and, perhaps more importantly, members of the unelected bureaucracy and national security apparatus could continue to spew propaganda via their mainstream media mouthpieces, to gin up public support for their preferred policy positions. But dissent to those policies, and debunking of their propaganda, could be deemed misleading and “harmful” by the Minister or some bureaucratic minion, and squashed.

Guardian laser

Communications Minister Michelle Rowland has touted such powers as necessary in order to safeguard next year’s federal election against foreign disinformation, a sentiment which Greens communications spokeswoman Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has unfortunately echoed. It behoves us therefore to look back on a domestic disinformation campaign by which the Defence Department interfered in the previous (May 2022) federal election, to ensure it was framed around the need for increased defence expenditure and other quasi-wartime economic and “security” policies (most notably AUKUS) in the face of a supposedly aggressive China—policies to which the Greens are rightly and adamantly opposed, but which, were they to let themselves be fooled into passing Labor’s MAD Bill, they and other critics of Establishment warmongering would thenceforth effectively be prevented from challenging.

When then-Defence Minister, now Opposition Leader Peter Dutton declared on ANZAC Day 2022, a month ahead of the election, that Australia must “prepare for war” with China, he and his fellow warhawks cited to support their cause a then recent incident on the high seas between an Australian P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance aircraft, and a Chinese People’s Liberation Army–Navy (PLA-N) Luyang-class destroyer. In a 19 February 2022 media release, Defence stated that two days earlier, the P-8A had “detected a laser illuminating the aircraft while in flight over Australia’s northern approaches”, which it regarded as a “serious safety incident”.

“Acts like this have the potential to endanger lives”, Defence complained. “We strongly condemn unprofessional and unsafe military conduct. … Such actions are not in keeping with the standards we expect of professional militaries.” The mainstream media propaganda mill immediately got to work, the Sydney Morning Herald for example reporting that “A military-grade laser can be used to blind a pilot as well as disrupt or damage equipment and instruments on board an aircraft.” The article quoted Rory Medcalf, head of Australian National University’s National Security College, who called the aiming of the laser “dangerous and unacceptable”, and said that “this is happening in our backyard, not in a backyard that China can remotely claim to be its own”— just as though Australian Navy ships and aircraft did not routinely probe right up against the boundaries of China’s sovereign territorial waters, whereas the incident in question happened while the PLA-N vessels made an innocent passage through international waters 100-odd kilometres from Australia’s coast. The SMH also quoted Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) senior analyst Malcolm Davis, who called the lasing “a hostile act, they are firing with intent to do harm to the air crew. … If it hits the eyes of the air crew it could permanently blind them.”

The PLA death-ray that wasn’t

Scary, right? Wrong. Because it turns out that Defence, as one physicist and former Defence Science and Technology Organisation (DSTO) research scientist put it, had at best been “economical with the truth”. And ASPI’s Davis, true to form, had been peddling weapons-grade nonsense—or to put it bluntly, lying through his teeth.

Military lasers capable of blinding both pilots and aircraft sensors do exist. (For that matter, handheld lasers that can blind a human can be bought openly for under $100 on eBay.) But there is no evidence that the PLA-N destroyer in question was equipped with such a device; and if it was, it certainly didn’t use it. “‘Military-grade laser’ makes it sound like a death-ray”, the former DSTO scientist told the Australian Alert Service, but to anyone versed in the technicalities it was immediately obvious that what the Chinese vessel had actually used was an infrared (IR) rangefinder that is specifically designed to be harmless to the human eye.

Images released by Defence identify not only the type of destroyer, but (because its Vessel Number is visible) the specific ship involved, which the US Naval Institute lists in a public database as being equipped with a Type 730 Close In Weapons System (CIWS)—a 30 mm rotary cannon in an automated turret, which tracks targets via radar and uses electro-optical sensors for range-finding and fire control. It has an effective range of 3 km, and a maximum range of 5 km. Normal procedure, the scientist said, would be to “flash” the P-8A before it came within firing range, essentially as a way of letting it know it had been seen coming. The P-8A’s sophisticated sensor array, he added, would have immediately detected, locked onto and identified the source of the laser—and would, ironically, have confirmed the range via a flash from its own eye-safe IR rangefinder. In any case, had the destroyer intended a threat it would have lit up the aircraft with the targeting radar of its very capable (and much longer-range) surface-to-air missile defences.

Sure enough, public scepticism pushed Defence to clarify on 22 February 2022—albeit it still claimed grievance— that the incident had in fact taken place at a distance of 7.7 km (i.e. well outside the CIWS’s range), after which the aircraft had continued to within 4 km (i.e. the crew did not feel endangered at all); and that the laser was “seen” by its sensors, not its pilots. Oh, but “Australia does not engage in the spread of misinformation or disinformation”, Defence asserted. Perish the thought!

If the MAD Bill passes, such admissions will become a thing of the past, because the sceptics who forced them will be silenced. No government should ever have such power.

By Richard Bardon, Australian Alert Service, 2 October 2024

For more background on the agenda afoot with the Misinformation and Disinformation Bill, see: