Signs held up at a conspiracy-based rally in Sydney on 23 September 2023. Photo credit: David Gray/AFP.

Introduction

Political disinformation is an increasing threat to the legitimacy of democratic processes and the health and stability of democracies the world over.1 Australian is no exception. In this chapter, we explore the extent to which disinformation impacted and distorted a symbolically important moment in Australian electoral history: the 2023 Voice Referendum campaign and its outcome.

In order for any electoral outcome to be deemed authentic and therefore legitimate, electors’ choices must be based on robust and accurate information about the options in contention. Yet, mis- and disinformation were conspicuously present during the highly contentious Voice Referendum campaign.2 Misleading information could be found in every form of communication relating to the election, from the speeches of activists and politicians, the ofcial pamphlets mailed out to electors, to online material posted on social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok. One especially alarming form of disinformation that emerged during the campaign was election conspiracism, whereby it was falsely claimed that electoral authorities were interfering with processes and results.

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2. The Union shall offer its citizens an area of freedom, security and justice without internal frontiers

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3. The Union shall establish an internal market. It shall work for the sustainable development of Europe based on balanced economic growth and price stability, a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress, and a high level of protection and improvement of the quality of the environment.

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4. The Union shall establish an economic and monetary union whose currency is the euro.

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Art. 2, Treaty of Lisbon

Please note that the Treaty of Lisbon (which came into force on December 1, 2009) is the present treaty of the European Union. It was signed by the then 28 heads of state or government (the United Kingdom was a member), as well as by their foreign ministers.

This study has traced the problem of decisionmaking speed in the European Union. This emerged because its presently 27 member states have traditionally voted according to a one country–one vote rule. Of today's seven official EU institutions, the European Council (the heads of state or government) still votes by unanimity.

Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine during the Referendum Campaign. Photograph credit: John Gass Newswire, The Australian.

One of the dominant narratives that has emerged in the aftermath of the Voice referendum loss in October 2023 was that the campaign was marred by – and lost – because of the deployment by the No campaign of disinformation and misinformation and a failure by the media to provide unbiased and informed reporting.

The intention of this chapter is to demonstrate – by drawing on primary data as well as the analysis of reporting already undertaken by others in the wake of the loss – that the media coverage of the Voice proposal during the referendum campaign was demonstrably unbalanced. This was particularly apparent given Australia's media ownership structure and the dominance of the News Corp media, and its reach through regional Australia. The No bias in the campaign was clearly evident in that structure.

The Regulatory Environment: The Australian Press Council, ACMA and ABC, SBS and the AEC

The current regulatory environment restricts the amount of information and data available as to the extent of misinformation and disinformation during the referendum campaign. At the moment there is no legislated constraint on untruthfulness in political advertising in Australia.

I remember being in the conference room at Yulara on the morning of 26 May 2017. There we were, more than 200 blackfellas in the room. My friend, Professor Megan Davis, read out the Uluru Statement from the Heart for the frst time. I watched people's faces as they heard the poetry of the Statement, the way it captured our history, cultures, our stories of powerlessness and tragedies, but also our hope for the future. It had been months of hard work, trying to work out a feasible solution, and no one had shied away from it. The Uluru Statement captured the will and request of the delegates: Voice, Makarrata, Treaty and Truth.

Everyone was so emotional. I was exhausted. Megan and the team were exhausted. They had spent a lot of the night before talking to the Anangu elders seeking their permission to call the Statement the ‘Uluru’ Statement. They had also been up all night working with the drafting committee selected by the delegates on the Statement itself. The delegates too were drained and tired; they had travelled a long way. They had done days of hard work, trying to bring together the priorities of their regions and communities to a national consensus position.

Troubling the Canon

Stanley Cavell's contributions to philosophy are manifold and the originality of his thought is perhaps only beginning to be fully acknowledged on both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps Cavell himself has come to embody his own aspiration—most clearly expressed in The Claim of Reason, but repeated elsewhere: to realign the two philosophical traditions or even better “to write as though these paths have never divided.” These paths are still divided, hence why perhaps reading Cavell today, entering a world where these two traditions do not shun one another, is so important. Cavell writes of his philosophical project that it “witnesses the loss in that separation” and his act of witnessing insists that philosophy can still be written as if responding to a single demand. The loss that Cavell evokes is one that groups certain ways of thinking and a cohort of proper names on one side or the other and in so doing tends to disqualify the other as either irrelevant or non-philosophical. Cavell also notes how these two traditions express themselves in extremely diferent ways, so that they do not simply think diferently, but they also write philosophy very diferently and obey formal rules of a divergent nature. The diferences here are so fundamental that one does not recognize the other as philosophy. There are then in Cavell a number of philosophical remarks devoted to who can be (and has been) enlisted as a philosopher and therefore what constitutes philosophical thinking (and philosophical writing as a genre). Cavell claims to have discovered Emerson and Thoreau. Not of course to have discovered them tout court, since they were already, at the time of his writing, what one could call “canonical names,” but to have discovered them for philosophy, for American philosophy, for and as serious philosophical thinking and writing.

Although there have been many Indian cinema auteurs – Himansu Rai (1892–1940), Vankudre Shantaram, Pramathesh Chandra Barua, Mehboob Khan, Bimal Roy and Karim Asif among them – I have selected Raj Kapoor (1924–1988) and Guru Dutt (1925–1964) as the representative auteurs of the Golden Age of Bollywood. Between them they demonstrate a range of filmic articulations of songs in Hindi cinema as their films illustrate, in an exemplary fashion, the symbiotic connections between songs and the melodramatic and sentimental narrative of Bollywood cinema.

“Auteurship” is a concept particularly relevant to our understanding of Hindi cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. In this context, the interrelated roles of director, cinematographer, and producer in Mishra's definition of the term may be taken as a useful point of departure:

This definition clearly draws on earlier theorizations of auteurship which, not surprisingly, trace the filmic auteur to the author of a novel. In his seminal 1954 essay, Une certaine tendance du cinema français [“A Certain Tendency in French Cinema”] (1967), François Truffaut makes the point that a film bears its maker's signature in much the same way as a literary work of art, and especially the novel, bears the signature of its author. This signature, Truffaut suggests, is an authorial style, that manifests itself as the stamp of an author's “individual personality [marked by] recurring themes within the body of work”.

Introduction

The aesthetic and philosophical status of television has long been a subject of critical ambivalence. While early analyses, such as Stanley Cavell's 1982 essay “The Fact of Television,” questioned whether the medium could produce works of art comparable to cinema, subsequent developments in television fction have challenged this skepticism. In this chapter, I revisit Cavell's ontology of television and argue that the emergence of serialized, narratively complex Tv series, particularly from the 1990s onward, necessitates a reassessment of television as a legitimate site of aesthetic and moral experience.

Cavell's writings on cinema emphasize a democratic aesthetic based not on formal innovation, but on lived experience. This essay argues that Cavell's framework ofers a compelling means of understanding the cultural and philosophical signifcance of television in the twenty-frst century. By revisiting Cavell's initial skepticism toward television and reframing it in light of technological, aesthetic, and social transformations, it becomes apparent that serialized Tv has emerged as a privileged site for moral refection, self-cultivation, and shared experience. In doing so, this essay positions Cavell not just as a theorist of flm, but also as a thinker on the power of popular culture to shape and educate our lives through the ordinary.

Once perceived as aesthetically inferior to cinema, television has become central to the formation of shared cultural meaning, democratic education, and self-cultivation. The evolution of television formats, genres, and modes of reception demands renewed philosophical consideration of the role of popular culture in shaping the moral and expressive lives of individuals and public spheres. Contemporary television is therefore a medium capable of articulating and transforming ordinary experience.

Clothes Made in Feathers at the Weltmuseum Wien

In October 2020, I spent a month at the Welt Museum in Vienna to study the ethnographic collection collected by Johann Natterer in Brazil at the beginning of the nineteenth century and to see if there were any artefacts on which I could focus my research on the construction of imaginaries about Indigenous populations. The answer became clear as soon as I walked through the permanent exhibition, which opened in 2017 and is located on the first floor behind a dark door. Before entering, you can take a quick look at the large neoclassical hall that welcomes visitors: painted vaults, marble columns and white balustrades are impressive, giving the room the appearance of a temple. On the other hand, there is nothing in the itinerary of the exhibition to remind us of the old museum. Geographical and thematic spaces alternate, offering the visitor a variety of expository languages that are the result of a dialogue between different disciplines and technical skills, and that well convey the complexity of the scenarios presented. It is quite clear that the perspective on alterity is European and specifically Austrian. However, this is done in a critical way: implicit suggestions and explicit questions reveal Western responsibility for the colonial past – it is less clear what can be done in the present to change direction.

The room dedicated to Brazil is more or less halfway along the route. It is entitled An Austrian Mosaic of Brazil and underlines this positioning. It is a composition of five displays, each dedicated to a different ethnic group and to a different moment in the history of the Indigenous peoples in Brazil and their encounter with Europeans.

The Central Land Council reinforce their support for the Yes vote during the Voice campaign. Photograph credit: Tina Tilhard, Central Land Council.

Introduction

The Voice proposal sufered one of the heaviest defeats in Australia's referendum history. It won the support of just 39.9 per cent of voters, the tenth lowest Yes vote on record. It also failed to win a majority in a single state, one of only 12 proposals to do so. The only jurisdiction to ofer majority support was the Australian Capital Territory. With this comprehensive No vote, Australians have now rejected 37 of 45 referendum proposals since Federation.

Why did the Voice referendum fail? Numerous theories were foated in the immediate aftermath of the vote.1 Some blamed the government, or the Yes campaign, for pushing ahead without bipartisan support, failing to provide more detail on how the Voice would operate, and poor messaging. Others blamed the Opposition, or the No campaign, for using the referendum as an opportunity to damage the government, spreading misinformation and fomenting division.

For all the political declarations, expert panels, and multilateral resolutions, the international drug control regime has proven remarkably resilient, less because of broad-based support than because of structural design. The momentum behind reform, though real, has repeatedly fallen short of structural transformation. The architecture of the system, the three conventions, the institutions, the procedures, remains largely intact. Despite the accumulation of critique, the time for true reform has not yet come. The time, as it stands, is simply not ripe.

This is not for lack of efort. Over the past two decades, networks of people who use drugs, civil society, international institutions, and several governments have produced a steady stream of critiques, policy innovations, and alternative models, from health-based responses to calls for legal regulation. But the contradictions between these initiatives and the foundational logic of the system have only grown more visible. As shown in this book, the consensus around prohibition has long started wobbling. Yet the formal structure of drug control continues to treat this consensus as real and operative. It is a system premised on the eradication of non-medical drug use, while the world it seeks to govern grows increasingly diverse in its policy approaches and domestic choices.

The reasons for this persistence are not mysterious. The regime is built to resist change. Institutions like the CND operate largely through consensus, allowing the most conservative actors to block reform.

Uluru Dialogue Senior Leaders and Uluru Youth Dialogue meet at a community hall in Yarrabah, Queensland. Photograph credit: Bang Media/Uluru Dialogues.

Introduction

The journey towards the Voice referendum began long before the issuing of the Uluru Statement from the Heart in May 2017. It is embedded in decades of advocacy, collaboration, and the resilience of First Nations Peoples. Over the past decade, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders, communities, and allies have intensifed their push for meaningful constitutional recognition and a stronger democratic voice. This movement has witnessed both progress and resistance, shaping the conversation on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and representation.