Disinformation worked in 2019. We can't let it happen again

But there is absolutely no question that any Australian political entity will have to be prepared against the same kind of foreign interference, feeding disinformation, when the next election comes along. And same goes for local disinformation. Tell you when it gets bad? When we start talking about tax reform.

Which Jim Chalmers, bless his ambitious cotton socks, has just started to do. Yes, it looks like changes to the capital gains tax discount are on the way in the next budget, barely 12 weeks away. And the best thing about it? Chalmers doesn't even have to take it to an election. Yep. He can do it before he gets enthusiastic tax avoiders to lie to the public.

Honestly, my heart goes out to any political party wanting to reform tax. Let me take you back to the last big disinformation campaign - 2019 - same one Bannon got involved in. There we were, on the eve of something big, including changes to franking credits. And Tim Wilson (who at the time was chairing an inquiry into franking credits) and his cuzz Geoff Wilson decided to pull a massive all-nighter (make that the entire election campaign) to work against Labor. The Australian Federal Police were even called in to investigate whether Wilson T inappropriately shared electoral roll information for commercial purposes while campaigning against the opposition's franking credit policy. Meantime Wilson G was part-funding the website which coordinated the opposition to Labor's policy. Don't you just love a public-private partnership?

Which brings us to the proposed changes to the capital gains tax discount. How it works now? The Australian Taxation Office tells me it's the tax we pay on profits from disposing of assets, including investments such as property, shares and crypto (also love the ATO's cute reminder to also add losses into your tax return). Now you'd think that you'd pay tax on that in the usual way you pay tax on what you earn. But no! If you are an Australian citizen and you've owned your asset for more than 12 months, you get a 50 per cent discount on your profit. That means you only have to pay tax on half the profit! I have no idea why except that this was invented by Peter Costello in 1999 to make rich people richer.

I asked Bob Breunig, professor and director, Tax and Transfer Policy Institute at the ANU's Crawford School if he thought changes to CGT were a good idea. He says it's widely accepted it needs to change, down to maybe 35 per cent. To me, even that seems generous. Maybe it should just be a discount based only on inflation. No extras!

"We have had a massive increase in wealth and we don't tax that effectively," he says.

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I'm taking that as a yes. Yes, it's a good idea to change the CGT discount. It won't fix all our housing supply problems - but it might make it less attractive for investors. What do we really need to do? More supply (governments federal, state and territory are all trying). Probs a land tax. Also, a note to the millennial children of boomer and X parents. You will most likely get your houses when your property-owning parents die. Yes, the timing means you need to have patience. But recognise that increasingly, young Australians have real reasons to be distressed. You with property-owning parents are not among them.

Money makes people crazy. It also makes them invent shit (or what we more formally call disinformation). During the campaign of Wilson and Wilson, the claim was that pensioners would be impoverished. I honestly think that word should only apply to people on the age pension and not on superannuants who've chosen to have their money paid out as an annuity.

Breunig says he worries a lot about disinformation. So then I turned to Tim Graham, associate professor in digital media at Queensland University of Technology, who says getting on the front foot is vital. Be proactive. Be fast. Down low? Too slow! As he points out, misleading assertions and rumours do the dirty work.

"The Voice referendum was a masterclass in this - is 'if you don't know vote no' false? How can it be? But it's misleading and it's all anyone saw on the socials in the months leading to October 14," he says.

The problem, says Graham, is that we get opinion leaders, everyone from politicians to think tanks and everyone in between, deliberately spreading this kind of disinformation. And you have to be on top of that straight away. Don't only respond with dry old stats (we love fact checking, people). Address it directly. On the Tok or the Gram or whatever. I'm now assuming that it also needs to go on old people's socials as well, such as Facebook, LinkedIn and, ah, MySpace. Most authentic way possible. Just be thankful you didn't grow up to be in political communication. Sounds like utter hell.

The Australia Institute's Richard Denniss describes the 2019 campaign as a very well-funded, very well-orchestrated campaign from some of the very wealthiest people in Australia trying to scare aged pensioners and low-income earners into how poor people were about to lose all their wealth.

"Now of course the irony is that the low-income earners who fell for Scott Morrison and other people's scare campaigns didn't have much wealth to lose but the consequence of that scare campaign was that Labor lost what people thought was an unloseable election," he says.

And now we discover that that election loss was compounded by disinformation and foreign interference in the shape of banshees Steve Bannon and local misinformation in the shape of Clive Palmer.

We will need to take care this time, even more so when we are so drenched with stuff all of the time. I try to read widely but I've also taken to joyscrolling pictures of my grandchildren. They are the real antidote to the harms of politics.