The prime minister’s inability to discipline backbenchers, News Corp’s extremism-based business model, and complacency are increasing the risk of right-wing terrorism in Australia as we fail to learn the lessons emerging in the United States about what drives extremists to violence.
President Joe Biden identified the challenge of right-wing terrorism in his inaugural address, saying “we must confront and we will defeat” it. One of his early actions was to ask US security agencies to evaluate the threat of domestic terrorism.
US police forces have long recognised that the most serious threat they face is right-wing terrorism, which has surged dramatically in recent years to the point where, before the pandemic, it accounted for 90% of terrorist acts in the US. The January 6 attempt to seize the Capitol and its fatal consequences only demonstrated a long-term trend enthusiastically encouraged by Donald Trump.
Here, despite warnings from ASIO about the growing threat of right-wing terrorism, the Morrison government has repeatedly downplayed the risk, even after Labor forced it to conduct an inquiry in December and despite Australia producing one of worst terrorist mass murderers of recent times in Christchurch in 2019.
The aftermath of the January 6 coup attempt, however, has illustrated how Scott Morrison and his government facilitate the conditions for far-right violence.
Those events demonstrated a key link long understood by counter-terrorism researchers: misinformation is crucial to radicalisation. Narratives of Western aggression against Muslims (which the West often did its best to confirm) or Islamic triumphalism are central to Islamist terrorism. The spread of myths and lies about Muslims via social media are a crucial driver of Hindu violence against Indian Muslims. And the conviction that Trump had been deprived of a landslide victory drove tens of thousands of white Americans — many armed and some plotting the murder of politicians — to attempt to overthrow Congress.
That’s why the “free speech” narrative peddled by right-wingers after Trump’s removal from Twitter and Facebook was not merely false but deeply disingenuous (and intellectually incoherent, as NSW’s Energy and Environment Minister Matt Kean demonstrated in an excellent piece skewering his federal colleagues). Preventing the spread of misinformation designed to radicalise is as crucial in relation to right-wing terrorism as it is in relation to Islamist terrorism.
Deplatforming has been shown to work in relation to Islamist extremism, both in removing material intended to incite violence and hate, and in removing platforms by which extremists can recruit, egg each other on and organise violence (which is why, driven offline, far-right social media site Parler has been offered a home by the Russians, eager to continue to try to destabilise the West).
But for many Morrison government ministers and backbenchers, it’s fine to deplatform incitement and hate intended to drive Islamist violence, but an outrageous attack on free speech to deplatform incitement and hate intended to drive right-wing violence.
This is a small example of a bigger problem: that right-wing extremism is normalised in a way that could never possibly happen in relation to Islamist extremism. Not merely normalised by the media, but by the perpetrators themselves: Islamist terrorists would never regard themselves as part of any “mainstream” in Western societies. Yet right-wing terrorists and the insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol believe they are the mainstream, that they form part of some invisible, silent majority tyrannised by liberal, woke, blah blah elites. It’s a variant of the unspoken media rule that white people don’t do terrorism, only brown people do.
Morrison’s refusal to do what many other national leaders have done, what even senior Republicans have done, right up to former Senate leader Mitch McConnell, and specifically criticise Trump for inciting insurrection — a refusal driven by Morrison’s desire to pander to right-wingers and, perhaps, his own strong personal connections with a prominent Australian QAnon supporter — further normalises extremism.
So too does his refusal to criticise in any way the Trumpist lies and QAnon conspiracy theories peddled by Craig Kelly and George Christensen. How can Australia deplatform misinformation when prominent backbenchers use substantial social media presences to spread it, with no pushback or criticism from the government? The government can’t even bring itself to criticise Kelly’s potentially lethal wingnuttery about vaccination.
Labor’s Anthony Byrne, the deputy chair of parliament’s intelligence and security committee, who professes a passionate loathing of right-wing extremists and who has been briefed by ASIO on their activities in his own electorate of Holt, warns of the consequences of letting MPs go unchecked. “If members of the government advocate the sort of right wing conspiracy theories that are the drivers and enablers of extremism, and you fail to criticise them, you’re sending a signal that you tacitly support them,” he says, “and you’re energising the people who take their cue from them.”
Of course, it’s even harder to deplatform misinformation when the country’s biggest media company continues to spread it. News Corporation — the world’s premier spreader of extremist propaganda — continues to broadcast conspiracy theories, extremist propaganda and Trump lies via Sky News, as detailed here. It’s not confined to the fascist fringe of Sky after dark — The Australian’s senior columnists cheered what they claimed was Trump’s win after November 3.
News Corp’s business model is based on extremism: the only way it can make money is to pander to an increasingly detached, deluded right-wing audience that believes itself to be the victim of a host of conspiracies. And in doing so it spreads exactly the kind of misinformation that leads to violence and terrorism.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. Christchurch showed us what destruction a single, delusional, radicalised white male could wreak. But the Morrison government and its chief media arm refuse to listen. What will be the price of their refusal?
Fully agree, but one minor edit, please:
“We can’t say we weren’t warned. Christchurch showed us what destruction a single, delusional, radicalised white Australian male could wreak. But the Morrison government and its chief media arm refuse to listen. What will be the price of their refusal?”
Nothing will be said or done about the rise of the militias, nut jobs and Q-anon lunatics by our government, or by News Corp or the IPA, or any Right-leaning organization, for one simple reason; deep down, they are comforted by the idea of an army of sympathizers ready to bash, intimidate or kill those who take a different stance. This is as old as history itself; the leaders pretend to tut-tut, and shake their heads, and the goon squads go about putting the boot in.
Morrison appears to be a silent appeaser to QAnon.
There’s a big contradiction in this piece. Members of parliament (including backbenchers) are not employees or subordinates of the Government or our Holidaying Prime Minister. It’s just not open to the government to tell backbenchers how to act or what to say, or indeed, how or which way, to vote on legislation. Sure Morrison could say ‘shut up and pull your head in’ to the fascist ignorant drongoes on his backbench. But he is not their boss. They could just as well respond to him to ‘go suck a sauce bottle’ for all the good it would do. To think otherwise, that the executive could ‘pull the backbench into line’ would put Morrison in the authoritarian autocratic dictator role….which is exactly what we don’t want assuming we don’t want to descend into a fascist state. Also Morrison is only PM at the pleasure of the backbenchers giving him the confidence of the HoRs. So why would he want to undermine his own support base by telling them what to say or do? In my view, Morrison’s silence shows both his lack of moral fibre and leadership qualities, and an attempt to deny any air to potential leadership challengers in his party, Dutton perhaps.
The thesis of this article is correct…..we do need to address mis and mal information. For starters, we should focus on illuminating the actual effectiveness and use of the raft of so-called anti-terrorist legislation and disproportionate powers granted to the government. Perhaps we may find it’s been used more to suppress dissent and punish those properly and morally exposing government wrongdoing than reducing the risk of terrorist acts?
And rather bemoan the failure of Morrison to do what he can’t do, ie. make his bosses…the backbenchers do as he tells them, perhaps it would be better to raise Morrison’s failure (I know, I know there are so many of them) to address through legislation means to reduce lies and mis-information, deception etc in political communications. One would also hope that the implied right to freedom of political communication the High Court has read into our Constitution as a necessary element for a parliamentary democracy includes a modicum of not being constantly fed propaganda, lies and lies by people in authority.
Fine obfuscation, though prolix. As you say, Morrison and his ministers cannot silence any backbencher. That’s all the more reason for Morrison and his gang to speak out when backbenchers spread dangerous nonsense. When they refuse to contradict Kelly, Christensen or whoever, they are endorsing them – silence signifies assent.
If Morrison says a backbencher is wrong about something there is no consequence for anyone’s free speech. It’s just a reply. It would be free speech by Morrison just as much as whatever the backbencher had said. The whole point of allowing free speech is supposed to be to allow views to be debated. Therefore we should hear from Morrison. Sadly, his refusal to speak is as clear a statement as any he could make: silence signifies assent.
On the other hand, Morrison is the party leader. He cannot silence a backbencher (let us be thankful). But he can discipline a perty member. It’s what any decent responsible party leader would do.
“perty”? What a word, I rather like it, but it should of course be “party”.
It’s not a simple matter of what the prime minister can, or should, do. It’s also a matter of his own beliefs and sympathies. Let it not be forgotten that Kelly is only in the current parliament because Morrison wanted him there and interfered in the preselection process to keep him. He is securely in the same camp as these people, as his own Qanon links demonstrate.
He could move to dis-endorse the member, just as he endorsed him for pre-selection.
What if, in the main, he agrees with them? After all he’s looking forward to the rapture and his good mate is a Q-anon nutter.
Telling troublemaking backbenchers to pull their heads in would be the action of a leader respected by his party. So failure to do so indicates …
…just maybe he is pandering to LNP nutters and/or to prevent them from defecting across to the Oxley Moron’s party?
And that leader would also have to be principled.
The Coalition has abandoned any pretence of caring about democracy or the rule of law in its pursuit of holding on to power at any price, but at least we can rely on Labor to fight hard and defend our liberties with every means at its disposal.
Ha bloody ha.