Last week, when MPs were thanking police for their actions and discussing the squatters that had festered for three weeks on Parliament’s front lawn, MPs from across the House raised the role of misinformation and disinformation.
This week a colleague pointed out an example. A nicely produced Instagram post from an account active during the recent protest. It wasn’t an egregious example but it made me think.
The difference, by the way, between disinformation and misinformation is whether the peddler is malicious (dis— ), or just ignorant (mis— ).
Photo: 123rf
The instagram post warned its followers about a bill that had apparently passed a second reading in Parliament the same day the Police were being pelted with bricks. Helpfully the post had a link to the “Bill” which like all bills and acts etc, live on the legislation website. More on that website in a moment. Spoiler though - it’s a goldmine.
What was being described was actually a Covid Order, (regulation enabled by a bill, but not itself a bill), but it had been approved by Parliament that day, as all Covid Orders must be, having been reviewed by an opposition-chaired select committee.
That mistake is understandable, the problem were the claims made about the order. Some were on the money - yes some jobs do have vaccination mandates. But others were fanciful. And as you’d expect the comments took it further - with interpretations of the imagined rules running as far as internment camps for the unvaccinated - a conspiracy theory that is straight-up bonkers.
The post helpfully had a link to the actual order - so anyone could have read it for confirmation. Maybe some did, but in reality most legislation is at best dense and at worst impenetrable to the untrained. So even with a link you can safely assume that most people are forced to take claims about legislation at face value.
And that is why the legislation.govt.nz website is so useful. At least for recent law and new bills being considered by Parliament.
On the legislation website - which the Parliament website links to for all its bills - bills are prefaced with explanatory notes that outline a bill’s purpose, history and impacts, and basically make it all pretty easy. All are useful, some are interesting, and occasionally some are fascinating.
You do have to look for them - at the very top of a new bill - at the very bottom of orders and other secondary legislation.
For an example here is a link to the explanatory note for week’s Russia Sanctions Bill.
It gets harder once legislation is amended - because the explanations are not. The backgrounders get harder to find and more out of date over time. They stay on the original version of the Act to which they refer.
But for new bills being considered by Parliament, or for recent laws the explanatory notes are a godsend and are actually readable by people not trained in the arcane mysteries of legal drafting.
So it’s worth knowing they’re there, if only to provide an alternative to imagining the purpose of bills and tumbling on down the rabbit hole.
