The misinformation bill – impossible to police and easy to weaponise

In 1899, Charles H. Duell, commissioner of US patent office, declared that his job would soon become redundant because “everything that can be invented has been invented”. 

We can laugh at ol’ Chuck’s naivety now, some 125 years later, because we are safe in the knowledge that since then we’ve invented a bunch of stuff: televisions, tractors, the internet, the spork.  

However, given his esteemed title and assumed expertise on the subject, Duell’s take on the matter was taken as fact – and therefore it would have flown under the radar of the Albanese Government’s new misinformation bill. Everyone would have been sharing that around on their sepia iPhone screens and soon all inventive industry would be squashed.