Extract from ABC News
It has become a standard, if unfortunate, part of Australian politics in recent years for politicians to pick up and run with some incident to crystallise public sentiment on an issue and let the media debate rage on it.
Think African gangs, needles in strawberries, Woolworths not selling enough Australia Day merchandise.
You might notice that these have tended to be the preserve of the Coalition side of politics more than the Labor side.
That Labor doesn't do it so much may be a testament to their better angels, or to the fact they have just never been good at the particular style of politics.
But we now face a perfect firestorm of issues that both challenge our community cohesion and present us with Australian society in all its ugliness.
It is a particularly complex set of issues that cannot be untangled from each other.
That makes this particular modus operandi dangerous for both those who might be tempted to practice it — and the rest of us.
We all know social media has become an unwieldy force in politics around the globe. But our political leaders are now being forced to confront, in very specific terms, the really difficult questions thrown up about when enough is enough.
A debate that has largely been framed in terms of freedom of speech has become conflated with a whole range of issues that now challenge us: from social cohesion, to terrorism, to domestic violence.
The killings, predominantly of women, at Bondi Junction and the stabbing attack on a bishop in the Western Sydney suburb of Wakeley have come at a time of horrendously relentless killings of women and amid heightened tensions provoked by the Gaza conflict.
Social media is a thread that has run through all these stories: from the misinformation and disinformation spread about the Bondi attacker while the attacks were still underway; to the live-streaming of the bishop's church service and subsequent misinformation that led to a violent riot; to questions about the growing aggression of misogynistic online content directed towards young men; to online abuse and threats of violence levelled at anyone on either side of the Gaza conflict.
Two mighty struggles
This week, e-Safety Commissioner Julie Inman-Grant took on X and Elon Musk in the Federal Court seeking to force the platform to take down 65 postings of graphic footage of the Wakeley knife attack.
She is seeking to do that under the powers the parliament granted her — under the Morrison government — in the Online Safety Act in 2021.
While there had been a lot of political noise made in the wake of the Bondi attacks 48 hours earlier, about dealing with the disinformation and misinformation that had circulated at the time, social media platforms are currently only subject to voluntary codes of conduct about removing inflammatory commentary and misinformation.
Legislation dealing with these issues is currently being considered, as are changes to the Online Safety Act — which was already under review before these attacks all happened.
The ground has now shifted under the political debates about the specifics of both those legislative developments.
But in the meantime, there are now two mighty struggles going on over how we communicate and debate each other in future.
One concerns the fight in the courts with Musk and his assertion that, in trying to force his company to take down the posts, the Australian government is not only hindering free speech, it is over-reaching into an attempt to dictate what can be seen online outside Australia's borders.
The second struggle concerns the general position of our politicians about if, and how, we reset the terms of social media's social contract.
The challenges for Dutton
The political leader in the more difficult position on this is Peter Dutton, who not only faces divisions on this in his party — and in the conservative base — but also the problem of reconciling those divisions with his own strong views about social media when it comes to issues like law and order and child abuse.
It is instructive to look at comments Dutton made on April 8 — before the Sydney attacks — about social media and its role in facilitating things like young people posting crimes, like house breaking or car theft, online.
The social media companies, he said, have to "make sure that they take content down so that these young offenders don't get the publicity that they're seeking".
The Coalition's private members bill would set up the power to do this, he said.
"Because at the moment, a lot of people are living in fear and they're worried about whether they're going to be broken into again. It's devastating, it's confronting to have somebody coming into your bedroom or coming into your living area, particularly when you've got young children."
In the wake of the Bondi Junction and Wakeley attacks, Dutton told Insiders on Sunday that there was "no question at all" that tougher action needed to be taken against social media companies and "I think there's a bipartisan position concerning this".
"We know that the companies — and we've seen some of the comments from Elon Musk overnight — they see themselves above the law. The Australian law here should apply equally in the real world as it does online ... you would be sued for defamation and you would be taken before the courts under various acts for publishing some of that which freely flows on the internet.
"They're allowing paedophiles to distribute through their networks, images and videos of children being sexually abused, they're impeding the investigations of the police."
The more difficult question
This issue of removing explicit content is the same one Inman-Grant is trying to deal with over the bishop's stabbing.
For some, including Senate crossbenchers Pauline Hanson and Ralph Babet, and the Institute of Public Affairs, this amounts to an attack on free speech.
Dutton also faces questions about his approach from some in his own ranks.
But he can't really go too far on the question of removing violent content, given his position on things like kids posting themselves breaking the law or child exploitation.
The fact that the Australian Federal Police and ASIO emerged this week to explicitly link the violent content with terror threats also highlights the difficulties for Dutton, given his tough line on national security.
Our national security officials told us the Wakeley footage could be used just as footage of the Christchurch terror attacks had been used by IS as part of their recruitment of young men.
And we subsequently saw the arrest of five teenagers linked to the Wakeley attacker, some of whom we were told had just as graphic content on their phones.
The even more difficult question becomes how parliaments and governments deal with misinformation and disinformation, since it involves not just removing graphic images but people's opinions and, therefore, becomes a much clearer debate about censorship and free speech.
When the government put up some draft laws to deal with this last year, the Coalition howled it down.
You would have to think the optics and the policy imperatives have changed.
Who wins and loses in the Federal Court is just one aspect of the battle ahead.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
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