Fair point. I think just that there's a general acceptance that "something must be done" and that the government are the people to do it is pretty alarming. It's a short step from here to a Ministry of Truth, and I can see Australia taking that step pretty soon.
The thing about Australia is that voting is mandatory. By definition this makes it difficult for politicians radicalising the edges to pull the mass of the normal curve away from the centre. In the US the opposite is true. The radicalised are more incentivised to turn up and vote than the centrist mass. So much so that the last 40 years has seen the hollowing out of the centre and this ridiculous (to my eyes) seesawing of extremes.
What I’m trying to explain is that (successful) politics in Australia doesn’t stray too far from the centre of the body politic. As a result there’s greater faith in institutions here than in the US. It’s far less alarming to us (conceptually) than it is to Americans.
I have a physics analogy which is similar. Vested interests set up magnetic fields in social media / legacy media (lot of things discussed prominently in social media is just what legacy media is saying. So legacy media is a sense is setting up an anchor points and people have to distribute themselves around it) to flip magnetic domains to align with the narrative.
We used to defer this to journalists, effectively. While individual journalists often lied and misrepresented the truth, there was some responsibility within the industry to tell the truth, and newspapers did print retractions and corrections when they got it wrong. The editorial content was strictly separate from the business of running the newspaper, so editorial decisions were (mostly) not influenced by commercial decisions and free to pursue The Truth as they saw it.
That, sadly, is no longer the case. And we have no good replacement for it.
There is no incentive to be truthful currently, among democracies the seems to be most powerful in the US with Trump able to lie and there seemingly be no counter for it.
With old regulated media there was (is?) the legacy of the organisation and the idea it was "trustworthy" on the line for the journalists that work for it. So they have an incentive to be truthful, and hopefully an idea that publishing lies is not a good moral choice.
With the personality driven journalism that emerges from the internet there is less incentive to be truthful, such personalities can be very successful using populism alone to play to their audience.
How are we seeing how that pans out when Australia's misinformation bill is still just a proposal?